AUGUSTA, Ga. — Jabbed, prodded and poked repeatedly about a topic that never really goes away, Billy Payne wouldn’t budge.
Faced with questions at his annual news conference about when a woman would become a member at the home of the Masters, the Augusta National chairman kept giving different variations on the same answer: That’s our business, not yours.
The topic was on the front burner again Wednesday, on the eve of the year’s first major, because one of the club’s longtime sponsors, IBM, has a new female CEO - Virginia Rometty. The last four CEOs at IBM, all male, have been invited to be members.
Payne’s polite-but-firm responses were in direct contrast to those of his predecessor, Hootie Johnson. When faced with the issue 10 years ago, Johnson famously declared female membership would come on the club’s timetable and “not at the point of a bayonet.”
“As has been the case whenever that question is asked, all issues of membership have been and are subject to private deliberations of the members,” Payne said Wednesday. “That statement remains accurate.”
Asked to expand on his refusal to comment, he gave two reasons: “Number One, we don’t talk about our private deliberations. Number Two, we especially don’t talk about them when a named candidate is part of the question.”
He did not say whether Rometty was that specific “named candidate.”
The issue first came up in 2002, when Martha Burk, then the chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, campaigned for Augusta National to end its all-male membership and threatened to boycott companies whose executives belonged to the club. Johnson responded by cutting loose corporate backers and the Masters was televised without commercials for the next two years.
When Payne replaced Johnson as chairman of the club and of the Masters tournament in 2006, he said there was “no specific timetable” for admitting women. The question was raised at the 2007 and 2010 Masters. Both times, Payne said membership issues were private.
Today, in addition to IBM, Exxon Mobile and AT&T also are sponsors of the Masters.
Burk said she had no plans to protest this year because “we saw that didn’t work.”
It’s not her job to pressure the club, she said, but rather, IBM’s.
“If they’re willing to diminish the company’s image, and to discredit in a certain way their new CEO, that’s a loud and clear statement,” Burk said. “I would regret to see that very much. I think it’s astounding that one of the largest corporations in the world is having their strings pulled by a bunch of old guys in Augusta.”
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