There are a million reasons why I won’t watch the Masters this afternoon.

Two of them are named Hootie Johnson and Martha Burk.

Johnson, the current chairman of the major golf championship at Augusta National Country Club, and Burk, head of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, represent equally extreme ways of life with which I’d rather not be associated.

Both are so blissfully wedded to their end of the political and social spectrum that they’ve become cartoonish.

Espousing ideas that are more outdated than any album by Hootie and the Blowfish, this Hootie’s staid approach to business as usual at his Georgia golf club has unveiled a personality that makes Jesse Helms appear huggable by comparison.

This is how we’ve always done things, saith Hootie. Why should we yield to liberal, external influences?

Yep, that line of thinking has always enjoyed rousing success in the South.

Johnson has become the poster child, albeit at a spritely 72 years of age, for golf club snobbery. By tuning to CBS for any portion of this afternoon’s proceedings, I am yielding tacit approval to his worldview. Were I to do that, I’d be just as well off watching a “Dukes of Hazzard” marathon. And so I will abstain.

Not that Burk and the “she who screams loudest and longest, wins” philosophy appears hell-bent on winning friends and influencing people.

Aren’t there bigger fish for the women’s movement to fry?

Burk’s investment of this much time and energy in this trifling pursuit is like mobilizing an entire police force in order to detain a juvenile graffiti artist while a career criminal burglarizes the neighborhood.

Instead of setting up shop on a rainy Thursday afternoon in rural Georgia and challenging the chief executive officer of each company that doesn’t support the exclusion of female members at Augusta National to surrender his exclusive membership there, perhaps Burk should demand that those CEOs pay men and women an equal salary for the same upper-level management positions.

You can bet that isn’t happening everywhere, and certainly it would be an easier argument to win in the arena of public discourse. I would argue that despite the ink and words that those of us in the media have expended on this issue, a majority of Americans don’t give a rip who’s teeing off at Augusta at any time except the second weekend in April.

Even millions of recreational golfers view the inner workings of private golf clubs as snooty, inconsequential, almost laughable. Heck, that’s why “Caddyshack” is still hilarious after the 943rd viewing.

Burk’s year-long crusade clearly was much ado about nothing, evidenced by the fact that police outnumbered protesters at the gathering she hosted on Saturday.

Essentially, she wasted her time, your time and my time. I can do something about the latter: avoid the tournament she has attempted to reshape, like a virus, while making it abundantly clear that she has nothing to do with that decision.

I’m willing to take the risk that something historic will happen, such as Tiger Woods winning the tournament for an unprecedented third straight year.

Woods is guilty by association, while we’re at it.

As a leading minority figure in the lily-white, male-dominated world of golf-as-usual at Augusta National, Woods should be ashamed of himself for taking a verbal drop from the tall grass every time he’s been approached about this issue.

Surely Burk’s request that Woods boycott the first major tournament of the season was excessive. But his status as the greatest active icon in the world of golf put Woods in an ideal position to take a stand in one direction or the other.

Heck, if every Hollywood character actor and guitar-picker is willing to rail against the war in Iraq, ill-timed and couchged in ignorance as that stance may be, surely Woods — whose eight-or-nine-figure income is almost completely performance-based and not at all tied to public opinion — could say something more substantive about the lack of women walking Augusta’s hallowed fairways than, “I wish it weren’t so, but it is. Shucky darn.”

A pox upon all your houses.

Hootie Johnson and Augusta National are wrong for living in the dark ages. Martha Burk is fighting the wrong battle. The competitors are wrong for sitting on the fence.

Sitting this one out is the only right thing to do.

Kalle Oakes is sports editor. He may be reached by e-mail at koakes@sunjournal.com.

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