J ust over a week ago, Wigan Athletic footballer Marlon King was given 18 months in jail for breaking a woman's nose in a London bar. Last week the Supreme Court ruled that Portmarnock Golf Club are entitled to continue excluding women from membership.

There's more than one way of slapping down a woman. Marlon King takes the literal route. Out in Portmarnock, they favour a more symbolic approach.

The two events are connected because Marlon King and the male members of Portmarnock Golf Club are to some extent moved by the same spirit, a spirit of stupid, unthinking and unreconstructed male chauvinism that still lurks around sport when it has been largely banished from other areas of life.

Someone asked me last week why there was such a fuss about Donal Og Cusack's revelation of his homosexuality. They pointed out that there wouldn't have been such a big deal about a gay artist, musician, writer, television presenter or actor having done the same thing.

They were right. But the fact remains that Donal Og's coming out was so brave because it's so rare for gay sportsmen to declare themselves. It is so rare because sport is the last great redoubt of conservative macho bullshit, the final hiding place for Caveman Values.

It pains me to say that because I love sport. But it's true. At big boxing matches you have the unfortunate round girls who strut round the ring in their poor man's Playboy Mansion costumes to the accompaniment of leers and jeers. The all-male sportsman's dinner where some has-been cracks a few sexist jokes while remembering the glorious career which has left him having to do this for a living is still something of an English institution.

Remember Luton Town manager Mike Newell's declaration three years ago that all women officials should be banned from the game of soccer? "She shouldn't be here. I know that sounds sexist but I am sexist. This is not park football, so what are women doing here?" said Newell, who is currently unemployed having been sacked by first Luton and then Grimsby Town. The official who incurred his wrath, Amy Rayner, is still refereeing.

When Jacqui Oatley became the first woman to commentate on Match of the Day, the torrent of macho guff included the comment from former Wimbledon manager Dave Bassett, "I am totally against it and everyone I know in football is totally against it . . . when she is commentating at the weekend I will not be watching."

And what about these comments made by American tennis player Justin Gimelstob about Anna Kournikova? "She's a bitch . . . I wouldn't mind having my younger brother, who's a kind of stud, nail her and then reap the benefits of that. She has a great body but her face is a five." This guy was a member of the board of tennis's world governing body the Association of Tennis Professionals when he made that comment. He still is. Nobody thought the remarks were serious enough to threaten his position.

Tony Zappia, CEO of the Australian rugby league club Cronulla Sharks, wasn't quite so lucky back in June when he was sacked for his mistreatment of a female club employee. Mind you, in order to get sacked he did have to give a woman a black eye, ask her to spank him and show her a pornographic email.

We in the media aren't blameless. Witness the suggestion by Australian rules commentator Danny Frawley that Jacquelin Magnay of the Sydney Morning Herald, one of the country's best sports journalists, should "get home and wash the dishes where you should be." And no major soccer tournament goes by without some bright spark of a news or sports editor thinking how wonderful it would be to have a female reporter do a feature on the 10 sexiest footballers who score for her every time.

The problem with all this pathetic bluster is that it provides an underpinning for more sinister assumptions. The story of professional footballers and women is a grisly one, a 'roasting' incident here, a rape allegation there, an apparent predilection among some exponents of the beautiful game to see all women as existing solely to service their needs.

Before Marlon King landed the punch which broke the nose of his five foot nothing victim, he had groped her repeatedly and told her, "I'm a millionaire." He's merely the most extreme example of an attitude which has landed footballers in unsavoury situations before and will do so again. The real victims, of course, will be the women involved, none of whom will be millionaires.

You could see all this as sport merely reflecting the sexism of wider society. Or you could see sport as being one area where this sort of nonsense remains indulged.

Marlon King felt that declaring his wealth and dropping the hand would get him what he wanted, and lost the head when that didn't happen. A man who does this kind of thing is driven by a notion of female inferiority. And it is precisely this sort of notion which lies behind the exclusion of women from Portmarnock Golf Club.

Because the most interesting question behind the behaviour of the men of Portmarnock GC is not: are they entitled to do it by law? It is: why do they want to do it? It's a question they have never answered, other than to emit some mumbles about always having done things that way. Of course that's not an answer. It merely begs the question: why have you always done things that way?

A long time ago, RTE Radio sent a reporter out to the last pub in Dublin which refused to serve women. If my memory serves me correctly, it was somewhere in the Liberties. The guy who ran the place was crafty enough. He took the Portmarnock Golf Club approach, he was very fond of women himself, this was just the tradition of the place, nothing against women at all, it was merely how they did business etc etc.

The boys in the bar, on the other hand, told the truth. They came to the pub to get away from women, they told the reporter. Women, they'd have your head annoyed with their blah blah, yap yap yap, women were nothing only a pain in the arse in a pub. Those highly-paid doctors and solicitors who patronise Portmarnock GC, when they're not busy patronising the rest of us, would be horrified to think they had anything in common with a thug like Marlon King or with some working-class boozers. Yet their cosy little club also privileges the idea that women are not on the same level as men. They are an encumbrance, an annoyance, a distraction from whom a refuge must be provided. This woman-hating refuge is Portmarnock Golf Club.

The members of that club, who no doubt regard themselves as being among the best and the brightest in Irish society, are in reality the most ignorant people in the country. Because the most remote rural GAA club or the most poverty-stricken inner city soccer club would not bar women from membership. It wouldn't even occur to the men there. They wouldn't be stupid enough.

Things are different in Portmarnock, in that sad single-sex enclave out there by the sea. Personally, I'd sooner join a leper colony.

thephotograph@hotmail.com

Sunday Independent