Less than a half-mile from the front gate of Augusta National, the local constabulary had set aside a vacant lot for last Saturday morning's protests. Several dozen squad cars and over 100 Augusta policemen, sheriff's deputies, and Georgia Highway Patrolmen were on hand to keep Martha Burk's minions and the pro-Hootie Johnson counter-demonstrators from the Ku Klux Klan from setting upon one another.
They needn't have worried. J J Harper, the self-proclaimed Grand Imperial Wizard of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had even worse luck marshalling his troops than Martha did hers. In fact, when we came upon the Grand Imperial Wizard and his lone deputy the two of them were in mufti (apart from a Confederate hat the junior wizard was wearing) as they attempted to erect a sign bearing a hate message.
"When are you guys going to suit up?" we asked them, but Harper's hoods and sheets must have still been at the cleaner's.
One suspects that the memberships of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, Royal St George's, and, for that matter, Portmarnock, watched last weekend's events in Augusta with more than cursory interest. One also suspects that along about Sunday afternoon they were breathing the same sigh of relief Hootie did after Martha missed the cut.
The Burk bandwagon, which had threatened to cast a pall over the 2003 Masters, barely caused a ripple. Trepidation over a potentially embarrassing demonstration by Burk and her followers from the National Council of Women's Organizations evaporated the moment the coach emptied out just before noon on Saturday, disgorging 16 demonstrators who'd been bussed down from Atlanta. Burk lamely attempted to claim that she had deliberately "negotiated" an undersized demonstration, but clearly, she was the one who'd been embarrassed.
"They couldn't even fill a bus," marvelled one onlooker. Although a scattering of sympathetic onlookers pitched in to join the NCWO group, Martha's demonstration never exceeded three score. Craig Stadler, the last-place finisher in the Masters, had bigger galleries than that.
The day before the Masters began, the Augusta National chairman had said: "I don't tell Tiger how to play golf, and he won't tell us how to run our private club." Perhaps Hootie should have told Tiger Woods how to play golf. Sunday's events conspired to ensure that the first commercial-free Masters telecast was also Eldrick-free, as the two-time defending champion double-bogeyed the third hole and was never heard from again.
On the other hand, anyone who spent much time around the 2003 Masters is going to be seeing pigs in his sleep. Once the mud dries, the enduring image of the event isn't going to be Mike Weir trying on his green jacket, Len Mattiace hockeying putts back and forth across the 10th green, or Jeff Maggert under attack from his own golf ball.
Rather, it's going to be a pig.
At her demonstration on Saturday, Burk addressed her platoon while standing before a gigantic pink pig balloon festooned with the logos of the Augusta National's corporate sponsors.
Just down the road vendors were doing a brisk business peddling "Root for Hootie" t-shirts which coupled a caricature of the chairman posed alongside a centaur-like creature combining Martha Burk's head and a porcine torso.
At Saturday's rally, Burk's NCWO minions were also distributing cute little buttons reading: "Women Pay while CEOs Play," depicting several green-jacketed pigs playing golf.
Let's put this in perspective, though. Hootie Johnson was clearly responsible for escalating the battle with his overreactive response to Burk's interrogative, but Burk's strident rhetoric has often made her seem downright puerile. Her suggestion early on in the debate that the Masters should be moved to another golf course painted her as golf-ignorant, and many found last month's attempt to link the women's membership issue to the war against Iraq nothing short of disgusting.
When he responded to Burk's first letter Johnson said that "there well may come a day when women will be invited to join, but that timetable will be ours and not at the point of a bayonet." After last week's activities, Hootie, sounding like George W Bush gloating about Saddam Hussein, had revised his posture.
"There never will be a female member, six months after the Masters, a year, 10 years, or ever," he promised a sympathetic Atlanta columnist. "There never has been, at any time, any consideration of Augusta National taking in women members."
In other words, the sum effect of Ms Burk's protest coupled with its evident lack of support may actually have emboldened Hootie and strengthened the club's resolve.
Meanwhile, at his pre-Masters address, Johnson had said: "The club's position on our membership is very comfortable with our present status.
"It's not my issue alone," he insisted. "I promise you what I'm saying: If I drop dead this second, our position will not change."
Sixty-two of Augusta's 300 members showed up at Hootie's news conference, pushing many legitimate reporters out of the room and giving at least the illusion of solidarity. But just because Hootie says he speaks for all of them doesn't make it true. Nearly a year's worth of moral debate resulted in just two resignations this time around, but if Martha can successfully persuade her followers to, as she vowed last weekend, "vote with their pocketbooks," she will be speaking a language the boys in green jackets understand.
Martha Burk may have been the clear-cut loser last weekend, but we may not have heard the last of her. While the laws of the land, and, more importantly, the US Constitution support Hootie's side of this issue, the moral imperative and the tide of history could still be on Martha's.
Meanwhile, spare a thought for the poor pig, who never asked to be dragged into any of this.
