Golf

Martha Burk, Hootie Johnson, and Augusta National, 15 Years Later

The showdown between the women’s rights activist and the country club chairman may have ended in 2003, but their fight over women’s rights and representation was always bigger than golf

Golf

Martha Burk, Hootie Johnson, and Augusta National, 15 Years Later

The showdown between the women’s rights activist and the country club chairman may have ended in 2003, but their fight over women’s rights and representation was always bigger than golf

By Michael WeinrebApril 2, 2018, 10:30 am UTC • 18 min

1. The Activist

One morning last July, a reporter called Martha Burk to get her reaction to the death of a man she’d never met. The reporter’s name is Doug Ferguson, and he’s the longtime golf writer for the Associated Press; Burk is a semi-retired women’s rights activist and gender-pay equity consultant who has no deep interest in golf, even though her legacy will be forever intertwined with the sport.

“OK, Doug,” Burk said when she picked up. “What happened now?”

Burk still had Ferguson’s number saved in her phone, and every time his name showed up on her display, it jolted her back to their first call 15 years earlier. That was the day Martha Burk catapulted to fame for igniting a debate that many people presumed was about golf, even though it was never intended to be an argument about golf at all. The first time she spoke with Ferguson, Burk knew so little about the Masters that she presumed the powers-that-be could just pick the tournament up from its eternal home at Augusta National Golf Club and move it somewhere else if they so chose. And now here was Ferguson again, asking her about the death of a man who was the longtime chairman of Augusta National, a man who had so stubbornly positioned himself as her nemesis that their protracted battle would literally become the first sentence of his obituary.

The deceased man’s name was William Woodward Johnson, and the media would make much of the fact that both Burk and Johnson shared the same childhood nickname: Hootie. (The difference, Burk once joked, is that she outgrew it, and Johnson never did.) Johnson was a witty and spirited South Carolina football player who became a powerful bank executive and then a powerful country club czar; Burk, a witty and spirited Texan, was the chair of an umbrella group known as the National Council of Women’s Organizations. All she’d done was read an April 2002 newspaper column in USA Today about Augusta National’s ongoing refusal to admit a woman member, and then, in June 2002, dashed off a letter to Johnson that she presumed would be either ignored or paid nothing more than lip service. It was part of her job to be ignored. She saw things that irked her and her colleagues, she wrote letters, she attempted to drum up support for causes in which there was often little real or lasting media interest. It happened every day.

What still amazes her is not just the fact that Hootie Johnson responded, but that Johnson mailed her an anodyne letter of response—and then, at the same time, put out a stem-winding press release so caustic that it almost feels like satire in retrospect. In the release, Johnson mentioned Burk’s suggestion that Augusta admit a woman sometime before the 2003 Masters so as to avoid it becoming “an issue”; he acknowledged the work Burk’s organization had done in areas like human rights and workplace equity, and he claimed he was “puzzled” as to why Burk had targeted a private club like Augusta. And then it got meta: The release anticipated the cable-news debate that would ensue, the attempt to portray Augusta’s secretive membership base as “insensitive bigots,” and the attempts Burk’s organization would undoubtedly make to pry away corporate sponsors from the Masters.

And from there, Hootie Johnson grew almost comically defiant. Augusta would not be “bullied, threatened, or intimidated,” he declared. He wrote that women may indeed one day be invited to join Augusta, but “not at the point of a bayonet.”

It was Ferguson who read Burk the press release over the phone. This was the first time she’d heard it, and she responded largely off the cuff. Her mother was a good golfer, but Burk didn’t know that much about the pro game, and this is when she made that reference to the PGA Tour simply moving the tournament elsewhere, not knowing that Augusta and the Masters were inseparable entities. So began 10 months of back-and-forth between Hootie and Martha, 10 months of media coverage, and 10 months of political warfare in an era when the internet was becoming a populist forum  for debate but social media had not yet consumed (or distorted) the dialogue. All of it culminated in an absurdist protest outside Augusta’s walls during the 2003 Masters, a protest that included a Klan member, an inflatable pig, and an Elvis impersonator.

In the wake of those protests, it appeared Martha Burk had lost. Her argument had been obfuscated by the critics and bloggers who had asked, amid the aftermath of 9/11 and the run-up to the Iraq War, Don’t we have better things to do than argue about a bunch of rich men playing golf? For the better part of a decade after Burk’s protest, even in the first few years after Johnson stepped down as chairman, Augusta’s membership remained all male.

