Golf but no softball big blunder for IOC

The Northwest Girls Softball League held its fall draft the past few days, and more than 800 players were distributed among nearly 80 teams.

It's a large number of girls, many who desire the opportunity to learn and grow and improve and play the game at its highest level.

Some surely dream of Olympic glory.

Sadly, they better have a backup sport.

A 15-member executive board of the International Olympic Committee recently recommended golf and seven-a-side rugby as two sports that should be added for the 2016 Games.

I like golf. I don't play well at all. Think of being awful at and yet thoroughly enjoying something -- that's me holding a club.

I don't like anything about golf in the Olympics.

It had no business being selected ahead of softball, which might have seen its quest to rejoin the Games end forever after being ousted for 2012 by one vote four years ago.

Softball will be gone for at least more than a decade and most likely much longer than those Northwest girls and thousands upon thousands of others like them across the country even will play the game.

Faces of women should be stinging everywhere today.

They all took quite a slap.

Golf is back in the Olympics for the first time since 1904 because Tiger Woods is the global star IOC members want to see and those running the Games are fighting depressive economic times like everyone else.

Tiger plus sponsorship dollars equals instant credibility and lots of cold, hard cash.

The decision doesn't reach one penny beyond this.

But the world's best player will be 40 in 2016, which even he has hinted might come after he is retired. Do you think Woods would play the Olympics in 2020 or 2024? Come on.

Moreover, golf in the Olympics becomes like tennis as just another tournament, not nearly important to those playing as major championships or the Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup.

Quick: In the next five seconds, name the men's and women's singles winners in tennis last year in Beijing. Thought so. Some couldn't do it in five years without the aid of a computer.

The Olympics to a softball player is the absolute pinnacle of her sport. A goal that girls strive years and years to achieve. The culmination of a lifetime's worth of hard work. Everything the Games are about.

Or should be.

You could make the argument that whoever wins the men's and women's gold medals in golf might leave directly from the Olympics to a PGA Tour or LPGA Tour event and feel better about competing in it because money is involved.

Professional golfers are like all athletes -- paychecks come first, and anyone who thinks otherwise is naive.

The Olympics also are foremost about inclusion, about welcoming the world's athletes of all colors and gender to one historic moment every four years. Which makes taking golf -- where two of the most prestigious clubs in the world (Augusta and The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews in Scotland) still don't allow female members -- as shortsighted as believing Woods will play in more than one Games, if that.

Seven-a-side rugby didn't even have a world championship for women until March, but an Olympic medal still likely would hold a higher sense of importance to a rugby player than a golfer worrying about his place in the FedEx Cup standings.

There is nothing wrong with that. We all have priorities.

You also should know that of 107 IOC members, 16 are women. There is only one female chairperson for 20 permanent committees, and she heads the Commission on Women and Sport.

Are you connecting the dots here?

Softball got the shaft. Big time. Golf in 2016 is going to play a 72-hole tournament for 60 men and 60 women and probably on some course far from where the Olympic Village is located and where most of the Games will be contested. Think of somewhere like Valderrama in Spain. A place that exclusive. That private. That non-Olympics.

It will be seen live only by those willing to pay big bucks for a badge and travel wherever Tiger might be teeing off. It won't have the feel of an Olympics, but it could make the IOC a lot of money, and that's all the members care about.

Do you really want to see how badly golf wants to be back in the Olympics?

Here's a thought: The full IOC membership won't vote to include golf and rugby until October, so what if the 116 members let it be known today that golf overwhelmingly would be accepted only if Augusta and The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews immediately began to welcome females.

Yeah. That would happen.

And I'm about to shoot 68 at Bear's Best.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He also can be heard weeknights from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. on "The Sports Scribes" on KDWN-AM (720) and www.infernosports radio.com.