Masters golf: 12 women candidates for Augusta National membership

The Augusta National Golf Club has steadfastly refused to alter its all-male membership. But circumstances may soon cause the gender barrier to break, and if it does there are several women who might be good fits for the club.

Condoleezza Rice

John Nordell/The Christian Science Monitor/File
U.S. Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice listens to a question from then-Senator Barack Obama during her confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in this 2005 file photo.

The former US Secretary of State and current political science professor is a big sports fan and an avid golfer who plays about three times a week on Stanford University’s campus course during the summer. She takes lessons in both Palo Alto, Calif., and in Birmingham, Ala., her hometown and the location of the once-segregated Shoal Creek club, where she is a member.  In an online interview with Golf Digest, she said her goal is to break 90 more consistently. In speaking of her aggressive approach to playing the game, she says, “My inner Phil Mickelson comes out quite frequently.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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