Lead Balloon Ep. 67 - Coca-Cola's Master's Tournament Sponsorship Triggers 2002 Boycott Threat, with Ben Deutsch and Dr. Martha Burk

When women's rights activists take aim at a last-bastion boy's club, Coke has to navigate a Public Relations lose-lose.

Home to the Masters Tournament, the Augusta National Golf Club typically serves as a backdrop for sports drama.

Former Coca-Cola Comms VP Ben Deutsch

But in 2002, the club itself became the story, as its men-only membership policy came under the microscope in an unexpected and sensational showdown between women's rights activists and the club's defiant adherence to "tradition."

The tale of how the conflict came to a head is an unlikely Public Relations parable in its own right, driven by two iconoclasts of their era: Augusta National chair Hootie Johnson and Dr. Martha Burk, the chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations.

And, as a signature sponsor of the Masters Tournament, Coca-Cola had to thread the PR needle, trying to land on the right side of history without alienating the powerful Augusta National Golf Club, the pro golf establishment and all of their supporters.

In this remastered episode, retired Coca-Cola Vice President of Communications Ben Deutsch shares his recollection of the showdown, and Dr. Martha Burk explains how she orchestrated an effective pressure campaign against Masters Tournament sponsors and Augusta National members.

Transcript:

Dusty Weis:

In its 90th edition when it tees off next week, the Masters Tournament of golf is an event steeped in solemn pomp, dignified ceremony and rich history. With a coveted green jacket on the line, the event has been a showcase of some of the world's finest golfers since 1934. Names like Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer have crossed the threshold from champion to legend on the lush rolling vales of the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia.

News Reporter:

In your life, have you seen anything like that?

Dusty Weis:

The club typically only serves as the backdrop for the drama playing out on its 18 holes. For the club to be the story itself, the source of the drama? Well, if you're a signature event sponsor, that kind of situation is less than ideal.

Ben Deutsch:

We were being positioned as an organization supporting what, at this time, was discrimination of women.

Dusty Weis:

Ben Deutsch is the former vice president of communications at the Coca-Cola Company. And in 2002, he was the brand's global media relations manager when Coke's partnership with the Masters was thrust under intense scrutiny over Augusta National Golf Club's discriminatory membership practices.

Dr. Martha Burk:

I said, "By the way, there's this little golf club and they don't allow women. Why don't we write them a letter?"

Dusty Weis:

Dr. Martha Burk was the chair of the National Council of Women's Organizations. Her plaintive letter of protest would not have made waves in the world of golf, except the chair of the Augusta National Golf Club chose to respond to it publicly, in a scathing open letter that catapulted the issue to the cable news A-block and turned Martha Burk into a household name. And, the event sponsors like Coca-Cola found themselves stuck between a worthy cause and the inertia of tradition, with no easy answers in sight.

I'm Dusty Weis from Podcamp Media. This is Lead Balloon, a podcast about notable tales from the worlds of PR, marketing and branding… told by the well-meaning communications professionals who lived them.

Dusty Weis:

Thank you for tuning in. This is a show where we pull back the veil on the ways that we message and tell stories in our society. And we’ve been doing that for QUITE a while now. So much so that we’ve gotten a lot better at doing it in the six years since we launched.

This episode originally aired five years ago. But with the Masters coming up next week, and the fact that it’s an awesome, little-known story, it seemed like an opportune moment to dig it up… dust it off… and apply an extra layer of awesome.

Because as epic as this story is… and talking to someone as high-profile as the former global VP of comms at Coca-Cola… I won’t lie, I actually had to rush this one through post-production to meet deadline because we were very busy when it dropped.

The other thing I deeply regret is that I interviewed Dr. Martha Burke over the phone. That may be the last phone interview I ever did, actually, because the audio quality is bad and there are virtual options to obtain better quality audio.

Fortunately, in 2026, there are also ways to moderately upscale the quality of bad audio.

And that is going to make it a lot more fun for you to meet Dr. Martha Burk, a proud feminist and activist… who in 2002 was the chair of the National Council of Women's Organizations.

When we talked to her five years ago, she was pushing 80 but still an unstoppable force and far from retired.

