http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/sports/golf/y10hootie.html
Public and Private Distinctions
By David M. Halbfinger
AUGUSTA, Ga., April 9 - Just because a man is called Hootie, his friends say, does not mean he is a backwoods bumpkin.
Just because he insists that his golf club bar women from belonging does not, they say, make him a backward-thinking bigot.
William Johnson, the 72-year-old chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, has endured a lifetime's worth of ridicule in the nine months since he angrily rejected a demand that he admit women in time for this year's Masters, the nation's most prestigious golf tournament, which is to begin here on Thursday
"There may well come a day when women will be invited to join our membership," he thundered last July, "but that timetable will be ours, and not at the point of a bayonet."
His defiance won Johnson a fusillade of criticism, in countless and continuing headlines, punch lines and cartoons, as a benighted holdover from the Old South. But a look at his history - as a South Carolina banker and power broker who long helped blacks and women advance in business and politics - paints a more complex picture of a man who is often portrayed in caricature.
So as feminists protest outside Augusta's gates, as antifeminists and white supremacists muster their unsolicited support for Johnson's stand, as golfers and their fans and police officers watch the spectacle unfold, some of those who have known Johnson for decades say they wonder whether it all could have been avoided. What if Martha Burk, the chairwoman of the National Council of Women's Organizations, had chosen to approach Johnson without setting a deadline?
Hootie Johnson, say those people - black and white, male and female - was long known as one of the most progressive, forward-thinking white businessmen to come out of his time and place. He just does not like to be pushed.
But others say Johnson may have finally come face to face with the contradictions of a life in which he stood for equal opportunity in the public sphere at a time when many did not, yet was also at ease belonging to private clubs where South Carolina's white male elite met without blacks or Jews or women.
"He was always comfortable going both ways," said Joel A. Smith, dean of the Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. "Like believing in the right to have some privacy - but in his public persona, his business persona, he thought everybody ought to have an equal shot."
The dispute over Augusta National - a private club that is host to a very public event - left him no room to finesse the distinction any more, say Johnson's friends.
Johnson, who declined to be interviewed, is as old as the golf course over whose elegant curves and greens he has presided since 1998.
William Woodward Johnson was born here in 1931, the same year that Bobby Jones broke ground on the course. At 5, a playmate called him Hootie and the name stuck. By 8, he was golfing with his father, an Augusta banker and golf lover named Dewey Johnson, at a country club next door to Augusta National. It would be 29 years before he won admission to Augusta National himself.
The Johnsons moved north to Greenwood, S.C., in 1942, when Dewey bought a small bank there and started dreaming of a statewide financial empire. But Hootie kept an eye on Augusta: in 1946, the story goes, five years before they married, he hoisted his girlfriend, Pierrine Baker, up in the air so she could see the great Ben Hogan three-putt on the 18th hole and lose the Masters by a single stroke to Herman Keiser.
Still, football, not golf, was Hootie's sport. At Greenwood High School, he and another running back, Sonny Horton, were dubbed Touchdowns Inc. At the University of South Carolina, he eventually became a star again, this time on the strength of his blocking.
Three years after graduating, at age 25, Johnson was elected to the South Carolina General Assembly. He served one term. "He was just there to get an exposure to it," said the former Gov. Robert McNair, then a ranking lawmaker, who took Johnson in tow at the Capitol and remains Johnson's lawyer and confidant.
Dewey Johnson died in 1961, and in 1965 Hootie took over the bank, which had expanded into Columbia, S.C., from his brother, who busied himself with a family textile mill. The state's youngest bank president, Johnson began romancing and acquiring smaller banks across the state.
Though he had left the Assembly, Johnson had not left politics. He just worked behind the scenes. In 1968, after three students at all-black South Carolina State College were shot in a confrontation with the police that became known as the Orangeburg Massacre, Johnson and four other white businessmen joined the Urban League chapter in Columbia. "That was a courageous move," said Elliott Franks, then the chapter's president.
Johnson also agreed to head the campaign committees for two black candidates who became the first elected to the State Legislature since 1902. "I remember him laughing about how every morning he was hearing commercials for all the black candidates, with the line, 'Hootie Johnson, chairman,' " McNair said. "It was constantly on the TV."
