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From the Gallery
Way I see it, let Hootie and Martha eat mud
Posted: Friday April 11, 2003 11:58 PM
By Seth Davis, Sports Illustrated
AUGUSTA, Ga. (SI.com) -- One storm blew over. Another is on the way.
Rainy Thursday gave way to Partly Cloudy Friday at the Masters. Next up is Surreal Saturday. As the old saying goes, the Masters doesn’t begin until the protest on Saturday.
This is the day we’ve all been waiting for -- and dreading -- since the Augusta National membership issue flared up last fall. Yet, I’m guessing that those folks who are lucky enough to get inside the National’s gates Saturday won’t give a hoot about Hootie, and they won’t say boo about Burk. They just want to see the world’s greatest golf tournament, as do we all. Walking around the grounds these past two days in the $20 work boots I bought at the local Wal-Mart, I got the sense that if I didn’t know about all that was happening in newspapers and on airways, I would have thought this was just another Masters. It is indeed a surreal feeling, and it leads me to believe that Saturday’s big climax will be anticlimactic.
Hasn’t everything that could possibly said about this matter has already been uttered a thousand times over? Yet, Martha Burk must somehow fill about four hours of protest time Saturday saying it all over again. She badly undercut her cause two weeks ago by invoking the spirit of the female soldiers fighting in Iraq, but she can’t possibly come off looking any worse than Hootie Johnson did when he laid down his if-I-drop-dead-this-moment proclamation during his annual State of the Masters press conference on Wednesday. (Memo to Hootie:
The state is queasy.)
How appropritate that the golf course should be draped in mud today and all throughout the week. The mud is even deeper and sloppier than it was last year, though thankfully the groundskeepers found something to soak up the excess moisture that doesn’t make the place smell like manure. (Insert your own horse’s ass joke here.) The mud perfectly symbolizes the Martha-Hootie mess. They’ve dug in their heels and will not move, except to bend down so they can sling the slop at each other.
The Masters tournament has always been Martha’s big target, but it’s also Hootie’s ace in the hole. Even people who otherwise agree with Dr. Burk’s position are unlikely to tune out the event, especially now that it’s commercial-free. (Thanks, Martha!) I also think Dr. Burk overplayed her hand (again) by launching her weekend with a news conference at the Martin Luther King center in Atlanta on Thursday. She has always tried to put her cause on the same plateau as the civil rights movement, but that argument just never took. If it did, then Jesse Jackson would have been in Atlanta on Thursday instead of phoning in his comments from Chicago. Perhaps he had a tee time at Cog Hill.
Meanwhile, Hootie Johnson is still the only person in the free world who doesn’t believe that his vitriolic response to Dr. Burk’s initial request that women be admitted as members has singlehandedly transformed this into the controversy that it is. It’s only fair that his legacy and his tournament is besmirched as a result. Whether you sympathize with Hootie’s position or with Martha’s stance, neither one has emerged as a sympathetic figure.
So what about this situation will be different one year from now? Very little, I’d guess. It’s hard to imagine the National will admit a female member by then, but it’s also hard to imagine Burk blowing into town with the same head of steam. So we’re stuck. As much as I want this whole mess to go away, there’s something fitting about the notion that it stays in this holding pattern for a while. The bottom line of Surreal Saturday is that Martha Burk and Hootie Johnson deserve each other. So let them eat mud.
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