And looking back, she could not believe that this story played out like it did.

Dr. Martha Burk:

I was on a plane one day, and I saw an article by a female sports writer, Christine Brennan was her name, she was a writer for USA Today, about this golf club that did not allow women.

And knowing it was very prominent, she was writing about that and how difficult it was not only with them in terms of women members, but women members of the press and so forth. I thought this is something that we should probably take note of.

And about a month later, in our board meeting, I mentioned it to the board. I said, "By the way, there's this little golf club and they don't allow women. Why don't we write them a letter and encourage them to open their membership to women." It was just a very almost throwaway agenda item, I don't think we even voted on that. I think, as I recall, we were picking up our papers ready to leave when it came up and they just said, "Oh fine, write them a letter," so I did.

And the chair of the club, this guy named Hootie Johnson...

Hootie Johnson:

I'm Hootie Johnson, chairman of Augusta National Golf Club. We sure hope you enjoyed the Masters Tournament.

Dusty Weis:

That is banking magnate and former South Carolina state representative Hootie Johnson. Don't be fooled by that folksy, pastoral air. Hootie Johnson would be assuming the role of immovable object in this drama. As chair of Augusta National Golf Club, he responded publicly to Dr. Burk's firmly-worded letter with a statement of his own.

In the second graf of its July 8th, 2002 story about the exchange, the Associated Press described Johnson's response as "a surprisingly long and angry statement."

Dr. Martha Burk:

He just went ballistic in the press and sent them a three-page letter/press release saying he would not be held at the point of a bayonet and all this sort of thing.

Dusty Weis:

The point of a bayonet?

Dr. Martha Burk:

Absolutely.

Dusty Weis:

Now, the appropriate irony here is that, according to Dr. Burk, if Augusta National had just responded privately to her letter, or even ignored it entirely, there probably wouldn't have been any coverage of it. Instead, it became a national sensation almost overnight.

Dr. Martha Burk:

The first call I got was from Doug Ferguson, who's an Associated Press golf writer. And he said, "What do you think about Hootie Johnson's letter?" I said, "What letter? I haven't seen it." He read it to me over the phone, the guy had sent it to every golf press in the country if not the world. And it just blew up into a national controversy, which played out over a year.

Dusty Weis:

Now, I want to explore that controversy with you but I think it's worth restating here, because what I'm hearing from you is that, when you were first just strategizing this effort, it wasn't meant to be a big headline-grabbing affair, you were just writing a letter.

Dr. Martha Burk:

Exactly. First of all, we thought we might be dealing with reasonable people and that educated us right away. So no, it was a minor thing to us, very minor as I said, because we worked on Capitol Hill. What we were trying to do was what I would consider the much bigger issues, like pay equity, like better social security, childcare, violence against women. All of those things were front and center on our agenda. And something like this was indeed very minor, and we just thought we might could push things along. We had no idea it was going to blow up like it did.

Dusty Weis:

Why, then, do you think did Hootie Johnson, the chair at Augusta National, publish that letter and essentially vilify you personally, making what he considered an attack a centerpiece of his defense of the practices at Augusta National?

Dr. Martha Burk:

Well, I think he thought he would just crush the little lady. But what he did not realize is that I was five minutes from every national network, and I at that time was known to the press because I appeared on national television, probably a couple times a month, on different shows about different issues affecting women so they knew where to find me. He was stuck down there in Georgia, and he didn't realize, I guess, what he was taking on.

Dusty Weis:

Of course, it's probably fair to say that Martha Burk and her side weren't aware, at first, just how big a fight they had waded into as well. But in 2002, it quickly became clear that, for both sides in the argument, this controversy was about so much more than allowing women to join the Augusta National Golf Club.

Now, I'll point out here that, throughout its 93-year history, the membership practices at Augusta National have been intentionally steeped in mystery.

No one really knows how many members there are, though it's said to be around 300-ish. Membership is by invite only, and it's limited to the most powerful executives at the largest companies and the most prominent politicians in the U.S.

Accordingly, an invitation to membership is, by its very nature, a potent tool for advancement and influence.

