Michelle Wie walked into her press conference before the start of the 2003 Kraft Nabisco Championship rather timidly. She was tall and shy, and her soft-spoken voice was paired with the kind of self-consciousness that all 14-year-olds seem to have. It was hard to believe this was the face of one of the most divisive and polarizing golfers of the modern era. Her crime? Saying she wanted to play in the Masters.

“I think it’s pretty realistic because it’s possible,” she said that day when asked if her dream was “realistic.”

A few months later, 32-year-old Annika Sorenstam became the first woman of the modern era to play a PGA Tour event. Her opening drive of the tournament traveled 30 yards longer than usual because there was so much adrenaline coursing through her veins, and though she smiled with relief afterwards her knees almost completely gave out as she walked down the fairway.

Not since the PGA Tour lifted its Caucasians-only clause in 1961 had there been more of a radical affront to golf’s status quo.

That, 2003, was going to be the year. The year golf would begin to loosen its ironclad grip on tradition. The year the game would finally start to look different.

(AP Photo/Dave Martin)

As the men prepare to compete in the 80th Masters, starting Thursday, we are no closer to seeing women play the country’s most picturesque and historic golf course.

It is difficult to decipher why what seemed to be a strong movement has so thoroughly stalled — but not as hard as it is to predict when it will gain any momentum again.

There is no Annika anymore. In fact there is no public face of the movement.

All that is left is an insurgent feeling that golf, which has struggled to reach younger fans in recent years, may need to make sweeping changes has more people starting to ask the boldest question of all: Is it time for a Women’s Masters, at Augusta National?

“Gender barriers are being broken,” said Wie after Augusta National admitted its first women members in 2014. “We just need to keep this forward momentum going.”

Augusta National’s official response to the possibility of an women’s event on the course is to point to comments Chairman Billy Payne made last year:

“We have a very short member season at Augusta National. It’s seven months only,” Payne said.

“The time that we dedicate to the preparation and conduct of the tournament is already extensive. I don’t think that we would ever host another tournament.”

(AP)

Some LPGA players have dismissed that as a smokescreen for a club long affiliated with discrimination of women.

“They’ve only got one tournament a year,” LPGA Tour player Paula Creamer said in response. “I understand that a lot goes into it, that one week and planning. The golf course is shut down. But I think it can handle two weeks at a time, whether it’s a week apart or back to back.”

Creamer has a point. Most of Augusta’s millionaire and billionaire members don’t play the course more than a few times a year (if that) and the two Masters’ could play in consecutive weeks, like the USGA did for the 2014 U.S. Men’s and Women’s Opens. Besides, if Augusta National has the ability to install machines under each of its greens to prevent puddles from forming during rainstorms — as it has done — freeing-up one of the remaining 51 weeks hardly seems like an impossible task.

Augusta National doesn’t because it simply doesn’t want to. Unprecedented changes to the industry may force its hand anyway. The Tiger Woods era is over and golf’s participation numbers have been, at best, stagnant ever since.

Women’s golf, meanwhile, fueled by a host of young personalities and intense popularity in Asia, has been growing rapidly. Golf knows it needs to broaden its appeal to survive, to reach a wider base, and the industry’s biggest players are forging alliances because of it.

(Gettty)

The Women’s British Open became a fully-fledged LPGA Tour major in 2001 and was contested at St. Andrews for the first time in 2007. In 2014 the USGA hosted the Men’s and Women’s U.S. Opens on the same course in back-to-back weeks for the first time in history. The 2016 Olympics will see men and women golfers do the same. Now, a recent partnership announced by the PGA and LPGA Tours this year opened the door to events where men and women golfers compete alongside each other.

“In a perfect world for me I’d like to see us on the same venue, on the same telecast, same time, playing at official events on the same money list,” LPGA Tour Commissioner Mike Whan said. Whan has been vocal supporter of bringing a women’s event to Augusta National and says he asks the club “every year.”

“Look at the [Women’s Tennis Association] … Tennis plays majors in a very collaborative way,” he said. “Both sets of athletes playing at the same time. The Australian Open, the U.S. Open, Wimbledon. It helps them break through into the consciousness of regular sports fans. That’s exciting.”

Back-to-back men’s and women’s Masters weeks would accomplish that, and LPGA Tour players wouldn’t need much convincing to sign on.

“There is no reason we can’t do that for women’s golf” Paula Creamer says.

“To have a Women’s Masters would be unbelievable,” says Stacy Lewis.

“If that day comes, even if I’m not the player to play it, I think it’d be really special,” says World No. 1 Lydia Ko.

But they know it won’t be that simple.