But now it was 2017, and Ferguson was on the phone once more, and Hootie Johnson was dead. Five years earlier, Augusta National, facing lawsuits and increased scrutiny, had admitted its first two female members. Now the world was embroiled in a fierce discussion over gender inequity that centered on the very idea Burk had been trying to convey 15 years before: That representation matters in a world where women had long been barred from access to places like Augusta National. That this was not a story about golf, but a story about power.

“Many people thought it was about golf at the time,” she says. “People used to say, ‘What do you know about golf?’ But it was always about access to power at the highest levels.”

This time—in this era—when Ferguson’s number appeared on her phone, Martha Burk believed for certain that her side had won. Whether it was her doing or not, the arc of the moral universe was, at the very least, bending further in her direction. When Ferguson told her Johnson had died and asked for her response, she thought back on their entirely public spat and into her head flashed the name of the former governor of Georgia, a staunch segregationist who had refused to serve black customers in his Atlanta restaurant.

“I think history will remember him,” Burk told Ferguson, “as the Lester Maddox of golf.”

2. The Journalists

In truth, this is a story not about one woman, but a chain of them: Martha Burk, after all, had picked up the story because of the female journalists who had been reporting on it for more than a decade. One of the first was Marcia Chambers, a Yale Law–educated writer who had published a few pieces about private-club membership issues for law journals and then began reporting for Golf Digest. Chambers began a quest for information from several private clubs and found their membership didn’t want to reveal much of anything. They were non-public entities, they argued, and they could do as they pleased. Chambers quickly understood she was nosing around one of the last cloistered and segregated elements of American life. It didn’t matter the heft Golf Digest carried in that world. It was, Chambers says, perhaps the most difficult reporting job of her distinguished career.

In 1990, in the midst of Chambers’s work for Golf Digest (she also published stories in Golf for Women magazine and The New York Times), Alabama’s Shoal Creek Country Club was due to host the PGA Championship. When a Birmingham newspaper reporter, in reaction to Chambers’s work, asked club president Hall Thompson two months before the tournament about the club’s membership policies, he replied that Shoal Creek had Jewish members and female members. “We don’t discriminate in every other area except blacks,” Thompson said. The pushback was tremendous, and the pressure led Shoal Creek to take in its first black member. Soon after, at least partially in anticipation of future backlash, Augusta National quietly did the same. The PGA Tour, the PGA of America, and the United States Golf Association also altered their policies that year to prohibit discriminatory clubs from hosting tournaments.

But the Masters was its own entity, run and presided over by Augusta National itself, and outside of the jurisdiction of the PGA Tour. And apart from the week of the tournament, Augusta National was a near-impenetrable fortress. It revealed nothing about its membership, and the members preferred it that way—if it did decide to be inclusive, it would be inclusive on its own terms. Even then, says David Owen, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and the author of an Augusta National–sanctioned history of the Masters, “it was always a very woman-friendly place, in terms of both the accommodations and (believe it or not) the course”—just not in terms of membership itself.

Chambers presumed that the aftermath of Shoal Creek would lead Augusta National to add a female member. But on this front, Augusta refused to budge. This was a line they could not cross. “They’d put in a token black,” says Chambers, who published The Unplayable Lie: The Untold Story of Women and Discrimination in American Golf, in 1995. “But they couldn’t do that for women. They couldn’t fathom it. And this was because of another problem that it took me a while to explore.”

The deeper issue, she learned, related to the fundamental dynamic of country club life itself. And the basis of country club life, Chambers says, is marriage. The men in those country clubs didn’t want anything to change, and many of the women who were married to those men didn’t want things to change, either, Chambers tells me. If a husband chose to get away on the weekend and play 18 holes with his buddies, that was his business. The men, Chambers found, generally held shares in the club; the men typically paid the bills in the household. Some of the women Chambers spoke to were reluctant to accept that their husbands would be playing golf with women who weren’t their wives—maybe, they thought, it was better if they just played with the boys. It wasn’t as if the wives felt shunned altogether: At some of these clubs, women were allowed to play, often for a late-afternoon tee time when the men weren’t monopolizing the course. At Augusta, Chambers says, “There were short windows on certain days when the men said it was OK.”