And as Dr. Burk noted in an interview with CNN in 2002, if women weren't allowed as members, that made Augusta National symbolic of the very highest, very most pernicious glass ceiling.

Dr. Martha Burk:

It's discrimination. It's not golf, it's not one woman on one golf course, it's, why is it all right, in the 21st Century, to discriminate against women, to defend it, and for the CEOs of America's largest corporations to belong to a club that excludes half their customers.

Dusty Weis:

Conversely, Hootie Johnson, Augusta National, and much of the golf establishment didn't stake their argument in a defense of discrimination against women. Rather, they hunkered down behind what I like to call the "you're not the boss of me" defense.

Indeed, the full context of that quote about bayonets lays the groundwork for this.

In his open letter to Martha Burk, Hootie Johnson had written, "There may well come a day when women will be invited to join our membership, but that timetable will be ours and not at the point of a bayonet."

Hootie Johnson:

It's just a natural thing. It's just been going on for centuries and centuries, men like to get together with men every now and then, and women like to get together with women every now and then. And, that's just a simple fact of life in America.

I do want to make one point, though. It's not my issue alone, and I promise you what I'm saying, is if I drop dead this second, our position will not change.

Ben Deutsch:

The way they handled it in the press was pretty contentious.

Dusty Weis:

With Coca-Cola locked in as an event sponsor of the Masters Tournament at Augusta, Ben Deutsch says he watched the situation with dread as it unraveled nightly on the evening news.

Ben Deutsch:

It was a very aggressive stance by Augusta National.

Dusty Weis:

Hootie Johnson had a reputation as a bit of a scrapper, essentially.

Ben Deutsch:

And, so it was obviously, we found ourselves squarely in the middle of this.

Dusty Weis:

What makes this story such a nightmare from a public relations perspective is that Ben Deutsch and the entire Coca-Cola brand, they were just caught in the middle of a fight they didn't pick… just the latest in a string of agonizingly bad luck for the company during his tenure there.

Ben had started at Coke in a sports PR role about a decade earlier, but then was volun-told he would be transitioning to a global media relations right around the turn of the century.

During that transition, the brand was stumbling through a European health scare and a whistleblower scandal. And, in the summer 2002, the last thing on Ben's radar was the men-only membership policy of the Augusta National Golf Club.

But it was about to become the biggest crisis on his plate, since Coke was a presenting sponsor of the Masters Tournament of Golf… which has ONLY ever been held at Augusta National.

Ben Deutsch:

Keep in mind, during that time, the Masters only had three sponsors. It was Citi Group, Coke and IBM. And, the pressure was first brought against the membership, and then smartly Martha Burk then brought in the sponsors and exerted some pressure on us. And there were a number of threats for boycotts of our products, and women's organizations were starting to rally around it.

As you can imagine a consumer brand like Coke, how important it is for us to obviously have a spotless reputation as it relates to any kind of issue, but certainly one in which, at the time, women, they were one of the top consumers of our products, in terms of the purchase of the product, the purchasing it for the family, et cetera. It was so important for us, obviously, such an important concern for us, that we were being positioned as an organization supporting what, at this time, was discrimination of women.

I went back and looked at some of the statements that we gave and I think our first statement ... Again, keep in mind this is in the early 2000s, I think it was 2002 you said. Our first statement was, "It would be inappropriate for us to comment on the membership of Augusta National, a private club."

Well, think about how that would play out today.

Dusty Weis:

How do you feel looking back on that right now?

Ben Deutsch:

Oh my God, I can't even ... In fact, I forgot that that's how ... It's been so long, I just assumed that we had something that was a little more critical of the situation and when I read that I thought, "Wow, that really surprised me that’s what we ended up saying." Of course, it's attributed to me. Again, a lot of these things, as I've told you, I've tried to block them out of my memory. I've been pretty good at that.

That was how we first handled it. And then, we knew that this was not a sustainable situation for us. I remember going to our business, our sports marketing folks and just saying, "Guys, Augusta National needs to do something about this."

Dusty Weis:

Ben Deutsch knew that Coke needed to be on the right side of this issue, but getting there was going to be an act of delicate needle threading because, from a PR perspective, they were in a bad spot. To be seen as supporting discrimination against women was bad for the company. But also, to alienate Augusta National, the pro golf establishment and all of their supporters—that was also bad for the company.

