Burk fails to master the Masters

Sunday’s changing of the clocks triggers an old awareness that people who mistakenly refer to daylight-saving time as daylight-savings time, as though it were something you could deposit in the bank or your 401(k) account, are inevitably the same people who see gasoline advertised at $1.65.9 per gallon at the pump and believe they are paying $1.65 per gallon, rather than $1.66.

I haven’t a clue why there should be a connection. I suggest only that there seems to be one which applies across the social strata, and those who would reform the uninformed in either case are well advised to save their breath in pursuit of more productive causes.

The DST thing is a rite of spring, returning each year when winter’s back is officially broken to take its place alongside budding crocuses (croci?), fiddleheads, the Kenduskeag Stream Canoe Race and the annual raking of the gravel off the front lawn as reminders that we’ve again made it over March Hill.

And speaking of rites of spring…

To golfers – especially those here in the Ice Belt – nothing signals rebirth each April more clearly than the Masters golf tournament down in Augusta, Ga., which begins on Thursday and runs through next Sunday. If the pros are flailing away in Georgia, it can’t be all that long before the amateurs begin hacking around Bangor Muni. Best dig out the clubs and heave them into the trunk of the car. The summons to meet one’s golfing chums on the first tee could come any day now.

When television conveys those gorgeous pictures of azaleas and dogwood in bloom amongst the huge pine and oak trees highlighting manicured greens and fairways and sand and water to die for at the Augusta National Golf Club, golf addicts of all ages and abilities begin salivating. Surely Mark Twain can never have been more wrong than when he insisted that golf, even in such a magnificent setting, constitutes merely “a good walk spoiled.”

On the other hand, perhaps the old coot was ahead of his time, considering the ration of grief that Martha Burk, the fire-breathing feminist of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, has handed Augusta National chairman Hootie Johnson in her attempt to get females admitted to membership in the tony all-male club. Talk about spoiling a good walk up the 18th fairway and to the 19th hole beyond.

As you will recall, Burk, in a classic case of extortion the envy of any Mafia don, had demanded last year that the club admit women prior to this week’s Master’s or face advertising boycotts of companies that sponsor the telecast. Ol’ Hootie said women – many of whom regularly play the course each year upon invitation of members – might one day be eligible for membership. But he promised it would be a cold day in hell when they were admitted “at the point of a bayonet” rather than at the discretion of the private club. He told Burk she should consider getting a life, and to spare several major advertisers from the aggravation he dismissed them from their contractual obligations to sponsor next weekend’s telecast.

Burk threatened to picket the Masters, along with a gaggle of other stuck whistles, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, depending upon whether he can get more ink at Augusta than he might from going to Baghdad for an 11th-hour saving of civilization. In an impressive reach last week, Burk charged that for CBS “to televise the Masters now and showcase a club that discriminates against women is an insult to the nearly quarter million women in the U.S. armed forces.”

CBS said the only insult was Burk’s toward the network, and promised that the telecast would occur. A golf club spokesman said Burk was grandstanding and shamefully invoking the troops to draw attention to herself. Former President Jimmy Carter said the matter could have been handled more sensitively. Defending tournament champion Tiger Woods said he hopes he can win his third consecutive Masters. And the good burghers of Augusta, Ga., said bring on the circus.

But through it all, no one said it better than U.S. News and World Report columnist John Leo, who offered this take on the dustup last November: “Augusta is not resisting Martha Burk out of sexism but because the members want to smoke cigars together, tell dirty jokes, discuss prostate problems, and scratch themselves in odd places without glancing around first. It’s ordinary male behavior in a male setting, now defined as a worrisome social problem…”

The Masters. Starting Thursday on a television channel near you. On daylight-saving time.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.