George Kimball/America At Large: The golfing world will descend on Augusta National Golf Club next week, and over the next few days the occupants of that emerald jewel surrounded by southern strip malls will come to grips with the fact that while there will be no visit from Martha Burk this year, they did get John Daly. We'll leave it for you to decide who got the better of that trade-off.
Twelve months have elapsed since Martha and Hootie Johnson locked horns over the club's male-only membership policy, and while both sides claimed victory, Martha has all but vanished from the scene while Hootie is as defiant as ever.
While Johnson, the Augusta National Golf Club chairman, has long since confirmed that the CBS telecast of next week's Masters tournament will once again be commercial-free, the 2004 Masters will, unlike last year's event, also be Martha-free.
"I have no plans at this time to return to the police state of Augusta, Georgia," Burk told me in a telephone call a month or so ago.
It is at this point also worth noting that 10 months have elapsed since Howell Raines and Gerald M Boyd resigned in some disgrace their respective positions as executive editor and managing editor of the New York Times. Following an internal investigation, the pair were forced to walk the plank over their handling of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, but as Alan Shipnuck makes clear in a new book revisiting l'affaire Martha et Hootie, if Blair hadn't brought Raines and Boyd down, Hootiegate might have.
In Shipnuck's view, the media frenzy at Augusta last year appears to have been largely Times-driven, as the self-proclaimed "paper of record" wedded itself to Burk's crusade with such enthusiasm the issue acquired the trappings of a national cause célèbre.
Over nine months the Times devoted more than 90 stories to the Augusta membership controversy, most of them overwhelmingly slanted toward Burk's position. And, as Shipnuck recounts in The Battle for Augusta National: Hootie, Martha and the Masters of the Universe, Raines and Boyd went to extraordinary lengths: as the storm clouds gathered, the Times spiked two columns questioning Burk's position (one by Harvey Araton, the other by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dave Anderson), because they conflicted with the newspaper's position.
Inevitably, word that the Times had killed the columns leaked out, much to the embarrassment of the paper. In somewhat sanitised versions, both columns belatedly appeared in print.
"Yeah, we screwed that up every way possible," Raines admitted to Shipnuck. Raines blamed Boyd for killing Araton's column because he deemed it "unfair" to Burk. He acknowledged he had personally killed Anderson's, on the grounds it explicitly criticised an earlier Times editorial calling on Tiger Woods to boycott the 2003 Masters.
Burk, who heads the National Council of Women's Organizations, claims to speak for seven million women, but only 40 of them showed up for last year's protest rally on the third day of the Masters. Consigned to a grassy parking lot a mile away from the club's gates, Martha's protesters did outnumber, say, Klansmen, but both the pro- and anti-Hootie factions were dwarfed in numbers by two larger groups: approximately 100 reporters, and twice that many uniformed police officers.
Limiting all of the protest groups to the lot ensured every idiot in the village was confined to one small spot. The bizarre collection of demonstrators, counter-demonstrators, Klansmen and assorted lunatics looked like the assembly point for Harvey Keitel's rag-tag army of mercenaries in Mel Brooks's 1974 film Blazing Saddles. The members of Burk's tiny band carried placards reading "Hootie patootie, shame on youtie" and "Women don't need balls to play", but the entire exercise was for the most part the sound of one hand clapping.
Burk recently conceded to me that last year's protest was "ineffective", but blamed Augusta officials for knuckling under to the club.
"They made sure we couldn't bring our message to the people who needed to hear it," Burk told us. "They consigned us to that 'pit' where we were surrounded by police - and they weren't there to protect us."
She is surely accurate on that count. Despite a massive show of force, the police remained aloof, but had Burke attempted to depart, say, in the direction of Magnolia Lane, the world would quickly have learned why they were there.
Even with no protests planned next week, the Hootster is taking no chances and intends to stage yet another Masters devoid of television commercials. Two days before the 2003 Masters Hootie was asked how long the club could continue sponsor-free. "Indefinitely," he replied.
We didn't believe that then and we don't believe it now, but you can count on at least one more year without commercials.
"There were many aspects of last year's broadcast that were favourable," said Johnson. "The response from our TV viewers about the ability to watch strictly golf was very positive."
A day after Burk's fizzled protest, Mike Weir defeated Len Mattiace in a commercial-free play-off, which attracted 34.5 million viewers, making for the third-highest-rated Masters telecast ever. Although details have never been made public, estimates are the decision to drop sponsors cost Augusta $7 million in revenue - and that's not counting the "production costs" the club had to kick in to defray CBS losses.
Meanwhile, the Washington Road street vendors who have an overstock of Martha-logoed golf balls ("The Burk Stops Here") left over from last year could have a tough sell next week.
