Time for my guilty golf feminist confession: Yes I believe in equality, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about mixed golf yet. Is it really being taken seriously?
Time for my guilty golf feminist confession: Yes I believe in equality, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about mixed golf. We’re taking a good swing at addressing the disparity between men and women’s golf, but is it really being taken seriously?
By Charlotte Ibbetson
What do you think when someone says, ‘mixed golf’? I’d hazard a guess that for a lot of club golfers, it would be the image of husband-and-wife teams playing foursomes before retreating to the clubhouse for afternoon tea. Not particularly competitive nor taken too seriously, is it really anything more than a ‘nice change’ type of format? It definitely has a place in golf clubs, but as far as the notion of men and women competing equally on the same playing field goes, it’s not quite up to scratch if you ask me.
Though that’s not to say that things aren’t changing, albeit at a somewhat turtle-like pace. Traditionally, the women’s club championship at my home club was played as a match play event over the course of a few months. Women played, won, and lost matches without anyone really even noticing until a new name was etched in gold on the ancient wooden board of the clubhouse. The men, on the other hand, played a 36-hole championship, with supporters lining the fairways and an inevitable jolly knees-up as the victor was crowned.
So, one year I asked if I could play. I had one of the lowest handicaps at the club, and it was after all called the Club Championships. After a lot of questions, ums, and ahs from the committee, the decision was in. The tournament would be renamed the Men’s Championship, forbidding women to enter. Seriously. But the next year rolled around and with the support of a few more members this time (both men and women), it was decided that women could in fact play. The only catch was that we’d have to play from the championship tees. If we wanted to play with the men, they said, it was only fair. So that’s what I did. Undeterred by the questioning looks, I held my own and competed, literally side by side with the men. I enjoyed it, and it’s set a precedent for the championships ever since, but could I really compete with the extra 1,000 yards of course? Absolutely not.
They’re total ends of the spectrum, but that wasn’t the answer to mixed golf that I was looking for either.
So, does the answer lie somewhere in between the two formats – something that we can take a bit more seriously but where both men and women can compete? What about tees based on your ability not whether you are male or female, or mixed series with accumulative points over a set number of rounds? We need new ideas that bring both men and women together, on and off the course. If nothing else, there’d certainly be a lot more revenue going through the bar – how many times has your playing partner not been able to hang around for a drink because they have to get home to their other half?
At a professional level, the LET, LPGA, European Tour and PGA are all making headway in addressing the gender imbalance with events like the ISPS Handa Vic Open, GolfSixes and the Jordan Mixed Open, where men and women compete side by side for the same prize money. But even those events come with their own controversies. Only four players from the LPGA’s top 50 supported the ISPS Handa Vic Open. Giving up their chance to share the spotlight instead of hiding in the men's’ shadows, I couldn’t help but think: What a fail - who is really responsible for driving this change?
Does the problem lie in the competition format, the people supporting it, or is just an antiquated mindset that will just take a bit longer to shift? Whatever is, I don’t think we’ve quite cracked mixed golf yet - but I am confident that we will.
Image credit: Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images
