The big news in golf last week was that Dottie Pepper was named as the assistant captain of the 2013 American Solheim Cup team by captain Meg Mallon. The news is big because Pepper has been shut out of Solheim Cup captaincies because of a remark she made as a broadcaster during the 2007 Cup.

On a day when Laura Diaz and Sherri Steinhauer were choking their guts out in their foursomes match against Maria Hjorth and Gwladys Nocera, über-competitor Pepper said, when she thought she was off the air, that the pair were “choking freaking dogs.”

Because the American press is squeamish, we don’t know if “freaking” is the exact word Pepper used. But whatever she said, it went on the air, and the roof caved in on her.

Immediately after the incident she apologized sincerely and the incident should have been laid to rest. An apology wasn’t good enough for some LPGA players, though, who have carried the grudge ever since and are to this day unnamed, probably because we wouldn’t want to know who it is who lacks the maturity to forgive and forget.

Pepper has been persona non grata ever since for telling the truth. Apparently she should have apologized, groveled, and begged for forgiveness, although who knows if even that would have been good enough for some people (Diaz, perhaps, who is not the warmest person you have ever met.).

The mistake Pepper made was to drop her objectivity as a reporter and allow herself get caught up in the competition as if she were still in it. Reporters are observers, not participants. That’s something for her network supervisors to deal with, but she was sent to golfing Siberia in addition by members of the LPGA.

Headlines in the last week’s articles refer to “Pepper’s penance,” as if this shunning was actually deserved. Or how about, “Pepper’s pardon.” Were the headline writers not suspected of getting caught up in onomatopoeia, we could laugh this off.

But no, Meg Mallon gave Pepper a pardon. That, unfortunately, is exactly what had to happen.

Up to now, no Solheim Cup captain has had the courage to tell to the players that Pepper is on the team, she had a 13-5-2 record in the Solheim Cup and she can teach you a helluva lot about winning, and if her presence is offensive to you, you can stay home and watch the matches on television.

Pepper made her public apology right after she made her remarks. The players who led the movement against her should make theirs, too, now. Pepper deserves at least that much.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

A little over a month ago, I posted on Billy Payne stonewalling the press corps about the Augusta National Golf Club not admitting women as members. Recently, Warren Buffet, the investment whiz, and a member of ANGC, said that the club needs to have “plenty of women” in the membership, but as he is not on the membership committee, there isn’t anything he can do about it right now.

I wrote that the world of golf could do something about it by refusing to grant to the Masters recognition as an official tournament in World Golf Rankings, exemptions for major championships, money lists, and so on. So at a press conference held for The Players Championship, which some observers call the fifth major, PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem stepped up to the plate on the very issue . . and struck out.

Oops. Wrong sports metaphor. He stepped up to the tee on the 17th tee at TPC Sawgrass . . . and whiffed.

In a May 9 NY Times article by Karen Crouse, who is becoming my favorite golf writer, Finchem said, in regard to the Tour’s strict policy of not holding tournaments at courses with discriminatory membership policies, quoting from Crouse’s article,

“We have concluded a number of times now, and we have certainly not moved off of this, that we are not going to give up the Masters as a tournament on our tour,” Finchem said Wednesday. He added, “It’s too important.”

Finchem clarified the Tour’s head-scratching position by saying, also quoting from Crouse’s article,

“We have a policy that says that when we go out and do a co-sanctioned event, we are going to play it at a club that is as open to women members, open to minority members, etc., and we follow that policy carefully,” Finchem said. In the case of Augusta National, he added, “we just elect to continue to recognize them as an official money event on the PGA Tour because we think it’s that important to golf, so we don’t get to determining whether their policies are right or wrong.”

That the Masters tournament is so “important to golf”, whatever that means, more important than the culture of non-discrimination. Got it. Tim, if discrimination is wrong at Whooping Crane Country club, it’s wrong at ANGC, too.

Apparently, the Tour follows a principled policy on discrimination unless it has to apply it in a difficult case, at which time the Tour folds. Principles aren’t for easy cases, though. They’re for the hard cases. If you retreat from your principles in the face of a tough decision, it doesn’t mean that you are unprincipled. It means that you have different principles than you thought you did. This stance shows that Finchem and the Tour do not truly believe in non-discrimination. They just want to make themselves look good by having filed the right paperwork.

What does Finchem think the ANCG would do if he held its feet to the fire? Not hold the tournament? Hardly likely, seeing that the Masters is a cash cow beyond any golf club’s wildest dreams. If the Masters was not played for a year or two, “golf” would not suffer. The club would, and Finchem has to know that.

