what's up with the college 80K law school 124K Vagina - Priceless sign? Is there something behind that, or is she just letting us all know she's been to college and law school?

this.

FYP

"Hootie Johnson is the furthest from a racist as you can be."

I knew a gay jewish guy who was dating a black guy. Is Hootie less racist than HIM?

HUH?

obviously favors the bruthas for anatomic reasons.. racist against jews, whites, azns, etc. So yeah, he is.

The black guy, on the other hand, Hootie ain't got nothing on him.

My thinking at the time was why didn't he just drop her letter off into the garbage and avoid the drama altogether. Seems to me that the organization was mostly a paper fiction and their big chance at turning into something else was a big public battle that wasn't necessarily inevitable. Maybe it was, and I'm glad it worked out the way it did.

I do think Hootie mishandled the returning champions letter thing, but that's another kettle of fish.

By the returning champions thing, you mean when they tried to cap the max age they could play? If so, yeah, that was horrid. But to their credit, they corrected it.

Oh, please, Tuq. If you really believe this, lad, PM me for a remedial reading list.

~sandy

This was not the case, jay, although Tom's former wife, Linda, was Jewish, and Tom did withdraw from the club for a few years in public protest of the club's ultra-secret membership committee and exclusionary membership policies -- and Jews were far from the only category of persons who were unwelcome there solely on the basis of social, racial, religious or gender classification. The club never admitted women to individual membership, although privileges were extended to widows of members.

Without going into detail, Tom paid a heavy personal price for his behavior. To his credit, his actions prompted other prominent club members to speak out and membership traditions at the club did change to at least a token degree.

Ironically, Tom later left his wife and took up with the former wife of a fellow tournament professional -- which estranged him from every family member he had failed to estrange the first time, including his children, and left his business manager between a rock and a hard place; he's his former brother-in-law. Not to mention many fellow professionals, who had long considered him loudly and self-righteously opinionated and a hypocrite. It is certainly true that he has evolved (or not) from a McGovern supporter in his youth to a present-day Rush Limbaugh devotee.

And, after his divorce, Tom quietly rejoined the Country Club.

It is also ironic, in my view, that Tom has long genuflected uncritically at the alter of Augusta, and led the charge to ban Gary McCord for an insufficiently respectful quip, although it would be difficult to imagine a less inclusive organization than the masters who bring us the Masters.

Mr Watson has always been a man of complexity and contradiction, in public and in private; he's a very interesting guy, as well as a transcendent competitor.

No, no, it's not a competition. There's just a two billion person tie.... and the other four billion are racist to some degree!

Poorly phrased by me, but what I mean was, in the last 30 years or so I have a hard time believing that racism was nearly as pervasive in a membership comprised solely of multi-millionaire business leaders than it would be prior to that, or in backwater places populated by rednecks. I'm willing to believe that it took awhile for a suitable black candidate to come along once they were open to the idea, said qualified candidate not available for societal reasons which aren't the fault of the proprietors of the club.

Anyway, on Monday night I was at a house party watching the NCAA final. There was a good old southern boy here on a golf trip, probably mid-50s in age. So he lives in Atlanta and he's casually throwing around the n-word like it was fifty years ago or we were in some Mark Twain novel, interesting since he was clearly an educated individual. It was pretty WTF but does make me realize that it is a big country and I don't appear to have much of a grasp on racial tensions in the South.

reading about Hootie on Wiki, he certainly seems like a decent man. he was/is very involved in minority relations, etc.

re: the membership in the club (99% WASP/C), sometimes the explanation isn't racist, but rather social. people often just stick to their own kind, form social relations, becomes friends, and invite them to join their club.

The Country Club in Brookline (MA, Ryder Cup, etc) is probably about as white/old school as Augusta. my ex-gf was a member, and at the time she was the youngest member in the whole club (she was 26...and I mean that she was a full member, not just her parents). which means that she had to know a lot of people in the club to be nominated, approved, etc.

I'm a Jewish guy, and walking around...well there weren't a whole lot of me. There was 1 black guy (iirc) who was a member, and he is a noted professor at Harvard Business School. There is 1 Jewish family, but they have a Christmas tree and live in the waspiest section of Brookline. everyone else was exactly as you would picture.

my gf would try to tell me what I said above: it's not that Jews or blacks were excluded, it's that friends of members are really the non-members who hang out at/play at the club, and meet members, and gain enough friends in the club that they eventually can become members themselves. you need at least 10 members to support your application, and there don't tend to be tons of black or Jewish people with that many friends who are members. an HBS professor? Sure. a Dr. who lives on the same street as 7 members? sure. but as a matter of course, new members tend to be those whose family has been in the club for generations, or who went to the same prep schools and colleges as everyone else, or who work in the same industries (though I think this is even a bit harder)

so, it's exclusionary not by rule, but by social custom and class.

do I buy this 100%? I'm not sure...but I think that explains a lot about how these super exclusive places tend to be so homegenous. it's not just racism.

