AUGUSTA, Ga. -- The sad thing is, there were some serious messages just dying to get out Saturday on a bright, blue, beautiful Masters day.
There was the discrimination thing and some faint charges of racism, and if you cared to think of it a certain way, there were people talking about economic blackmail and lying and cheating and all sorts of grim-sounding stuff.
But, you know, even as protesters held their rally and media members scrambled furiously about, even as policemen stood by, leaning on their cars, it became pretty clear that this thing was just too darn funny to take too seriously.
I mean, c'mon. "Hootie Patootie Shame on Youtie"? An inflatable pink pig? A man with a sign that read "I will kiss Martha Burk for a ticket"? Elvis?
Saturday was supposed to be such a huge day in Augusta. Not so much for the third round of the Masters, of course, as for the protest down the street. Saturday was the biggest day in a year's worth of controversy over Augusta's male-only membership.
And here's how it went:
By 9:30 a.m., the biggest group of protesters, representing Burk and her National Council of Women's Organizations, had not yet arrived at the 5.1-acre field a half-mile from Augusta National. "It would appear," a bystander offered, "that protesters like to sleep in."
Some 100 police cars and 100 law-enforcement officers -- these guys ever hear of carpooling? -- were parked on the field, splitting it up into stripes so that each of the several different protesting groups would have its little space to get its message across. If I happened to be a burglar, Augusta would have been a good place to work Saturday.
PARP, which stands for People Against Ridiculous Protests, had a sign erected. As you might expect, no PARP members were around.
A man dressed as Elvis wandered the field, doing interviews with the dozens and dozens of media people. "Elvis," said the Elvis, "has always supported women."
A man -- I think it was a man, because he had a beard -- paraded under an umbrella with American flags attached to it, his garishly painted face peeking from underneath. He identified himself (herself?) as Sister Georgina Z. Bush. He was evidently anti-war, but he (she?) was just a little too creepy to find out too much more about.
In one of the more enlightening moments of the day, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, Jack Batson, explained to me how the courts, in keeping protesters away from the front gates of the club, decided that the pursuit of happiness of Augusta National was more important than the right of free speech for the protesters. "The preamble of the Constitution takes precedent over the enumerated rights," he said. "I thought of that in the shower this morning."
A man carried this sign: "The Right to Protest Is Crucial, Even When the Cause Is Inane and a Blatant Publicity Stunt."
People driving along Washington Road on their way to the tournament gawked and honked their horns. Some of them shouted stupid, sexist things. The folks across the street brought chairs out to their front lawns to watch everything.
The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, who founded the Los Angeles-based Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, proclaimed Burk a "liberal, white, millionaire female who is mad because she can't get into a private, all-male club." He also railed on the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow PUSH coalition, which was also at the protest supporting the NCWO. "Jesse Jackson is unworthy of even commenting on it," Peterson said. Jackson, smartly, didn't show up.
A man with a hand-lettered T-shirt represented golf haters in the world. "All Golf Is Vile," his shirt said on the front. "Golf Destroys Home, Farms and Forests," it read on the back.
Finally, sometime before 11 a.m., a bus pulled up on Washington Road and, as the sound system set up for the rally blared Helen Reddy's I Am Woman, the protesters stepped off the bus. By best count, there were somewhere between 20 and 30 of them. At that point, police had protesters outnumbered probably four or five to one. It was almost the same ratio for media members to protesters.
Several minutes later, Burk stepped out of a car on the other side of the field and, swarmed by the media, walked up to the stage. Later, she claimed that a right-wing organization bought several seats in the buses from Washington just to keep others away.
Sometime during the rally, someone called Augusta a police state and someone else held up a 12-foot placard of a Ku Klux Klansman with the Masters emblem on his white robe. A man in a tuxedo watched. He had a sign that read "Formal Protest."
Also during the rally, an anti-Burk protester (I'm assuming, here), maybe 15 feet away from her, directly in front of the stage, held up a hand-lettered orange sign that read "Make Me Dinner!" on one side and "Iron My Shirt!" on the other.
Before the rally, but after I Am Woman,Cyndi Lauper screamed Girls Just Want to Have Fun over the sound system and Tom Jones crooned She's a Lady, which includes the line "Well, she always knows her place."
On the other side of the field, Todd Manzi, founder of theBurkstopshere.com, tried to sell more buttons, caps, T-shirts and bottles of water with his anti-Burk message. He declared, again, that he was getting out of the anti-Burk business after this weekend.
Throughout much of the NCWO rally, Allison Greene, the Augusta restaurant manager who founded Woman Against Martha Burk, listened to the speakers, shaking her head, mouth agape. She clutched a package with a petition signed by 1,600 women, many of the pages with personal notes.
Greene had planned to hand the package to Burk after the rally, but she couldn't get to her. She tried to give it to another NCWO representative, who refused to accept it. Alice Cohan of the Feminist Majority Foundation finally took it from her.
Cohan dropped it, face down, with a bunch of placards and unused T-shirts to be loaded into a van. Shortly after, Greene was gone.
"Unlike Martha Burk," she said, "I have to get back to work."