So, coming up after the break… Martha Burk takes her attack to a whole other level…

Martha Burk:

So I called the golf money writer for USA Today, a guy named Mike McCarthy, and I said, “I’ve got a list. Would you like to have it?”

Dusty Weis:

And Ben Deutsch and Coke have a tough talk with the Augusta National Golf Club.

Ben Deutsch:

I’ll never forget. The response back to us was, “Don’t worry, we’ve got it covered.”

Dusty Weis:

That’s all coming up in a moment, here on Lead Balloon.

Dusty Weis:

This is Lead Balloon, and I’m Dusty Weis.

It was a new millennium in 2002… but one of the most storied, prominent golf clubs in the world still did not admit women as members.

Getting an invite to Augusta National Golf Club was an opportunity to hobnob with some of the richest and most influential people in the world. Keeping women out was essentially denying them the world-class professional networking opportunities the club afforded its all-male membership.

And for Dr. Martha Burk, feminist, activist and chair of the National Council of Women's Organizations, what had started as a quick written jab at an organization she really didn’t care about had become the de facto moral showdown between those who felt sex discrimination should be abolished in the new century and those who would still defend it.

With no less than their existential mission at stake, the National Council of Women's Organizations ratcheted up its pressure campaign on event sponsors like Coca-Cola and anyone else with a financial stake in maintaining a presentable public image.

Dr. Martha Burk:

Public pressure, even after a few days, was starting to build and the companies involved, and there were many... It was a membership of 300 people, mainly CEOs of large companies. So they were struggling with what to do. They didn't want to drop their membership, they didn't want to make Hootie mad.

But, they were getting pretty bad press at that point and, as I said, this was a news story, it was kind of juicy, so I was all over it.

A lot of the members weren't known for a long time, several months into this controversy. Coca-Cola, obviously being a sponsor, they were known.

But then, I got an anonymous fax that just said members at the top and it had all their names. I didn't know most of these names because I didn't swim in those circles, I didn't know who were the corporate leaders of the world really. So I called the golf money writer for USA Today, a guy named Mike McCarthy, and I said, "I got a list. Would you like to have it?" Well, yeah.

So USA Today, of course, had the resources to research it. It came out with a teaser on A1, front page of the Sports section, "Who are these guys? Well, here they are." They were all outed.

Dusty Weis:

Who do you think sent you that list? Did you ever find out?

Dr. Martha Burk:

I found out years later, and I don't remember the individual's name, he was not a well-known person. But he sent the list and it was his ex-wife's father was a member. I figured that, in the divorce, he somehow spirited away the list, I don't know, maybe it was a bitter divorce.

Dusty Weis:

Did it feel to you, in the moment, like you were on the cusp of history?

Dr. Martha Burk:

Hell yes. That's the short answer. Yeah. And believe me, I got lot of death threats. When I went down there to protest, I was in a bulletproof vest, and I had hired bodyguards. That's how passionate some of the anti-women people were. So yeah, I think it was groundbreaking in terms of not only taking on the corporate sponsors, but 300 corporations that the CEOs were members.

Dusty Weis:

So as Martha Burk and the National Council of Women's Organizations gained ground in the court of public opinion, Ben Deutsch and the PR team at Coca-Cola were fighting their own battle behind-the-scenes.

As one of only three signature event sponsors of the Masters Tournament at Augusta National, their continued sponsorship of the event—or their decision to cancel that sponsorship—was going to tick off a massive segment of the population either way.

As Coke’s then-media relations manager, Ben and his team were tasked with finding a solution that cost Coke as few paying customers as possible and still put the brand on the right side of history.

Ben Deutsch:

The first move is to have Augusta National basically fix the problem, so that’s what our first discussions with Augusta was, "Guys, we really need you to help resolve this. We need to you to take a position, to take an action, to engage in discussion," blah, blah, whatever it may be.