Just watch. The subject will come up during U.S. Open week, and I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the USGA will say the same thing as Finchem. I guess I’ll have to get out the the USGA address again and ask you to write, especially if you are a USGA member, to ask that the Masters champion be removed from the list of automatic exemptions, beginning with the 2013 U.S. Open competition, until such time as it admits female members.

The USGA does not seem to have an e-mail address for general correspondence. Their mailing address is:

The United States Golf Association
P.O. Box 708
Far Hills, N.J. 07931

You may also telephone them at 908-234-2300, FAX 908-234-9687.

Yesterday, Masters chairman Billy Payne faced questioning from reporters about the continuing absence of female members at the Augusta National Golf Club. He handled the issue as poorly as a 30-handicapper dealing with a downhill slider on one of Augusta’s bikini-waxed* greens.

Payne’s stock answer to the question was, “That’s a membership issue,” hoping the assembled press would get the hint and realize where they were and whom they were talking to, and start minding their manners. In other words, golf’s equivalent of being in church and speaking to the head prelate.

Apparently the press hasn’t drunk the Augusta Kool-Aid, because the questions kept coming. Apparently, too, Payne had only one answer scripted because he didn’t expect to have the same question asked more than once after he gave the word. Since he was prepared with only one answer, that’s the answer he kept on giving, and it got worse every time.

In my April 2 post, I suggested that Martha Burk should work this issue from the inside, through the golf organizations that have leverage. Now that the press has picked up on the points in that post (are people in high places loyal readers?) that will be another point of pressure if they don’t let go, and keep asking the question after the Masters is over. At the Players Championship press conference. At the U.S. Open press conference. At the PGA Championship press conference. Keep the ball in the air.

Now I know this is a golf instruction blog and that’s what you expect to read when you dial it up. There’s another Know the Rules post coming tomorrow. This issue is important, though, and I am using this space to add my voice to the list of people who don’t believe that Augusta is above criticism or accountability in the golf world, and that we have a duty to ask why ANGC is getting by with flouting the rules that the rest of this country has to live by, and the golf world thinks nothing of it.

I hope to see a fine tournament ending with Webb Simpson and Keenan Bradley playing off in a battle of belly putters. But let’s not allow the issue of female membership die as soon as the honorary starters tee off tomorrow.

* So described in 1994 by Gary McCord in his final** Masters as a broadcaster.

** Per request/demand of the Masters Tournament Committee.

See also Finchem Whiffs Discrimination Issue at Ponte Vedra Beach

The issue of Augusta National Golf Club admitting a female member is in the news again. Martha Burk, instigator of the protest over the same issue in 2003, is pressuring Augusta once more. Normally, the CEO of IBM is invited to become a member. IBM has a new CEO, a woman. Will Augusta National stick to something of a tradition and issue an invitation to her because of her corporate status, as Burk says it should, or say nothing because of its own tradition of never having had a female member?

Something might be said about that at a press conferences this week, who knows. What we do know is that Augusta National is a private club and they can admit or deny admission to anyone they care to. That doesn’t mean we have to give them a pass.

Shoal Creek Golf Club became a pariah in 1990 because of its policy of not admitting Blacks, and the PGA withdrew its offer to the club to host that year’s PGA Championship. Shoal Creek could not have gone ahead and run the tournament anyway because the Championship is run by a governing body not attached to the course. The Masters tournament is run by the offending club, so Augusta National would have to be sanctioned via outside pressure by a relevant organization instead of orders given. But it has to be the right organization. The National Organization for Women is not the right organization.

Burk didn’t get that the first time, and she still doesn’t get it. A more effective strategy would be for her to go behind the scenes and lobby the PGA Tour not to recognize the tournament as an official win, not to count the money earned on the official money list, and not to award FedEx Cup points to the winner. She can lobby the PGA of America and the USGA to remove the Masters champion from its list of players exempted from qualifying for the U.S. Open.

This would be a more effective strategy because what drives the Masters is prestige. They’re not worried about money. In 2003 and 2004, the tournament was broadcast without commercials in order to avoid the prospect of a sponsor boycott. What would hurt would be to take away the trappings of prestige that has elevated this chummy invitational to a status co-equal to the title tournaments of golf’s major governing bodies. Even Jones thought the tournament had wrongly outgrown its original nature.

I doubt that will ever happen, though. The good old boy network is too strong. Can you see Tim Finchem even giving this idea more than a millisecond of consideration? In the end, Golf should be asked to explain why it came down hard on one private club for discriminating, and but does not on another. That would be a good question to ask at the U.S. Open press conference this June and the PGA Championship press conference in August.