(Getty)

Martha Burk was standing in a muddy field almost a mile away from the front gates of Augusta National, bellowing to a crowd of about 40 people, with a sinking feeling in her stomach that she had been sabotaged. That was the rumor, anyway; that her movement’s detractors flooded Burk’s participation sheets with names of people who would no-show on the day of the fight. Now Burk’s crowd was outnumbered almost two-to-one by Augusta police officers, her words drowned by a chorus of honks provided by drivers-by responding gleefully to counter-protestors’ signs reading “Honk for Hootie,” in support of then-club Chairman Hootie Johnson’s insistence that the club would not allow women to join.

Burk’s cause had captured the nation’s attention months earlier; Coca-Cola and IBM had pulled their sponsorships from the 2003 Masters, so the tournament ran commercial-free for the next two years. Fans loved it and greeted the companies as a nuisance when they came crawling back in 2005. The City of Augusta was later found guilty of violating Burks’ right to protest outside the course’s front gates and slapped with a fine, but it didn’t matter. Burk’s attempt to force Augusta National to admit a woman member died that day in the mud, surrounded by honking applause.

“We do not intend to become a trophy in their display case,” Johnson had warned Burk months earlier. “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.”

(Robert Deutsch, USA Today)

In order to understand Augusta National you have to first understand the debate that rages around it: Should private businesses be allowed to discriminate? Is it their right to be left alone and seclude, like an individual citizen has a right to do, or should they be pulled forward and forced to engage? In most cases, golf courses and clubs have submitted to the changing times as they come or shortly thereafter. But not Augusta.

“As long as I’m alive, golfers will be white, and caddies will be black,” Roberts once famously said.

But that wall fell — Lee Elder played in 1975 — and so too did the others for African-Americans. Black caddies were a requirement at the club until 1983. The club finally extended an invitation to join to a black man in 1990. In 1991 the PGA Tour decreed that it would only allow tournaments at clubs that had non-racially discriminatory membership policies. The Masters didn’t need the PGA Tour’s blessing because it is, technically speaking, an independent event, but it quietly admitted an unnamed African-American member that year anyway.

Tiger Woods effectively crashed through the last glass ceiling that remained when he slipped on his green jacket six years later, and so, not long after, the public’s attention turned to women.

In 2002 Augusta National still didn’t have a female member, the British Open was being contested at all-male golf clubs, and the The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews remained strictly male-only. Women weren’t allowed in the clubhouse, either, though the notorious “No dogs or women allowed” sign that adorned the building was, eventually, removed.

But things were changing. Sorenstam’s massive, game-changing drive was about to happen. Michelle Wie was rising. Tiger Woods was the all-conquering face of golf who had just slipped on the Green Jacket for a third time.

(Getty)

“They will open those doors up there to women,” Burk said of Augusta National. “They know it and we all know it, because we are right, and we will prevail.”

It wasn’t until almost 10 years after Burk’s declaration that Augusta National quietly announced it had admitted two new members: former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and businesswoman Darla Moore. In 2014 it added a third: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.

Burk retroactively declared victory, but many within golf maintain that her movement — if it had any effect at all — only served to delay the initiation of female members. Augusta National, under no circumstances, would change simply because people thought they should.

“I’m not sure they’ve changed their mind ” former CBS Sports president Neal Pilson said at the time. “Augusta, historically, has operated on its own timetable.”

(Jack Gruber-USA TODAY Sports)

Michelle Wie watches the Masters every year. She started when she was seven years old, with her dad, and it was the dream of playing there that helped her fall in love with golf. It is what pushed her forward, onto the tour and into men’s events. She said it never occurred to her it was only men playing.

“I used to be like, ‘Oh, could I play there,'” the 14-year-old said that day in 2003.

Golf likes to say it is the most fair game on the planet. Anybody can play against anyone with its handicap system. Each tournament’s prize money is awarded entirely on merit, and even pros go home with nothing if they don’t make the cut. Tournaments across the country host open qualifiers and award spots regardless of reputation.

But the invisible line is still there, still being held most firmly by Augusta National. Maybe it’ll move one day. Things don’t look encouraging right now, but things do change. Just ask Annika Sorenstam.

“Look at the British Open. We do play some of the top courses. St. Andrews, Turnberry. Not long ago people would have said ‘ugh, that’s not going to happen,'” Sorenstam said, who became one of the first women members when she was inducted to the The Royal and Ancient Golf Club last year.

“I think we should strive for it. We need to give kids the ability to dream.”

[sigallery id=”3b7f4bce21eba9b0090c8ca1c13b50b6″ title=”2015 Masters” type=”sigallery”]