Dollars but no sense: Golf's long history of shortchanging women

ByMAX SAFFER
April 15, 2016, 10:33 AM

— -- When Jordan Spieth rounds Amen Corner this weekend and begins making his way back to the clubhouse at Augusta National Golf Club, the world will be watching as he tries to defend his 2015 Masters title. A short distance away, through a thick curtain of magnolia trees and across Rae's Creek, lies the ninth fairway at Augusta Country Club, where for nearly three decades, until 1966, the best women's golfers played the first major of their season, the Titleholders.

The tree line and creek separating the courses act as a metaphor for the seemingly insurmountable distance that separates the financial compensations for the best male athletes in the world and their female counterparts. Three weeks ago, Novak Djokovic questioned equal pay in tennis. Last week, players on the U.S. women's national soccer team turned to the law to fight for equality. Last Sunday, Lydia Ko won the LPGA's first major, the ANA Inspiration in Rancho, Mirage, California, and received a $390,000 check. It was 21.6 percent of the $1.8 million Spieth earned for his 2015 Masters victory.

Why is the divide so wide in professional golf? There's a lot of history.

From 1937 until 1966, the pioneers of women's golf starred on the early Donald Ross design at Augusta Country Club, but they competed for a fraction of the prize money that the men played for on the other side of the creek. In 1947, Babe Didrikson Zaharias won the Titleholders and took home $300 -- a mere 12 percent of the $2,500 that Jimmy Demaret got for winning the Masters seven days later.

"I was the leading women's money winner for 1948 and my winnings totaled just $3,400," Didrikson wrote in her memoir. "As you can see by that, the amount of [events] available to a woman golf pro was still pretty limited."