Dusty Weis:

This is interesting to me, because this is a process that plays out very often behind-the-scenes, away from the public limelight. But here, we have a company like Coca-Cola looking at a situation and saying, "Oh, this is a thing that we don't support personally, that we don't support as an organization." But rather than come right out and condemn it vocally, you were using your influence to try to effect change behind-the-scenes. That's not something that the public is always aware of when it's happening, but you saw that there was an issue and you wanted to be on the right side of it.

Ben Deutsch:

Right. Like I said, that seemed to be the first really move for us, and if the situation doesn't get remedied that way then we would be in a position where we would need to make a decision, and make a choice.

We went to Augusta and said, "Guys, we need you to manage this because we are in a position where we're getting criticized and there are a number of threats of boycott."

I'll never forget the response back to us was, "Don't worry, we'll handle it." But yet, this still was going on for, I think it was a two or three month period. It was getting to a point where we were getting very concerned. I know we went out and had another discussion with Augusta, and the sponsors reached out to them, and Augusta told the sponsors that, "Don't worry, we've got it covered."

Ben Deutsch:

The next morning, we were notified maybe an hour before the press release went out by Augusta National, that they were putting out an announcement. That announcement essentially was to go sponsor-free, that the 2003 Masters was going to be sponsor-free.

I think Hootie Johnson's quote in there was something to the effect that, "We felt it was unfair to put the Masters media sponsors in a position of dealing with this pressure. It's not their fight, it's ours."

That's how it got resolved. Or, that's how it got resolved from Coke's perspective, and the other two sponsors.

Dusty Weis:

I imagine that you felt quite a bit of relief when that happened because what other moves did you have at your disposal?

Ben Deutsch:

I would describe it as disbelief, because nowhere in any scenario would any sponsor ever have expected that to be the outcome.

But, our only lever was to decide, in some form or fashion, to suspend our sponsorship of the Masters. That would have been the only lever we had left. It was very clear that that was it.

We certainly didn't want to do that, but I'm quite certain had we been put in a position where we felt like that was the only way for us to resolve this, we would have done that.

I think about how a scenario like that one would play out today, and I think there would be an incredibly quick decision made by the Coca-Cola Company, or any brand today, how it would have been handled and that would have been to walk away from the sponsorship.

Dusty Weis:

Possibly in a matter of hours.

Ben Deutsch:

Correct, correct. Again, in that day, that was 2002, there was no social media at the time. Clearly, it was a different day as well. But, clearly when I think about how we'd handle something like that today, the right way to handle it would be to communicate to the organization, clearly understand whether or not they were going to do something to resolve it. If it was clear that that was going to take a long period of time, or that there wasn't a lot of interest, then it would be incumbent upon any sponsor to take the action of removing itself from that situation.

Dusty Weis:

Dr. Martha Burk was also caught off guard by the announcement that the Masters would not be accepting sponsorships for the 2003 tournament. A decision she describes from her perspective as "letting the sponsors off the hook."

Dr. Martha Burk:

They could just go quietly into that good night, so to speak, and blame it on Hootie. "That's fine, we just won't be a sponsor this year," and hope it all would blow over, which it didn't until after the tournament and then it slowly dropped out of the news.

Dusty Weis:

The controversy didn't end there for Dr. Burk. She organized a high-profile protest of the now sponsor-less 2003 Masters Tournament. If you remember the news coverage of the event, it kind of took on a life of its own. There was an Elvis impersonator, a giant inflatable pig, even a Ku Klux Klan presence. But without any real resolution, the story eventually lost steam as the US went off to war in Iraq and news coverage moved on to other things.

Dr. Burk returned to her DC advocacy on behalf of larger issues in women's rights and Augusta National carried on with its own business as usual, until this day in 2012:

News Reporter:

Today, the biggest glass ceiling in sports was smashed. For their part, both former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina business executive Darla Moore were quite gracious today, as they broke into the boy's club, accepting their membership at Augusta National.

Dusty Weis:

ABC News with the coverage there. Yes, on his own terms, Hootie Johnson had stepped down from his membership chair at Augusta in 2006. Then in 2011, IBM had announced the appointment of its first female CEO, Ginni Rometty. And with previous IBM executives all having received membership invites to Augusta, and IBM's continued sponsorship of the Masters, speculation was rampant that Augusta would finally need to revisit the issue.

