Eleanor Cannon, the chairperson of Scottish Golf, has revealed that the amateur game’s governing body could follow the Royal & Ancient’s lead and stop taking national and international events to single sex clubs.
After Muirfield’s vote on allowing female members failed to gain the required two-thirds majority last week, the R&A swiftly acted amid widespread condemnation and removed the world renowned East Lothian club from the Open Championship’s rota for the time being.
Major amateur events like the Scottish Amateur Championship, the Scottish Strokeplay Championship and the Home Internationals are occasionally staged at male-only clubs while the Scottish Women’s Open Strokeplay is co-hosted between Troon Ladies and Royal Troon, two clubs which co-exist but retain separate male and female memberships.
Cannon said: “We’re meeting on Monday and that’s one of the things on the agenda because we’ve got to decide what our response is.
“I’m delighted that Martin Slumbers (the R&A chief executive) took the stance that he did. I think it’s what the game needs.”
Cannon is now urging the Muirfield membership to make “a courageous set of decisions” over the next few months after a vote which shed the game of golf as a whole in an extremely bad light.
“What (Muirfield) has become in the space of a week is simply another all-male club,” she said. “They are not elite anymore and they have got to look at the consequences of that and decide what they are going to do about it. The responsibility sits with the Muirfield board for that and I would very much like to see them take a courageous set of decisions over the next few months.
“We have to put it into context. This is one of 608 clubs and the fantastic work that’s going on at ground level by people who love the game and want to grow the game simply cannot be diminished by the recent press about Muirfield.”
Meanwhile, Paul O’Hara overcame Graham Fox in a play-off to win the Tartan Tour’s P&H Championship, the opening order of merit event of the season, at The Renaissance.
Fox, who will compete in the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth after a late journey south, closed with a three-under 68 to join his Clydeway Golf Centre colleague O’Hara at the top on a three-under 210 but it was O’Hara who claimed the £5,600 first prize in the sudden-death shoot-out.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here