Peter Alliss: BBC commentator says women who want to join Muirfield should marry a member
The R&A has dropped Muirfield as a host of The Open Championship after a proposal to admit female golfers was rejected by a third of the club's members
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Your support makes all the difference.The golf commentator Peter Alliss has risked provoking outrage by suggesting that women who want to play at Muirfield should marry one of the club’s members.
Alliss, known as the BBC’s ‘voice of golf’, was speaking after a vote on accepting women into the club narrowly failed to achieve a two-thirds majority among members.
Only 64 per cent of patrons voted in favour of the proposal, after a group of mostly elderley members wrote an open letter complaining that female golfers played too slowly.
The R&A, golf's ruling authority, subsequently dropped Muirfield as a host of The Open Championship, claiming it would no longer stage its flagship event "at a venue that does not admit women as members".
Alliss, who has previously provoke controversy with his views on women in the sport, told BBC Radio Five Live: "The women who are there as wives of husbands, they get all the facilities."
"If somebody wants to join, well you'd better get married to somebody who's a member.
"I believe clubs were formed years ago by people of like spirit: doctors, lawyers, accountants, bakers, butchers, whatever they like.
"And they joined in like spirit to talk amongst them and to do whatever. I want to join the WVS (Women's Voluntary Service) but unless I have a few bits and pieces nipped away on my body I'm not going to be able to get in."
If somebody wants to join, well you'd better get married to somebody who's a member.
Alliss, an 85-year-old former Ryder Cup player, added: "It's a very emotive subject. I don't think all the true facts have come out.
"I was at the Open Championship two or three years ago and I used to go in for a coffee every morning. There's a very nice drawing room in the clubhouse at Muirfield and it was full of ladies who were all chatting - 'Hello, Peter how are you doing?' - and me in my usual, jocular, quiet way suggested, 'What great times are coming, you'll be able to join the club'.
"And there was a look of horror on the faces of the ladies, ladies whose husbands were members, and I was met with 'Good Lord, no we don't want to be members. If we joined, our husbands would have to pay thousands of pounds for our entry fee and our subscriptions. We can come and play and do pretty much what we wish for nothing'."
In an interview with the Radio Times last year, Alliss claimed that golf's moves towards greater equality has 'b****red up the game for a lot of people.'
The BBC was also forced to apologise for comments made by Alliss during coverage of last year's Open Championship at St Andrews, after he speculated how Kim Barclay, the wife of winner Zach Johnson, would spend the prize money. “She is probably thinking – ‘if this goes in I get a new kitchen,’” he said.
Additional reporting by PA
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