I check out of pro golf every year after the PGA is over. The Ryder Cup, Presidents Cup, Solheim Cup, those events don’t do much for me. After the PGA is finished in August, all the men’s and women’s majors have been played and it’s time for college football anyway.

So every year it takes me a little while to get used to how good the pro golfers are. I watched the third round of the Sony Open yesterday, and I’ll watch the finish today because 18 guys are within four shots of the lead on a course where low scores will be plentiful.

What I had forgotten:
1. How hard they and fast they swing, such as the current co-leader, Matt Every.
2. How dead straight they are. Nick Faldo showed us the 8-yard-wide opening to the 18th green that players have to navigate from about 250 yards away. I lost count of how many golfers bounced the ball onto the green right through that gap from that distance.
3. How important every putt is. The moment I tuned in I saw a guy miss a three-footer and a few minutes later saw someone else miss a putt of the same length.
4. How much I want to go to Hawaii this time of year.

For the past several years the official opening of my golf season has been to watch Bubba Watson jump out of his shoes cutting the corner with his drive on 18, but he’s not in the tournament this year, so I guess we won’t get to see that.

The group I would follow today if I were there is the Corey Pavin and Chris DiMarco duo. I would learn a lot about how to play golf, and there wouldn’t be that many people in their gallery, so I would get to see everything.

One thing about pro golf that I hadn’t forgotten, and that I saw plenty of yesterday, is that to shoot a score you have to keep the ball in play and make some putts. My son, who is 35 and learning to play, calls me after every round. We go over which shots didn’t work out in order that he might learn better ways of getting the ball around the course. Right now my thing is for him not to tee off with any club longer than a 4-iron. He’s doing that, and finding out how different golf is when you hit second shots from the fairway.

Anyway, I advise him that next time he should try this shot, or this strategy, and you know what? He takes notes! Not that I know anything, but he writes it down! For all you readers who have teenagers in the house who think you are sooooo stupid, there’s hope. A time will come when they listen to you. Actually, they’re listening now, but they just don’t want to admit it. I’m hearing both our sons say to me, “You know when you always used to tell us X? Well, . . . “

But, back to golf. There’s snow and ice on the ground in the Pacific NW today (see #4, above), which means putting practice indoors and the Sony Open at 4 this afternoon. Life is good.

Even though one day later is the same as any one day later, and we can start on a new path anytime we want to, there is something about turning the page to January 1 that makes a difference. We have had our year-end festivities, from November through December, and then there’s January. Thirty-one days of not much going on. So we get introspective and start to think, “Maybe there’s a better way.” A better way to do whatever it is that’s important to you.

If golf is important to you, you’ll be setting goals for the coming season. Last year I didn’t accomplish much on the course because of my Grand Canyon hike, but I did get a lot done on re-tooling my swing. I also had a putting lesson last month that turned everything around. I can’t wait to go out there again and start breaking par.

That probably won’t happen, though these things might:

1. Get my grandson real good at this game.
2. Shoot in the 70s consistently instead of once or twice a year.
3. Get my next golf book published.
4. Have more fun.

Each one of them is within reach. I’ll keep you posted as the year goes by.

Here’s one for you:
Read Better Recreational Golf. It’s full of little things that will make a big difference.

Right about now, that’s all I can do. I have a back problem that is keeping me from taking a big swing, but I can hit with my wedges. So, I’m practicing them a lot, and the ease with which I have to swing is having surprising results.

I have to have an easy, flowing swing, so I don’t hold the club too tightly. It’s just a turn to the right, and a turn to the left with soft hands, loose wrists, and loose arms. This is also a great way to practice the release that I have been working on all year.

Last Sunday I hit balls at the range with my son, and just lofted one shot after another right where I was aiming, and with pretty good distance control, too. I hope when my back heals and I can swing fully again that I’ll remember these lessons, because I am sure they apply to those shots, too.

But that isn’t why I haven’t been blogging recently. I’m hard at work to deliver my next book to the editor by the end of the month. The working title is The Golfing Attitude. The first section is about achieving complete concentration during the round and applying that to various situations during the round. The second section is full of playing tips, shotmaking pointers, and good advice for playing your best golf with the skills you have right now. It should be out by March 2012.

The Golf Chanel is in the middle of its second annual 7 Nights At the Academy. It comes on at 7 ET, 4 PT. Not bad, a bit heavy on commercials, though. Johnny Miller is his know-it-all self, but then he does pretty much know that amount, Nick Faldo is trying to tell us everything he knows in the few minutes he has on the air, but Raymond Floyd is the one to listen to. Everything he says is solid. If you haven’t read his book, The Elements of Scoring, you should get a copy right away. It’s the best book on the mental game I have ever read.

I’ll be watching a lot of college football in the next few weeks, I need a break from golf on TV.

