Women on Course -- Why It Matters.
NYTimes sportswriter Karen Crouse has another better golf story up today:
AUGUSTA, Ga. -- The ladies issue, as Billy Payne, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, described it, did not end last August with the admission of the club’s first two female members: Condoleezza Rice, the former United States secretary of state, and Darla Moore, a South Carolina financier.
Their inclusion has been described as symbolic. It is not. It is significant, and here is why: the relationship-building qualities that make golf a popular hobby for many men are lost on a lot of high-powered businesswomen who have been too intimidated to give the game a try. Maybe if they see Rice, resplendent in her green jacket, showing guests around the clubhouse, as she has done during this tournament, white-collar women will feel welcome at their local courses. ...
If we're talking public courses, why just white-collar women?
Even if one rejects the trite conclusion,... At an Executive Women’s Day conference organized by the PGA Tour during its tour stop outside Miami last month, it was startling to hear women who are competitive enough to pursue, and win, the corner office say they avoided golf for the reason that if they could not hit every shot perfectly, they did not want to hit any shot at all, lest they embarrass themselves....When men and women mingle on the golf course, everybody wins. In the mutual battle against the course and the elements, bonds are formed, barriers are broken and understandings are reached. What is beautiful about golf, aside from the scenery, is that the game fosters deeper connections. It is amazing how much one person can learn about another during several hours of battling awkward lies, shifting winds, bad bounces and errant swings....The participants in the 77th Masters have described delightful conversations with Rice, who outside the ropes was seen but not heard. In her 2010 memoir about her family, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People,” Rice addressed racial prejudice in a way that resonates in gender politics.Rice wrote: “No one can doubt that years of racial prejudice produced underrepresentation of minorities and women in all aspects of American life. Corporate boardrooms, management suites and elite university faculties and student bodies have for our entire history failed to reflect even roughly the ethnic mix of the country. That is not acceptable in America, which is the world’s greatest multiethnic democracy.”The ladies issue at the Masters matters because the more Rice and Moore roam among the old guard on the manicured grounds of Augusta National, the less the men whose company they keep there will be able to hold on to their tired stereotypes of women as dawdling golfers or boardroom party crashers or dull conversationalists. They will seem to them as they are: just like them.
there's no doubting that people mix better together when there is a solid foundation of respect for others assumed.
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