Are Jews prominent golfers? I really just don't know. Because if so I'd expect a decent Jewish population at Brookline. But what you're saying also makes some sense.

There's also the point that these things aren't cheap, and the economic disparity between the races and classes are going to be evident within the club's walls.

yeah, plenty of Jews golf...there are plenty of "Jewish dominated" CC's around Boston. I grew up about 100 feet from one.

this isn't always true actually. The Country Club costs, comparatively, almost nothing to join. I think $20k? everything is paid for and the club has a ton of money, so they are basically just paying for upkeep. the nicest new clubs in the area (Nantucket) can cost near $1m, I believe.

I don't think Augusta costs that much either - the gigantic barrier is class/contacts, not money.

I believe Watson ended up quitting the club? Also, IIRC, he wanted his friend Henry Block (of H&R Block) to join the club, and Block too was Jewish. (I might have this wrong.)

I remember Lee Trevino thought the Augusta bigwigs were jerks and would refuse to go into the clubhouse, changing his shoes in the parking lot.

It was a joke in our synagogue when I was a kid that Sam Snead must be Jewish because, in a Pepto-Bismol commercial, he said, "I always get nervous on the day of atonement . . ."

I remember it being a big deal when Charlie Sifford won the L.A. Open and the Masters did not invite him to compete that year--despite the fact that they invited every other tour winner--because he was black. This would be the late 1960s I believe.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...50/ai_55158491

KB4Z,
I agree with most of that, my grandparents on both sides of the family belong to Jewish golf clubs and social clubs in Montreal and Toronto, my parents grew doing stuff there, and when I was younger I went there, etc. etc.

That's a fine piece, Andy...

It wasn't perfectly accurate in every respect then, and it's nine years gone now, but it's as good a sense of the man, and his environment, as anyone's ever going to get.

You are correct about Henry Block as well, although more in a general sense than a personal one; it was just the straw that broke the camel's back -- Tom's children, after all, are at a minimum, technically, Jewish. Tom had to have been desperately conflicted as he watched them grow up and join in club activities. And, believe me, the membership practices at Kansas City Country Club were in no sense a matter of natural selection -- Henry Block's transparent exclusion could only be put down to his religious and cultural heritage.

(At one point, Tom tried to excuse the process by babbling on about the common etymologies of "discriminating" and "discrimination," and played the fool. He found no comfort on either side of the issue...)

You are also correct that Trevino and Augusta National were oil and water. Trevino complained about limitations on player's passes and about the course design working against his fade and he did refuse to dress in the clubhouse and some years he declined to play at all. At the end of his career, he said he regretted copping such a negative attitude; he believed he was good enough to win anywhere and he would liked to have won the Masters once, if only to thumb his nose at the membership. He did resent and despise them. He's pretty grumpy, at the best of times, anyway.

Although Watson and Trevino had absolutely nothing in common socially, they became an odd couple -- Trevino was a Watson house guest when he had occasion to be in Kansas City, and Trevino made no secret of it in senior tour locker rooms.

Friend of mine who was a semi-bigwig at JC Penney in the early '90s played in a pro-am once with Trevino and once with Watson and his son was on the Hogan (I think that's what it was called then) tour, so he got to know both Trevino and Watson a bit; he said Trevino was the biggest phony in the world and not terribly friendly and that Watson was the nicest guy in the world. FWIW . . .

I remember the other pros saying that when they would go to Britain for The Open, they would all hang out together, but that Trevino would stay in his room and they wouldn't see him the whole trip.

And now we're hearing what jerks Azinger and Faldo were/are . . . I dunno. Nobody was a bigger jerk, apparently, than Ben Hogan, but maybe we're just living in an era where there aren't very many secrets anymore. There are probably some ugly stories about every athlete. Nicklaus has some disparaging things to say about Arnie in the new book that just came out about them. Friend of mine told me he was once in a group at the Olympic Club where a member of the foursome made a hole-in-one. Willie Mays was playing one group behind and the guy who made the ace waited for Mays at the 18th green. He told Mays that he was his hero since he was a kid and he made a hole-in-one today, it would be the greatest day of his life if Willie Mays would autograph the scorecard. Mays took the card, scribbled all over it, crinkled it up, gave it back to the guy and walked away.

I note Watson played at Pebble Beach last year with his son as his partner, so I assume they're reconciled, at least to some degree. Divorce is difficult no matter how famous your name.

BTW, I note Watson incurred a two-stroke penalty on Friday when he moved his ball marker on the green to get it out of Snedeker's line, and then forgot he had moved it and putted from the wrong spot. He then shot a fine 34 on the back nine, but it was too late to make the cut. When asked about it, Watson said, "I'm getting old."

Bump since its slow and these are about to be archived.

Hootie profile from this past Sunday's paper

Outside of the Martha Burke stuff, he's about as low profile as you can be for how much stuff he's been involved in

The story also has a Q and A touching on the Burke controversy

This is awesome:

LOL.