In the case of a purely private institution, there was nothing to be done. If an all-male club like Burning Tree, near Washington, D.C., wanted to discriminate, and it stayed private year-round, it could do whatever it wanted with constitutional protection. But Chambers believed Augusta National was different, and the series of stories she wrote led other reporters to begin asking the same questions. Augusta National “held a special place in the world of golf,” she says, and the leadership’s attempts to differentiate the club from the tournament rang hollow to her. And yet this was the argument Hootie Johnson made; this was why, when USA Today columnist Christine Brennan picked up on Chambers’s work and began asking Johnson, year after year starting in 1999, when Augusta was going to invite a female member, he continued to stonewall her.

“Marcia, we love our women,” Chambers recalls Johnson telling her during an interview. “We just don’t want any fussin’ with ’em.”

“Hootie,” she responded, “how do you spell fussin’?”

3. The Chairman

As Chambers continued to dig through the course of the 1990s, she realized how unique Augusta was in terms of its executive structure. While it had a board of directors, Chambers found that the board largely deferred to the chairman of the club on major decisions, and that the chair nominates his successor. “Like being general of the army,” she says. Hootie Johnson, the longtime chairman of Bank of America, took over the chairmanship of Augusta National in 1998 from Jackson Stephens, the chairman of a private financial services company. Johnson was born in Augusta in 1931 and was raised in South Carolina; he played football for the Gamecocks and served a brief stint as a local congressman before going to work at his father’s bank, according to Alan Shipnuck’s book The Battle for Augusta National: Hootie, Martha, and the Masters of the Universe. That bank merged with another local bank in 1985 and, after Johnson was installed as chairman of its executive committee, eventually merged with Bank of America, making him one of the most powerful men in the state—but also someone who preferred to keep his name out of the press.

So why did Hootie Johnson choose to take such a public stand on an issue that he admitted, in his own press release, would almost certainly change eventually? Why did Hootie Johnson stake his reputation on this, of all things? Here was a man who had often forwarded progressive ideas about civil rights. African American South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn told Shipnuck that Johnson was “among prominent white businessmen ... the biggest supporter of African Americans in the history of the state of South Carolina.” He was an old-school Southern Democrat, a supporter of several prominent black politicians, a member of the board of directors of the Urban League. He devised a vocational program at his bank to train young African American women.

But Hootie was also stubborn, and he didn’t want to be told what to do, particularly by someone he deemed a brash opportunist, someone who appeared to care little about the culture and history of both the Masters and Augusta National itself. And as soon as he issued that press release, Hootie—by dint of his nickname alone—became a caricature to a certain element of the country that viewed the traditions of the Deep South with disdain. Augusta National had long been a proxy for that discomfort: A beautifully manicured course nestled in a deeply segregated city, a place long presided over, from 1931 to 1976, by enigmatic chairman Clifford Roberts, who was most known outside of golf circles for reportedly claiming, “As long as I’m alive, all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be black.”

Augusta historian David Owen—who also wrote a March 2003 piece for Golf Digest entitled “The Case for All-Male Golf Clubs”—insists that the notion of a “race barrier” at the Masters is overblown, that the tournament never technically barred blacks from playing (even though an African American didn’t actually play in the Masters until Lee Elder in 1975), and that it actually changed its rules in the 1960s and 1970s to allow for more black players to qualify (in fact, the most sweeping changes didn’t address race, but new tournament rules did make it easier for black players to qualify). The PGA of America, by contrast, prohibited non-whites until 1961, but “no one ever revisits that before the PGA Championship,” Owen says. “Augusta National, because it’s in the South, has long been treated, reflexively, as the embodiment of American golf’s ugly racial history. Unfairly, on the facts.”

Fair or not, Augusta’s moral propriety was once again being challenged, this time over gender. Hootie Johnson had now courted a public fight, and Martha Burk, charming and press-savvy and driven by her convictions, was more than willing to engage. She thought it would be a one-day story, maybe a one-week story. But as Johnson’s furious reply to Burk fanned it with oxygen, it became something much bigger.

4. The Fight

“I felt supported to write what I believed—which is that, essentially, symbolism matters,” Selena Roberts tells me over the phone. Roberts, then a columnist at The New York Times, was perhaps the most prominent female voice in sports media at that moment; to her, there was an obvious point to be made in the midst of Burk’s challenge, which was that Augusta National’s secrecy could not be reconciled with the very public face of the Masters itself. She spoke to a couple of club members who told her, off the record, that they were embarrassed by Johnson’s stance, but that they were afraid to speak on the record for fear of having their memberships revoked. Some players told her the same thing off the record, but refused to go public for fear of retribution. If all these people being afraid of Augusta National’s overarching power didn’t prove her point, she thought, then what did?

