"Does he really want that discrimination to continue against the CEO of IBM?"

USA Today's Christine Brennan writes about the Bloomberg story on new IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, revealing that she knows Rometty from ties to Northwestern University, and actually raises the possibility, "remote as it might seem, that she's already a member and we simply don't know it yet."

She reached out to Rometty, got no reply, and brought up this Masters Memory:

I don't blame Rometty for not getting back in touch. The last person to talk in this column about Augusta's discriminatory membership policies was U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Lloyd Ward, one of the very few African-American males to ever be a member of the club. Next week will be the 10-year anniversary of the phone conversation in which Ward told me that he wanted "to have influence from the inside" to change Augusta.

That didn't go so well. His words infuriated then-Augusta chairman Johnson, and it wasn't long before Ward was no longer either the USOC chief or a member of Augusta National.

Ward's comments in my column were read by Burk, triggering the national debate on Augusta's discriminatory membership policy, with Johnson uttering the infamous phrase that he wouldn't be pressured at "the point of a bayonet" to bring a woman into Augusta.

Brennan suggests that Chairman Billy Payne is in "quite a bind."

No, Payne is dealing with one of his own. Augusta National has been discriminating against women by not allowing them to be members since its founding in 1933. Does he really want that discrimination to continue against the CEO of IBM?