After years of protests, the club that is home to one of golf’s most prestigious tournaments relented in 2012 and allowed its first female members. Now, one of the top professional women’s golfers is hoping that Augusta National Golf Club, where Jordan Spieth finished off a record-tying win at The Masters on Sunday, will one day host a women’s version of the tournament too.
Paula Creamer, the 2010 U.S. Women’s Open champ and a 10-time winner on the LPGA Tour, tweeted Tuesday that she hoped Augusta would consider such a tournament in the near future:
https://twitter.com/ThePCreamer/status/587992545617117184
Creamer has a point. Overall golf participation in the United States fell for the fifth consecutive year in 2014, and even those who still play are hitting the course less: in 2013, American golfers played their fewest number of rounds since 1995. The declines, which have also happened in the United Kingdom, have led the organizations that run the game toward emerging markets, including women, who bucked the overall trend in 2013 when the sport reported a 260,000 gain in women participants. But even their numbers seem to be peaking, meaning the game could use the boost that a high-profile tournament like the Women’s Masters might provide.
Augusta, meanwhile, has shown signs of progress on this front. The notoriously hidebound Georgia club admitted its first women members in 2012, when it welcomed Condollezza Rice and business executive Darla Moore. It added a third — IBM chief executive Virginia Rometty — last year. And it crowned the first female champion in its history, when 9-year-old Kelly Xu won her division in a junior competition at Augusta before last year’s Masters began (three other girls won their respective divisions, and the competition returned for its second edition before this year’s Masters).
Behind the times as it might have been, Augusta was still ahead of other iconic parts of the golf world. Scotland’s 260-year-old Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews admitted its first women members this year; other clubs in the UK and some in the U.S. still remain closed. St. Andrews, however, has twice hosted the Women’s British Open, so perhaps it is Augusta that needs to follow the cues of its British counterpart this time.
It would be generous, though, to call the Women’s Masters even a remote possibility. The LPGA already plays five major tournaments a year, so it may not be interested in adding a sixth. And as Golf Blot’s Steve Elling noted, Augusta chairman Billy Payne said there has been no talk of a women’s tournament when asked about it at his pre-Masters press conference last week.
“I believe I had that question last year, or the year before,” Payne said last week. “We have a very short member season at Augusta National. It’s seven months only. The time that we dedicate to the preparation and conduct of the tournament is already extensive. I don’t think that we would ever host another tournament.”
Indeed, Augusta is closed from the end of May until early October, when it re-opens to allow members to play, in part because of tradition and in part for maintenance on the course to keep it primed for the next year’s Masters. Still, it might be possible. Last year, North Carolina’s Pinehurst No. 2 hosted the men’s and women’s U.S. Opens in consecutive weekends, the first course to ever do so. Former U.S. Golf Association director David Fay, who came up with the idea, was confident enough in the course’s grounds crew and condition that it would hold up through two consecutive tournaments without putting the women at a disadvantage (it succeeded). Granted, that was a one-off event, and Fay said beforehand that Pinehurst was the only course that could manage it. But a similarly meticulous grounds crew and a limited field — The Masters hosts fewer than 100 players, compared to 156 at last year’s U.S. Open — could make it possible at Augusta, especially if the events were played in non-consecutive weeks.
It wouldn’t be easy. Seven-day golf tournaments (including practice rounds) and the crowds they bring take a toll on a course, so feasibility is certainly a concern especially at a place like Augusta, which unlike Pinehurst hosts its tournament each year and where organizers take a certain pride in the image the course projects and the challenges that result from constant tweaks. Perhaps such a tournament would work best as its own one-off, or as an occasional rather than annual stop on the LPGA circuit. But given that it would be another sign of progress for a club hardly known for such and the shot in the arm it could give the sport, a Women’s Masters seems like an option worth considering for everyone involved.
Update:
The original image was incorrectly identified as Paula Creamer. It has been fixed.