And so Roberts focused her energy on Hootie Johnson, with perhaps sharper language than anyone else in media. But Roberts was not alone: The executive editor of The New York Times from 2001 to 2003, Howell Raines, was a native Southerner who believed this story carried sociological weight. And so the Times went in hard (too hard, some would say), and with the Times driving the narrative, the rest of the media followed.

“Keeping history, to Hootie, was far more important than making history,” Roberts says. “To be the keeper of the way things were was what mattered to him.”

“As a woman covering it,” says Johnette Howard, then a Newsday columnist, “you were constantly reminded how race trumped gender. I remember hearing some African American writers say, ‘My computer’s going to be a Martha-free zone.’ I’m like, ‘Really, guys?’ That was personally disappointing to me.”

A handful of female columnists kept up the pressure; so did some of the male writers who had been covering the Masters for decades, like Leonard Shapiro of The Washington Post, whose newspaper office was four blocks from Burk’s NCWO office. Every time Johnson and Burk furthered their public debate, Shapiro would hustle over to Burk’s office for a quote. Shapiro spent some time in Augusta reporting on the deep ties between the club and the city’s economy; he remains amazed, he says, that given how public the Masters was, Augusta National still felt “they were able to discriminate against half the population.”

The media hits kept on: In July 2002, a month after Burk’s letter, a pair of the tournament’s corporate sponsors, IBM and Coca-Cola, declined to comment on Augusta’s membership policies. Tiger Woods, asked at the British Open about the burgeoning controversy, said Augusta’s members were “entitled to set up their own rules the way they want them.” Burk chastised Woods publicly for his naïveté, and began to pressure corporate sponsors. By August, Johnson had countered Burk, announcing that the tournament would drop its three major sponsors—Citigroup, Coca-Cola, and IBM—and televise the Masters commercial-free. Burk pressured CBS to refuse to televise the tournament, but CBS declined. By September, a pair of newspapers, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and USA Today, had published the names of Augusta National’s members, and Burk began writing them letters, as well.

Johnson hired an aggressive crisis-management consultant named Jim McCarthy, who began feeding information to media critics and conservative bloggers and commissioned a poll that showed 74 percent of respondents believed Augusta should remain all male. (The poll, it turned out, was discredited by independent observers as a “push poll”; the president of the polling company was a future political operative named Kellyanne Conway.) When the Times killed a pair of columns written about the controversy by male sports columnists Dave Anderson and Harvey Araton—largely for what Raines later claimed were based on minor editorial issues—critics seized on it as an example of the Times pushing a liberal agenda rather than reporting the facts.

It had become a political story, and the frighteningly polarized contours of debate in the internet age had begun to shape the way stories like this were consumed. The arguments became stripped of nuance—a lot of “Magic Marker writing on the walls,” Howard says. Burk began getting death threats, including one that she says was investigated by the FBI. When HBO’s Real Sports did a profile of Burk, Bryant Gumbel—himself a member of Burning Tree, the all-male golf club near D.C.—asked her to pull up some of the threatening emails she’d received. Burk told him they were terrible; Gumbel, Burk says, told her it was premium cable and they could deal with profanity. So she showed him.

“I can’t put those on TV,” Burk recalls Gumbel saying.

“My greatest relief,” Burk says, “is that it predated social media. I really think I’d be dead if that weren’t the case.”

And yet, as the calendar turned to 2003, Burk and Johnson both dug in. Thomas Wyman, then the retired executive chairman of CBS, had resigned his Augusta membership in 2002 after publicly calling for Johnson to change his stance, blaming “some redneck, old-boy types down there.” John Snow, President George W. Bush’s nominee for treasury secretary, also resigned his membership under political pressure. Burk began planning a protest at the 2003 Masters, and after protracted legal wrangling with local officials over permits, her protest was pushed to a vacant field far from the gates of Augusta National. Counter-protest groups, including one called Women Against Martha Burk, also registered for permits. So, too, did the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. A rumor that Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female justice of the Supreme Court, would be named Augusta National’s first female member, was quickly shot down by a club spokesman.

