Annika Sorenstam
I hesitate to write about golf in these pages, given the editor’s strong feelings about the game and about golf clubs. But not for long. It is true that the Open Golf Championship is held at clubs where women are not permitted to be members. But it is also true that the Open is a men-only competition.
A decade ago, a Swedish woman golfer, Annika Sorenstam, participated in what are normally men’s golf competitions and acquitted herself with credit – without winning prizes. On the whole, men do not compete against women at sport, unless they are riding a horse. I think it’s the case that the horse in a race or competition can be either male or female. No discrimination there, then.
Forty years ago, there was the risible case of Bobby Riggs, a tennis professional, who derided women tennis players and challenged Billie Jean King to a match – and was defeated. But my memory of games of squash against men is that almost the only chance I had of winning against a man was when I was playing a man who was a dangerous hacker (and generally didn’t know about the obstruction rule, either). That kind of game was a disagreeable experience to be avoided. The better men would have wiped me off the court in short order. In squash, the two players need to be of pretty much equal ability for there to be a game that is not completely one-sided. The best women would be slaughtered by the best men.
Golf clubs, though, have been changing. When I first joined an Edinburgh club in 1979, it was one of a handful where women had equal rights: we were able to play at any time, other than when there was a men’s or a junior competition in progress. We were able to play in our own competitions at weekends. We had equal access to the clubhouse – there was no ‘men’s lounge’ as there was in many other clubs. But absurdities remained. The dress code for men was inviolable. I recall the then captain of my club waiting until 7.31pm to approach me in the lounge to tell me that my husband would have to acquire a jacket and tie instantly or else leave. It was fine to wear a roll-neck shirt and a sweater up to 7.30, but not beyond that time. So we left and did not spend more money in the club’s bar.
That was a minor absurdity compared with some others. On one occasion many years ago, a university match at Muirfield involved two prominent English universities’ teams. The captain of one of the teams was a woman. Because there were no changing facilities at Muirfield for women, she had to change in a hotel. At another East Lothian club, a friend’s son was asked whether he was going to the annual dinner. ‘No’, he said. ‘I’m not going to an event where my wife has to enter by the back door’.
I recall being invited, several years ago, to play in a mixed competition – an innovation – at a posh Edinburgh men’s golf club. A room had been especially rigged up to serve as a women’s changing room (and, I felt, to convey the sense of this being a very temporary arrangement). In the competition, women with no handicap were given a notional handicap of 36, which shot the whole competition to pieces. The clubs that are the highest-rated in the land may not have caught up yet, but many others now have.
On the subject of handicaps, there have been changes over the years which have rendered the whole thing ridiculous. The handicap is what enables players of all levels of ability to compete against each other on equal terms. Formerly, there was a very sensible, transparent and easy-to-operate system. All you had to know was which had been your best four scores over the current and previous seasons, and to average them. The difference between that and the standard scratch score – the score that a zero handicap player could be expected to make on that course – was your handicap. Many years ago now, the handicap system for men changed for the worse, and this was, of course, emulated a few years later by the authorities in the women’s game, who imposed the new system for all competitions within and across clubs – regardless of the way that it was clear that some men were radically scaling down the number of medals that they played in to protect their handicaps because of the new system.
The powers in the women’s game had felt, allegedly, that low handicap players – the very best – were disadvantaged in international competitions because of the handicapping system. This would not, of course, apply to professional competitions where there is no handicapping. Nevertheless, change there apparently had to be. The system now in place depends not only on how a player actually scores, as it had previously done. It depends also on the weather and on how other players in the same competition score. It could scarcely be more complex, and I marvel at how clubs still manage to attract women to be voluntary (unpaid) handicap secretaries.
It used to be the case that one could stand on the 18th tee and know exactly how much one had to score at that hole to play to one’s handicap. Not any more. If a particular proportion of the field plays below the standard scratch score, the standard scratch score is reduced and therefore one’s own score is less good than it appeared at first sight: score 89, standard scratch 70 = 19 over your handicap. If you have an 18 handicap, you have played one over. But if the standard scratch is reduced to 69 because of the way other people have played, you are two over.
This attempt to rationalise the system and make it more equitable takes no account of variables. For a start, it is not as if the same cohort of people is playing in every medal: attendances vary according to availability and enthusiasm. If all of the consistent players are involved, the standard scratch is more likely to be lowered than if enough of them are on holiday or indisposed. Further, if the weather is fine on a Saturday morning and several people have low scores, the standard scratch is likely to be lowered, even if the people playing in the afternoon have had torrential rain to contend with. This – and vice-versa – does happen.
The end result is that one can come off the course not knowing what one’s score means. Every scored round more than a few points above one’s handicapped score (3, 5, eg, depending on one’s level) results in one’s handicap being raised by 0.1. If it is below the standard scratch, it may be lowered by 0.3 per stroke below, for example, in one handicap category. But in order to know whether either of these is the case, you need to know what the standard scratch score is, and that depends on how all of the other competitors score and what effect the weather has had. Before this change, many players tended to score better on fine days and worse on dismal days: it evened itself out anyway.
Why have they done this, these people who make the rules? To benefit the best – the very best, only – players in the country, perhaps. But I think there is another reason. I imagine that the decision-makers – Scottish Ladies’ Golfing Association, Ladies’ Golf Union, whoever – thought: ‘We need to change, but what can we do? I wonder if a computer would help?’. So a computer whizz was – according to this hypothesis – brought in and, in the manner of computer whizzes, went twiddle, twiddle, twiddle on the keyboard, and said, ‘Look what you can do! This is exciting: I could write a programme to give you a whole new system’. So the answer to the question of why they have done it is the usual one: because they can. And if they can, they must.
Only one thing is sure: there is constant grumbling about the handicapping system, but we are stuck with it. Women golfers are more likely to complain about that than about the fact that certain snooty golf clubs remain the preserve of men.
Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh
