Uneven Lies

By John Allen

In courtrooms and conference rooms, the cause of gender equity in sports has been playing sub-par the last twelve months. But away from the media glare, people such as Erica Webster show how balance is becomeing an every day reality.

Maybe it's the Bermuda grass. The stuff is tidy. Cropped to between half an inch and an inch and a quarter on the fairways, manicured to the low pile of new carpet on the greens; weeded, watered, and diligently policed for any itinerant atom of litter; pampered and protected until it's as green as money — Bermuda grass is orderliness made manifest.

Looking out from the broad swath of lawn that connects tee to green on any golf course, it's hard to imagine that such turf could become a battlefield, especially in the untidy wars of gender equity. Civility seems to be the law in golf, and nowhere is that more evident than at the Mountain Course in the hills west of Vail, Colorado, where head professional Erica Webster '93 manages the hooks and slices of the genteel members of the Club at Cordillera.

But every course has its dangers. "Here the typical hazards aren't traps and bunkers, but uneven lies," she says. "We have a lot of undulating ground."

Like most affluent country clubs, Cordillera is something of a temple to organized leisure, which may make it sound trivial. But then, in America, organized leisure has grown into a vital industry all its own — and golf is one of that industry's most thriving sectors. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, there are now some 15,195 golf courses in the country, an increase of 33 percent from 1974. More than 27 million Americans play some half a billion eighteen-hole rounds of golf every year.

The Mountain Course, the first of four golf courses that Cordillera operates, opened for business in 1994. Webster joined the staff that summer as an assistant professional, when the club had only sixty members. This year, there are more than eight hundred whacking tiny balls toward small holes in the thin Colorado air.

"Most of them are just picking up the game," says Webster. "They're typically successful vice presidents and presidents and company owners — self-made people for the most part. But because they've made their own money, few of them have had much time to play. Truthfully, a lot of them struggle with it."

But if their struggle isn't enough to break the sculpted peace of the fairway, then the conflict over college athletics might be. This year, a collection of coaches, athletes, celebrities, and politicians are all taking aim at Title IX, the law that governs sexual discrimination in education, and thus in collegiate athletics.

In 2002, Title IX marked its thirtieth year as U.S. law, and last August Education Secretary Rod Paige appointed a commission to study its successes and shortcomings. But Paige wasn't motivated merely by an anniversary. The previous January, the National Wrestling Coaches Association (NWCA) had filed suit against the Department of Education, claiming that Title IX regulations promote "gender-conscious cutting and capping" that ultimately restricts opportunity for male athletes. The wrestlers' faction became an army when several other sports organizations, including the College Swimming Coaches Association of America, the College Gymnastics Association, and the United States Track Coaches Association, joined the suit in support of the NWCA.

Further, Paige's boss, President Bush, had obliquely expressed dissatisfaction with the way that Title IX is enforced in his 2000 campaign, criticizing "any quota system that pits one group against another."

In response to this political environment, the commission fractured. In early 2003, it issued a report recommending a variety of alterations to the way that the Department of Education looks at Title IX. In particular, it offered suggestions for allowing schools more freedom to tailor the men's and women's athletic opportunities they offer to the necessities of the institutions' athletic budgets and to the interests of their student bodies.

But several vocal members of the commission issued their own "Minority Report," charging that the majority's recommendations would "seriously weaken Title IX's protections and substantially reduce opportunities to which women and girls are entitled under current law." In an editorial, the New York Times called the commission's work "The Attack on Women's Sports," and a variety of groups, including the Women's National Basketball Association, began circulating "Save Title IX" petitions to prevent changes to the law.

But as golfers say, you drive for show, putt for dough: when it comes to winning tournaments, the long shots that thrill crowds aren't as important as the short shots. The driving work of groups like the NCWA, the Department of Education's commission, and the WNBA may take up all the press. But Webster, putting away in the hills above Vail, is a quiet victory for gender equity. People such as Webster, who make a career of playing, teaching, and organizing athletic activity, show that Title IX isn't merely a symbolic or a regulatory issue — it makes a difference in everyday life.

Webster's road to Cordillera began at UW-Madison, where she golfed for the varsity women's team for four years. She went on to become an expert golfer, tying for second in the Colorado Women's Open in the summer of 2002. She's a direct beneficiary of the effects wrought by Title IX, and in her role as head professional, she's indirectly promoting gender equity for future generations of athletes.

According to the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, which recently released a study entitled "Title IX at 30," the purpose of the law isn't to build professional athletes. "The quest for equal opportunity in sports has always been about the physiological, sociological, and psychological benefits of sports and physical activity participation," the group wrote. "Olympic medals and professional sports contracts are not what Title IX is all about."

However, professional golfers are somewhat different from other paid athletes. Though the sport does produce a few stars of the tournament tour — the Tiger Woodses and Annika Sorenstams — most professionals in the world of golf are local course pros. The PGA of America now has more than 27,000 members, which enables it to boast that it's the "largest working sports organization in the world." These pros are the teachers and administrators who enable others to participate in the game, whether for competition or just for fun.

"Actually," says Webster, "I don't get to play nearly as much as I would like to — maybe once a week in the summer, though I try to get into three or four tournaments a year." Instead, she spends her time giving lessons, managing a staff of up to seventy-five employees, including caddies, and helping prepare Cordillera for its member tournaments.

All this is typical work for a head professional. Still, in the world of golf pros, Webster is a rarity. She's one of only two female head professionals in all of Colorado, a state with 261 golf courses. The typical head pro, she says, "is male and over thirty." Young, female golfers in search of role models have to look a great distance to find one.

"There just aren't a lot of female professionals out there," she says. "It isn't a road that a lot of women golfers take. There's no reason why this should be true — being female shouldn't be an obstacle. I guess there's still a certain reluctance to hire them at a lot of clubs." Before she could take on the uneven lies at Cordillera, Webster had to find a more level playing field.

Thirty years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine today's debate over the law that enabled her to do so. Though Title IX is now discussed in heated terms — credited for the rise of women's ice hockey or blamed for the decline of collegiate wrestling — in 1972, the law was just one of several education amendments, and it appeared to have nothing to do with sports.

Title IX is Congress's attempt to outlaw sex discrimination (and, in an odd coincidence, discrimination against the blind) in schools. Its salient point is contained in just one sentence: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." Nowhere in any of the additional clauses and sections does it mention athletic programs or teams, though the authors of the legislation were careful enough to make exceptions for religious groups, military training programs, social fraternities and sororities, and beauty pageants.

Instead, the athletic controversy stems from regulations that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare - and its descendant, the Department of Education — started drawing up a few years later. In 1975, the department explicitly extended the law's enforcement to cover equal athletic opportunity, and in 1979, it created further guidelines for athletic compliance. Those guidelines were clarified most recently in 1996.

Essentially, a university can comply with Title IX in one of three ways: by showing that its athletic opportunities match the interests and abilities of its students; by demonstrating a history of expanding athletic opportunities for women; or by offering opportunities to men and women in a ratio that mirrors that of the student body.

UW-Madison follows the third measure. "We've got about 53 percent women in the student body," says Cheryl Marra, the UW Athletic Department's senior women's coordinator, "and we're consistently within 1 to 3 percent of that in terms of athletic opportunity."

Of course, this wasn't always the case. Until 1974, UW-Madison had no women's varsity athletic teams. That fall, it created its first collection of women's sports, including golf. In 1989, the drive to achieve gender equity became mandatory, when a Title IX complaint was filed against the UW, and the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights began to scrutinize the workings of the university's athletic department.

However, the desire to achieve gender equity doesn't combine easily with budget constraints, and eventually the UW had to make difficult choices. In 1991, the university dropped several low-revenue sports: men's and women's gymnastics, men's and women's fencing, and baseball, a men's sport. Since 1995, it's added three women's varsity sports: softball, lightweight crew, and ice hockey. The Office of Civil Rights gave the UW its seal of approval in the fall of 2001.

The NCAA complicates the friction that such changes created. NCAA rules govern how many athletic scholarships a school may offer for each of its varsity teams, and in part to help schools achieve a balance between the sexes, the NCAA weights the number of scholarships to encourage women to participate in certain sports. For instance, at a Division I institution such as UW-Madison, the women's golf team may offer six full athletic scholarships; the men's team receives only four and a half.

This presents a challenge for Dennis Tiziani, who coaches men's and women's golf at the UW. He notes that a full squad requires at least five players, so the men's team is always dependent on walk-ons. However, he credits the UW for its sincere effort to comply with Title IX regulations. "They took the issue and made it work," he says. "It's a strong pull for me, because it gives us credibility" when seeking out golfers.

It's due almost entirely to Tiziani's influence that Webster is in the golf profession today. Webster grew up in the affluent Madison suburb of Shorewood Hills, but she says that she felt little attraction for golf. "When I was a kid," she says, "I thought golf was about the worst possible thing I could do with my time. It was too long, too slow — I was much more into soccer."

But during her high school years, she began golfing with friends at Madison's Blackhawk Country Club, learning from head professional Mike Schnarr, and then at Cherokee Country Club, where Tiziani was the director of golf. He saw potential in her and helped her work on her swing.

"She was a real strong girl who could play halfway decent," he says. "But more important, she always had control of herself, of her emotions and fears. Golf is a game of misses — you almost never get a perfect shot. If you don't want to be a psychological case, you've got to learn to deal with that. Erica never let it get to her."

But if Tiziani found a fine golfer in Webster, she found something more in him. Her father had died when she was only three, and she says that she'd been lacking a full sense of direction before she met Tiziani. "Our relationship was totally unique," she says. "He was exactly what I needed when I needed him. He was a coach, a mentor — he was like a father figure to me in a lot of ways. He gave me the love of the game and the tools to get me where I am today."

In the fall of 1989, the same year the Office of Civil Rights began taking a hard look at the UW, both Webster and Tiziani were on the brink of change. Chris Regenberg had left as the UW's women's golf coach, and Tiziani, who'd coached the men's team since 1977, was offered the women's coaching job as well. His daughter, Nicki, was golfing at UW-Madison, and partly to be her coach, he took the position. At the same time, Webster was starting her college career. She decided to follow Tiziani and joined the golf squad as a walk-on. By her sophomore year, she was on scholarship, and during the course of her UW career, she became one of the team's mainstays, at a time when the team itself was becoming more competitive, improving its standing both in the Big Ten and nationally.

"There were a lot of good players on those teams," says Webster, but none of them translated their collegiate game into their life's vocation. "Nicki Tiziani was a great player. Alissa Herron was a great player. But nobody from my team went professional. Alissa is working for a sports agency. But nobody followed the same path I did. There's a lot of stigma to this industry, that it's a male-dominated industry, a boys' club. Going professional isn't a road that everybody wants to battle down."

What helped Webster break into the "boys' club" was the aid of Pentti Tofferi, Cordillera's director of golf and her predecessor as head professional on the Mountain Course. It was Tofferi who not so much hired Webster as hijacked her for Cordillera in 1994. His human resource skills combine a talent scout's eye with a clever sense of business, and he saw how gender balance could be an asset. "She's one of the best golf professionals I've known," he says. "Her playing ability is a real differentiator, lifting her above a lot of others." But at the same time, it doesn't hurt that she's female. "Having a woman on staff as a professional is attractive for women who might want to play here. Ladies like to take lessons from another lady. Erica gives our professional staff a different set of experiences."

In 1994, however, Webster wasn't at all sure she wanted to be a professional golfer. She'd majored in marketing at the UW, and when she graduated, she felt her competitive golfing days were near their end. "I wanted to work with golf in one way or another," she says, "but the road I was going down was that of a sales rep."

After graduation, she moved to Arizona, hacking around golf courses while she was looking for work. In the spring of 1994, her family convinced her to join them for a vacation in Vail and, while there, to apply for seasonal work at as many golf courses as she could. It was then that she met Tofferi and played nine holes of golf with him. "Then he left, and my brother and I played the back nine. When we were done, Pentti offered me a job. He'd even found me a place to live. To this day, he's never even seen my resume, but he made sure that every roadblock for me was gone."

With Tofferi's encouragement, Webster enrolled in the PGA's professional certification program, forgoing the chance to join the LPGA.

"The LPGA course is primarily designed to produce teachers and coaches," says Webster. "I've always been interested in the business side of things, and the PGA program is much more well-rounded. It covers not just playing and teaching, but maintenance, shop management, running tournaments — the whole business. So that's the way I went."

The program can take as long as six years, but Webster shot through it in less than two. Cordillera promoted her to head professional duties - to running her own course instead of apprenticing under Tofferi - in 1997. "With her talents as a manager, business person, teacher, and player," says Tofferi, "she's really earned the respect of the members of the club."

Still, her elevation to head professional met with some resistance. "At least one of the members actually told Gerry [Engle, Cordillera's president] that he was making the biggest mistake he'd ever made when he promoted me," Webster says. "I never asked Gerry who it was — I'm not sure I'd want to know. And fortunately he didn't tell me about the complaint until the end of the season, after I'd realized I could do the job without burning anything down or blowing anything up. By that time, I guess I was just bullheaded enough not to validate any of that stuff."

Six years later, Webster's still running the Mountain Course, and this summer, she'll take on a new role as the face of Colorado golf. The local Fox Sports Network affiliate has hired her to host a television program entitled Golf Life. "I'll be traveling to different courses around the state, playing a few holes with the local head professional, showing the places off," she says. Though taped in Colorado, she says the program may also air in four other states. And in small ways like this, at local courses, golf's uneven lies are becoming less of a hazard for the women who choose to follow.

Today, of the 27 million Americans who play golf, about 6 million are women. That makes golf the sixth most popular women's sport in the country, excluding individual exercise programs such as aerobics and jogging. Few of these women will ever have the opportunity to play at Augusta National, but each needs a course, and each course needs a head professional. With people such as Webster in that role, equity enters the world of everyday athletics.

Slowly, Webster is becoming less of a rarity. This year, she says, Cordillera will hire two female assistant pros. "This will be the first time we've had female assistants besides me," she says. "It's going to be fun to have more gals around."