You know, Better Recreational Golf makes a great Christmas gift, and the shipping is free. I await your clicks.

When I was growing up, there was a set of golf clubs in the basement. There was a steel-shafted wood of come kind, and several irons with wooden shafts. I don’t really remember much more than that, but I do remember that they fascinated me.

They belonged to my father (they had, too, my mother was tennis player, and a good one), but he never played. He must have played when he was younger, but like so many men do, when his family started, along with that and his job and his avocations, there was no time for golf. But the clubs were there.

There was a heavy canvas shag bag, too, along with a few of the old-style balls that had dimple patterns that ran at right angles to each other, very orderly.

When I got my first set of clubs, the one that I liked the most was the 9-iron. Maybe it was the shape of the numeral on the sole of the club (an early fascination with typography that continues to this day), I don’t know. The other clubs were golf clubs, but my 9-iron was Golf. I had a dozen Wilson golf balls, Jim Ferrier model. Later I became a big Maxfli fan, because their ball logo was a colored dot with a circle around it. I went for the green-dot versions in a big way. Even today, I mark my golf ball with one green dot.

I had a book, too, called Play It Pro, Golf from Beginner to Winner, put out by Wilson Sporting Goods. It’s a slim paperback, only 66 pages long, that takes you through equipment, how to swing, chip, putt, get out of sand, and so forth, along with a bit on professional golf. I still have the book, and there is a chart in the back where you could enter your scores. My first time breaking 100 is marked on that chart, when I was trying out for the high school golf team at about age 15.

I took group lessons when I was nine or ten, at a driving range that had a par 3 course attached. I thought it was really easy. The pro said to do This, so I did This and it worked. I couldn’t figure out why no one else was doing what he said to do.

We couldn’t afford too many lessons after that, nor too many rounds of golf, but I did get some plastic balls and hit them all the time in front of my house during the summer. There weren’t many kids in my neighborhood, so I didn’t have anything else to do.

The telephone wire into our house ran about twelve feet above the ground and just in front of the spot where I would hit from. I would take a real golf ball and see how close I could get to the wire and still be able to pitch a ball over it. I could get pretty close. Getting a short shot in the air in a hurry is still pretty easy for me, because of that.

My father took me to my first professional golf tournament, the Portland Open Invitational, when I was ten. What I remember most is watching the players warm up on the range. In those days, the pros had to bring their own range balls, so their caddies were all down-range picking up the balls that their pro hit to them. Right to them. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing that someone could hit the ball that straight time after time.

One more memory before I go, which I have to, lest this essay turn into a volume. I was about eleven years old when my father and I went to see Patty Berg give a clinic on the 10th fairway of our local golf course. There wasn’t a lot of money to be made on the LPGA tour back then, and this is how she made her living. It was amazing the amount of control she had over the ball and how it did exactly what she said it would do. I got her autograph, and I still have that, too.

I would tell you about the day I got Arnold Palmer’s autograph, but that’s post in itself. Soon.

Last weekend, Lexi Thompson showed the LPGA that she is ready, as a player, to compete and win. She led wire to wire in her five-stroke victory in the Navistar Classic in Prattville, Alabama. She was never seriously challenged because she did not allow anyone to come close.

If there is anything she lacks, I’m not sure what it would be. Her size and strength make her the biggest hitter out there. She has touch around the greens as well. The only question is how well she can stand up to week-in, week-out competition, or whatever the LPGA schedule can muster up that approaches that.

That’s the only question about her playing ability. There is a big question about her even playing. Should she be able to become a full-time member of the LPGA Tour at 16 years of age, or next year at 17?

The LPGA rule about the minimum age for membership says that an applicant must be a “. . . female (at birth) [there’s a hot-button issue right there] 18 years of age or over. . . . Females (at birth) between the ages of 15 and 18 may be granted special permission to apply for membership. . .”

So it can be done. Aree Song became a member at age 17 in 2003, as did Morgan Pressel in 2005, and neither were any worse off for it.

There also seems to be a requirement for her to go through Q School, even though she has won on the Tour. There isn’t much sense in that, and Mike Whan, the LPGA Comissioner,  has the authority to waive that matter. We might know in a few days.

The only thing I would be concerned about is Thompson’s education. I believe a younger player  must have received an accredited high school diploma to be eligible to apply for LPGA membership. The word “accredited” refers to the document awarded by a secondary school that provides a curriculum meets the requirements of the regional education accrediting agency. The diploma must also meet the standards for all public high schools of the state in which she lives.

I could, at this point, launch into an essay on the value of an education, but do I really need to? Get the diploma, the right one, then go play all the golf you want.

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