Dusty Weis:

And I've got to ask, when that day came, A, I imagine that your phone rang off the hook, but was that a gratifying moment for you?

Dr. Martha Burk:

It was let's say semi-gratifying. They waited long enough that they thought I would be out of the picture. But of course, I got a lot of calls and I said then and I will say now, because they let in two women, one a woman of color to their credit, yes. And, the one was Darla Moore, who's a good friend of Hootie's. It's now 2021. Guess how many female members they have? Three.

Dusty Weis:

Not long after, Hootie Johnson passed away in 2017. The first line in his obituary made mention of the Augusta National membership controversy.

And some folks will tell you that’s a shame, because there was a lot more to Hootie Johnson than that.

This is a guy who was an active campaigner for civil rights in his home state of South Carolina. Earlier in life, he fought for school desegregation, went out of his way to promote hiring diversity at his family's firms, and he was the first white Southerner to serve on the board of directors of the Urban League.

Was he wrong about women members at Augusta? Yeah. Does he deserve for that to be his legacy though? That’s more complicated, but it’s 35% of his Wikipedia page. Does he have anyone else to blame for that but himself for that? Probably not.

79 years old when we spoke, now aged 84, Dr. Martha Burk said she’s happy to have it as part of her legacy… but she noted that there's still work to be done on the subject of equal treatment for women.

Dr. Martha Burk:

I've always said this thing's going to be on my gravestone, it doesn't go away, but that's okay because it was an important thing. It was symbolic of how women are still and were then, discriminated both at work and at home, and there are a lot of things that we need that we still don't have.

Dusty Weis:

And when Ben Deutsch looks back at his quarter-century career at Coke, he sees the Augusta National controversy as a legacy moment as well.

Unlike Dr. Burk, his work to make change in an unfair world didn’t happen in front of the cameras.

As is often the case in a corporate setting, his job was to exert pressure behind the scenes, using financial influence… the real levers of power.

Ultimately, it wasn’t one or the other… but the combined influence of activists like Martha Burk and sponsors like Coca-Cola that forced Augusta National to change. It’s how real progress gets made, I would argue.

Though in 2026, with a Culture War pushback against anything upon which the now-pejorative label of DEI can be slapped, a lot of companies have started looking for ways to shirk their social responsibility.

But for Ben Deutsch, maneuvering the company through these and other travails was no less than a formative professional experience that ultimately set him up to serve as the company’s Vice President of Global Communications.

Ben Deutsch:

Coke was a pressure cooker, still is a pressure cooker, especially in communications. And four to five years, we were on our heels.

And, that prepared me in a way that seven to 10 years of maybe smooth sailing, or even a couple of bumps along the way, would have never prepared me.

I learned in the heat of the moment, and I think I'm grateful for that. I think that really prepared me to take on the responsibilities that I did.

Dusty Weis:

Ben Deutsch retired from Coke in 2017, and since then, he’s been living out my dream of going back to school as an adjunct faculty member. He’s executive-in-residence at the University of Georgia and teaches Corporate Communications at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

He’s a great follow on LinkedIn… and every year at this time, I look forward to the pictures he posts from the Masters Tournament of Golf at Augusta National Golf Club.

He and I spoke at length for this podcast, and he told many stories from his time at Coca-Cola… you can find those in the archives, episodes 18 and the second half of episode 19.

But I, for one, will sleep better knowing that I was able to do this story justice, finally, by remastering it and giving it its own spotlight.

Special thanks as well to Dr. Martha Burk for sharing her side of this story with me five years ago. Now 84 years old, she’s still working too. Still publishing, still advocating, and she even has her own weekly three-minute podcast wherein she opines about the news of the day. Check out her work at marthaburk.org.

Lead Balloon is produced by Podcamp Media, where we make podcasts for businesses. Our podcast studios are located in the heart of beautiful downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We work with brands all over North America to help them launch and build podcasts that work. Check out our website, PodcampMedia.com.

Music for this episode by Bellodrone, Clark Walker, Mateo Galesi and Snow Bones…

And until the next time, folks, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weis.