• Ryder Cup

Is it time women were allowed to play in the Ryder Cup?

Michelle Wie, as one America's best women golfers, could potentially benefit from Ryder Cup equality © Getty Images

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Here's one of those little truths you learn about life: you can't have it every way. It seems even golf is beginning to come to terms with that. The sport wants two incompatible things: to be exactly as it always has been and to enjoy all the advantages of the 21st century.

Golf is coming up to one of those rare weekends when it stands on top of the sporting agenda in quite a lot of the sporting world, for on Friday the Ryder Cup begins: three days of high tension with a 50-50 mixture of inspiration and disintegration, a format that makes stars of journeymen and vice-versa.

The Ryder Cup began as a golfing competition between United States and Great Britain but it dispensed with tradition and brought in a team to represent all of Europe in 1979. Reality could no longer be avoided and since then the competition has actually been competitive … and golf in Britain accidentally became a bit less insular.

So even golf can change - slowly, and more reluctantly than any other sport in the calendar. Last week the Royal and Ancient Golf Club made a revolutionary decision. They held a vote, open to all their - exclusively male - members, and they decided that they would, after 260 years of existence, allow women to join the club. The R&A will be hosting the Open at their St Andrews course next year: now, praise the Lord, they will do so without the royal and ancient debate about male-exclusivity.

It's the Olympics what done it. The 2012 Olympic Games were the first in which every participating nation had female athletes. Britain had gold medals from female athletes in rowing, cycling, track and field, boxing, taekwondo and equestrianism. Now, after years of lobbying, golf will be an Olympic sport in Rio in 2016. There will be two gold medals on offer: one for men and another, worth just the same, for women.

Olympic golf is a vision founded on money: Tiger Woods striding down the 18th fairway at the Olympic Games in Rio with a one-shot lead and all in the same time-zone as the East Coast of the United States. What advertiser could resist?

Of course, post-hydrant Woods is no longer quite such a tiger, but it's too late now. Golf is part of the Olympics and as a result, it is committed to Olympic conditions of equality.

It's fascinating to wonder where this will lead. The template for sporting equality is Wimbledon, where male and female athletes perform at the same place at the same time for equal prize-money in both single-sex and mixed competitions. At every track and field meet, men and women compete on the same track and with one or two exceptions, the same events. In the horsey sports men and women routinely compete against each other.

Shared events are catching on: the men's and women's cricket T20 World Cup was held more or less simultaneously in Bangladesh earlier this year. There is scope, then, to bring the men's and women's games closer in golf. A mixed Ryder Cup? Well, a bit early for that. The suggestion will outrage traditionalists, and there aren't many other kinds of golfer.

Women have their own Solheim Cup competition, but that's not exactly the point. After all, at track and field meets, and for that matter, in an Olympic medals table, the scores of men and women are added together to make the total. Why not do this in golf?

Women have the Solheim Cup - but it could be a long time before a mixed Ryder Cup is introduced, if at all © Getty Images

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In 260 years it may well be a no-brainer what-took-you-so-long issue. But you don't have to be a raving cynic to suggest that changes will happen not when people think it's fair and right and proper, but when people believe there's a financial reason for doing it.

HSBC, like all major public concerns, are concerned about image. They have done a lot of stuff in golf - very conspicuously in women's golf - to the profit of both. But Giles Morgan, HSBC's head of global sponsorship, said that a major golf tournament under their sponsorship at a men-only golf club was "a very uneasy position for the bank."

In other words, the image of golf was affecting the image of the bank adversely: banks have female depositors and top businesses have women in the boardroom. HSBC don't want association with an image from a PG Wodehouse story about old buffers in the clubhouse arguing about their niblicks far away from the ladies, God bless'em.

It was not reforming zeal but commonsense, sometimes known as self-interest, that pushed the change through at the R&A. Muirfield and Royal St George are still wondering they can get away without going the same way and will soon be concluding that they really can't. If you want major sponsors and if you want the Olympic Games, the price is women.

Why would any man want to be part of organisation that denied him female company? A few months back I met Anna Watkins, the Olympic gold medal sculler who is currently studying for a PhD in mathematics. We talked about the relationship between mathematics and sport: she told about what's left when a great athlete runs out of maths. I wouldn't want to be part of any sporting organisation that didn't welcome such a person.

By coming into the Olympic Games, golf has asked to belong to the same club as Watkins, and so golf must make a few a concessions in order to become, as it were, Watkins-worthy. There's also the fact that when women climb Everest and rule countries and do brain surgery, you look a bit silly if you don't let them hit a little ball with a stick.

Simon Barnes was Chief Sports Writer at The Times and UK Sports Columnist of the Year in 2001 and 2007. He writes about a wide variety of sports for ESPN.co.uk, as well as ESPNFC.com and ESPNcricinfo. He has written more than 20 books including The Meaning of Sport and three novels. On Twitter he is @simonbarneswild

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