IT will be business as usual at Muirfield next Monday when 117 women tee up in the club’s traditional mixed foursomes event.
At the same time, work on increasing the size of the ladies’ locker room will also keep clattering away.
But in the midst of this sits a club which has found itself at the centre of a storm after its members voted, by the narrowest of margins, to continue its male-only membership policy.
The committee of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers had urged change and backed the motion to allow female members.
A total of 397 members who were eligible to vote wanted change too. But with only 64 per cent in favour, and a prerequisite for a two-thirds majority, the motion was defeated.
With the youngest member aged 28, some may be quick to suggest it was the older section of the membership who stymied the move.
But then again. “My impression is that we have many forward-looking members who are in their 80s and we have others who are younger who are still resistant to change,” said Henry Fairweather, the club captain who delivered the result of the vote to a gaggle of flashing cameras and frantically scribbling scribes.
“The club will retain its male-only policy,” he added, in a downbeat statement.
Single gender clubs were once of their time and for every Muirfield there was formed a female-only St Rule or a Troon Ladies.
“If you said to those women who played golf 120 years ago that in 2016 a tiny per cent of the clubs in the country would be single gender they would probably think it was a great result,” said Shona Malcolm, the first female secretary of the PGA in Scotland.
“It’s not a great result in the modern day though, is it? I do respect the right of private clubs to do their own thing but society is changing.”
Indeed, female golfers have their own tales to tell of Muirfield.
When Antonia Beggs, the operations manager at the 2014 Ryder Cup at Gleneagles, was performing a similar role at the Senior Open at Muirfield a few years ago she “had to eat in the kitchen with the staff but the rest of the team could eat in the clubhouse because they were guys”.
Meanwhile, Scottish professional golfer Heather MacRae wrote yesterday: “The first time I played Muirfield I had to sit outside after the game as I wasn’t allowed in. I sat and watched a member go in with his dog.”
The Royal & Ancient, the game’s governing body, upped the ante by taking swift, decisive action and removing Muirfield – where American Phil Mickelson won the trophy in 2013 – for the time being, from the Open rota.
Royal Troon, the other male-only club in Scotland to host the Open, co-exists with the ladies club nearby and will host this summer’s event jointly. It is already undergoing its own membership review and the R&A’s stance will no doubt rattle walls of the Ayrshire clubhouse.
“The R&A has made a decision that makes the position very clear,” conceded Mr Fairweather.
However, just as a core group of Muirfield members warned of the “inevitable risk” of admitting women, some commentators have backed the status quo.
The BBC’s Peter Alliss was reported as saying women would be “horrified” at the prospect of being allowed to join.
“The wives can use all the facilities at the club,” he said. “They love going there for nothing.”
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