All of this media-driven push and pull leading up to the 2003 Masters became wearying, even for Martha Burk. A war with Iraq was looming, and the story felt less urgent than it had the year before. When the tournament finally rolled around in April, attendees of Burk’s Saturday protest at Augusta National—including publicity-seekers and radical weirdos and the Klan Wizard and someone who referred to himself as the leader of a group called People Against Ridiculous Protests—robbed it of much of its seriousness. Howard, covering it for Newsday, remembers the reporters outnumbering the women who had come to protest on Burk’s behalf. “It was just farcical,” says Howard, who recalled an appearance by Burk at the King Center in Atlanta the day before, a far more serious event that received far less coverage. “When they got their real 15 minutes, [Burk’s group] kind of flopped.”

Shipnuck wrote that after the protest, Burk seemed to understand that the story had crescendoed. In the midst of our hour-long phone conversation, Burk tells me at one point that she has no regrets about the way things went down, even the largely failed protest. But this isn’t entirely true, as she reveals a few minutes later. “I should have breached the grounds (of Augusta National) and let myself get arrested,” she says. “Getting arrested is often part of the political theater. But I had a lot of young people [including NCWO staffers] with me who didn’t sign on for that.”

5. The Long Run

Maybe you read Burk’s use of the phrase “political theater” as a tell—as proof of the claims of critics like golfer Paul Azinger, who declared that Burk was “actually promoting Martha Burk.” When I ask her about it, she tells me she already had a media presence before Augusta—“CNN knew where to find me,” she says—and that her goal, as an activist, was to raise the profile of an issue she’d been calling attention to for her entire career. “If you have a platform,” she says, “by God, use it.”

Maybe, in that moment, it was easier to see Martha Burk as a woman who knew very little about golf, who just wanted to insert herself into a golf story she knew nothing about and make a name for herself and write a book. Even Marcia Chambers, the reporter who helped unearth the story that Martha Burk took wide, says that Burk’s naïveté about Augusta’s internal culture led her to make missteps—that perhaps she didn’t fully comprehend the hidden forces she was up against, forces Chambers had spent years investigating. “Change and Augusta,” Chambers tells me, “are not necessarily words in the same sentence.”

But eventually, Augusta National had no choice. Johnson retired as chairman in 2006, and over the next two years, a series of lawsuits by a group called Women on Wall Street (with which Burk was tangentially involved) led to a settlement that barred Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney from reimbursing expenses related to entities like Augusta National that restrict membership on race or gender. In 2012 Ginni Rometty became the first female CEO of IBM, and she was initially denied membership to Augusta, even though every previous IBM CEO had been granted a membership as a courtesy for the company sponsoring the tournament. In August of that year, Johnson’s successor as chairman, Billy Payne, quietly invited a pair of women to join: Condoleeza Rice, the former secretary of state, and Darla Moore, a South Carolina banker who happened to be a longtime friend of Hootie Johnson. (In 2014, Rometty also became a member.)

None of these women, Howard points out, are exactly “bra-burning suffragettes.” But she admits this has been progress, and progress is slow, and progress will only be pushed by “asking important questions and not being worried about blowback,” she says. “Your existence is not improved by keeping your mouth shut.”

“For anyone who’s trying to change societal norms, the first one in the pool is often going to be the loneliest one,” Roberts says. “That’s just the way it is. It’s difficult to poke and prod a place when they’ve never been poked and prodded before.”

This was something Marcia Chambers understood all those years ago, and something Christine Brennan and her colleagues picked up on. Fifteen  years later, in a world of activist hashtags, maybe Martha Burk’s war with Hootie Johnson doesn’t carry the horrific urgency, of say, the Harvey Weinstein story. But the larger point behind Burk’s argument—that women deserve equal access to places like Augusta and other private clubs—has, at the very least, become a mainstay of everyday public discourse. Even if you disagree with Martha Burk, you can’t help but understand her argument now. It’s not really about golf at all, and it never was.

Burk is nearing 80 now, and someday, they’ll be writing her obituary as well. She knows what the first line will be, and she knows that she, too, after a lifetime of activism on behalf of women, will be inextricably linked to this man she never met—this man who, for his own reasons, viewed her as his sworn enemy.

“I’ve said that this damn thing is going to be on my gravestone,” she says. “And you know what? That’s OK.”

Michael Weinreb