Somewhere along the way, those 219 members at Muirfield Golf Club confused tradition with dogma.
Tradition is 16 Open Championships played on the iconic East Lothian links. Tradition is a club that dates back to 1744, when the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers was founded. Tradition is a list of Open champions that reads like a roll call of the game’s greatest players – from Harold Hilton (1892) to Phil Mickelson (2013).
Dogma is the narrow-minded, insular and extremely archaic decision by those 219 members who voted on Thursday to cling to the club’s all-male membership policy.