Admitting women members to R&A would not force male-only British Open venues to follow suit

The governors of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews woke up Wednesday and noticed it was 2014. And though they will, next fall, give R&A members the chance to welcome women to the inner sanctum of golf’s governing body for the first time in the institution’s 260-year history, there’s no guarantee the three male-only venues on the British Open rotation will follow them into the brave new world.

“This should not be interpreted as the R&A declaring we will not take the Open to a single-sex club in future,” R&A chief executive Peter Dawson told reporters about his organization’s plans to vote in September on whether to let women join the old-boy’s club.

“As long as clubs are behaving legally and they are the best courses for the Open, then we have to put the needs of the championship high on our list of priorities,” said Dawson, who just last year said the media and others would not bully his association into doing the right thing and certainly won’t foist the fancy liberal notion of equal access on his member clubs. “So this is merely a step along the direction of travel for us. We’re not intending to place other clubs under pressure. The governing body issue is primarily driving this forward.”

Dawson claimed to be “delighted” to announce on Wednesday what he called the not necessarily “overdue,” but, rather, “expected” news that the R&A’s general committee would urge members to “welcome women into the club in the future.” He said early returns from members, who must pass the proposal with a two-thirds majority of the vote, looked good for those seeking, ever so timidly, to enter the 21st century.

“We’ve been talking about this for a while. And it is our governance role within the game that is the driving force behind making this happen,” said Dawson, who may also have been influenced just a tad by executives at HSBC, a primary Open sponsor, who said earlier this year how “very uneasy” they were with the event taking place at clubs with male-only membership policies. “Society is changing. Sport is changing. Golf is changing. And I think it is appropriate for a governing body to take this step.”

Should the walls come down at the R&A, which is situated on the grounds of the Old Course at St. Andrews but is a separate entity from the inclusive and most renowned venue in golf, Dawson said the decision would not be binding on the all-male Open hosts, Muirfield, Royal St. Georges, and Royal Troon. The heated issue, which only serves to bolster the widely held view of the game as pompous and discriminatory, flared up last year when Muirfield hosted the Open and Scottish political leader Alex Salmond boycotted the proceedings.

At the time, as in years past, Dawson defended the bastions of sexism against such a mind-bending concept as gender equality.

“I don’t really think, to be honest, that a golf club which has a policy of being a place where like-minded men, or indeed, like-minded women, go and want to play golf together and do their thing ranks up against some ... other forms of discrimination,” he said ahead of last year’s Open Championship.

“I really don’t think they’re comparable and I don’t think they’re damaging. It’s just kind of for some people a way of life that they rather like,” Dawson explained to people who were born after 1800. “It’s just a way of life that some of these people like.”

Dawson, who came under fire during his pre-Open press conference for his antediluvian views, scoffed at the notion that denying women equal playing privileges amounted to any sort of discrimination whatsoever.

“To be honest, our natural reaction is to resist these pressures, because we actually don’t think they have very much substance,” said Dawson, who, at the time, conceded that he and his smug cronies might, at some point after the Open, have to deal with the distasteful issue.

“When things are a bit quieter, after the championship,” he said, “I’m quite sure we’ll be taking a look at everything to see what kind of sense we can make of it for the future.”

The future is apparently now, even for Dawson, who claimed on Wednesday that sponsor pressure and Augusta National’s acceptance of its first two women members in 2012 played no role in the R&A’s announcement. Though “the time would seem to be right” to change the R&A’s membership policy, staging the Open on courses that continued to discriminate but that maintained championship-caliber conditions was just fine.

“We are not doing this to try to put pressure on those clubs,” Dawson said. “The Open has to go to the best courses and these clubs are certainly among them.”

The best Dawson can hope for is that the creaky old buzzards at Royal Troon, who will host the Open in 2016 (after Hoylake in July and St. Andrews in 2015) will save him the embarrassment of having to defend them and himself against criticism similar to that which nearly eclipsed Phil Mickelson’s dramatic victory at Muirfield last year.

And just to clarify what has become a confusing side issue -- despite the full name of the R&A and its location, the public Old Course and other St. Andrews tracks are accessible to all.

Perhaps by the time the 2016 Open Championship rolls around, wiser heads will prevail at Royal Troon and they will heed the sage words of the Black Knight.