John West, now 80, who was McNair's lieutenant governor and successor, said Johnson "recognized early on, and was one of the few white leaders that did, that we needed to heal the breaches, to involve the blacks in the business and political world."
West added, "He not only did it but became a leader in it."
It was as a banker, however, that Johnson really made his name for promoting equality. Franks said Johnson set up a training program to hire black women as tellers and entry-level workers at what was then the State Bank & Trust Company of South Carolina. "Then Hootie used his influence to bring the majority of other banks in the city into it," Franks said. "He just said to me, as long as we're about business, no hidden agendas, everything out in the open, I'm with you and I'll do whatever I can."
Cynthia Engel, an accountant who worked at Bankers Trust of South Carolina, a later iteration of Johnson's bank, said she sought a job there in 1985 because "he promoted women when it was unheard of." She added, "I used to joke around that Hootie was always politically correct before it was politically correct to be politically correct."
Johnson's bank enforced community service in a variety of ways. He deducted donations to the United Way from employee paychecks. He sent bank officers to all-black Benedict College, where he was a trustee, to help administrators sort out their financial problems at no charge. Bill Stevens remembered being told to take care of a black minister's church loan.
"We always believed that Hootie always did the right thing," said Stevens, now president of his own bank in Greenwood. "He was so big and powerful, but still so concerned about a trainee who just came back from the Navy that he took me to lunch. He could've had lunch with the governor. He's like steel and velvet. That's my ideal of a man."
Ike Williams, who ran the South Carolina N.A.A.C.P. from 1969 to 1983, said Johnson "helped make it fashionable to contribute to the N.A.A.C.P.," and credited him with helping sway public opinion in Columbia in favor of a new method of electing City Council members that paved the way for blacks to win. In 1993, when a group of businessmen led by McNair mounted a legal effort to remove the Confederate battle flag from atop the state Capitol, Johnson was instrumental in lining up potential plaintiffs to force the issue, Richard Gergel, the lawyer who filed the suit, said.
Many of Johnson's friends look back at this history and, bewildered by his recent actions, accuse Burk of provoking him in her letter last June by asking that Augusta National admit women by this year's Masters.
"You don't give him a deadline," Stevens said. "That's like spitting in his face."
But Johnson has also had his limits and has defined over the years just how far he was willing to go. He agonized before accepting an invitation to serve on the board of the National Urban League, Franks said. And his term was brief. One official of the group said Johnson resigned quietly after Vernon E. Jordan Jr., the league's president, took a public stand in the 1970's that was "too strong for Hootie to live with."
"He was concerned about these issues in a very moderate way," the official said. "He was basically a peacekeeper. He was not at the cutting edge."
He also made accommodations that some others would not. His many years in the inner circle of the South Carolina Democratic Party came to an end in 1978, after he refused to support the Democratic challenger to Senator Strom Thurmond, the Republican incumbent, who many years earlier had run on a segregationist presidential platform.
"The Democrats tried to pressure him," recalled West, the former governor. "So he said, 'The hell with you,' and became an independent."
He has also felt comfortable with membership in exclusive clubs like the once all-white Palmetto Club, or the all-white Forest Lake, which until recently had no Jews. He has been zealous about protecting the rights of such clubs to run their own way - and about rejecting what he sees as ill-mannered assaults.
The story is often told in Columbia about how a major customer of Johnson's bank demanded admission to the Summit Club, a private club Johnson had formed at the top of the headquarters tower he had built for his bank. "Hootie said he would be happy to get him on the wait list," said Smith, then a top officer at the bank. "The guy said: 'I'm not talking about the wait list, I want to be a member today. Surely you could bump one of your junior officers and give me his membership.' And Hootie says, 'I think we've concluded our business.' "
Smith says he remains close to Johnson, and ventures a theory that Johnson sees a distinction between public and private life that has allowed him to break down barriers in one while living with them in the other.
"His sense of timing may not be the same as everybody else's," Smith said.
"Look at him from what he's done over a lifetime," Smith added, "and at times he's been way ahead of the curve, to the point that people were taken aback - and at times he wasn't. But he probably knows who he is better than anybody I've ever met."
it would have been my first time at augusta national. 
we should hopefully see some sun tomorrow evening at 7PM 
oh well the azaleas and dogwoods are in full bloom, no doubt that the course will look magnificent, it always does. 
oh well better luck next time.
the south at its best.
Golf. 
