Reanne Evans, snooker's trailblazer, shows golf the way Despite promoter Barry Hearn's best efforts to secure women's snooker some semblance of a television audience, it has remained a dismally neglected backwater, in which Evans's reward for seizing a sixth world title was a derisory £1,000 next to the cool quarter of a million that O'Sullivan took home from the Crucible. Evans, whose hegemony in the female game calls to mind a great white shark in a goldfish bowl, is encountering the same problems as Allison Fisher, who bestrode this stage in the late Eighties. Swiftly Fisher, despite entering the men's rankings, sensed that she would never be accorded respect on a par with her colleagues and took flight to the US to pursue a lucrative career in nine-ball pool. It no doubt enriched her marketability that she became bracketed as the "Duchess of Doom." So Evans's success in advancing to next month's Wuxi Classic in China should be celebrated as a triumph for never yielding, for refusing to acquiesce to the accepted wisdom. A strange logic persists that the best female potters could never dream of TV exposure because their talents are insufficient to engage a popular audience. But Evans, by vanquishing Thailand's Thepchaiya Un-Nooh from three frames down, has beaten the men's world No 69 and reinforced her potential to play on an equal footing. Beyond the gloomy confines of municipal snooker halls, Evans should be heralded as an inspiration. In a summer where the Open Championship is being staged at Muirfield - a club demonstrably less enlightened than Augusta in continuing to ban female members - how wonderful it would be if a woman could yet colonise their precious patch of greensward by right. Tantalisingly, it is not impossible. The notion of a woman teeing it up at an Open has long been mooted, from when a precocious Michelle Wie had a chance to qualify in 2005 at St Andrews after the Royal and Ancient lifted the "men-only" demand on the entry form. In a lukewarm, piecemeal concession from golf's rule makers, women are at last allowed to attempt qualification, but only from local level - and even then, only a handful of players who finish in the top five at the other ladies" majors. The opening for Norway's Suzann Pettersen or Swede Anna Nordqvist, both leading finishers at last month's Kraft-Nabisco in California, is theirs to grasp. Regional qualifying for this year's Open is staged on June 24, on an eclectic array of courses from Clitheroe to the Buckinghamshire, affording Europe's top women a delicious opportunity to walk straight past Muirfield's "No women" edict and embarrass the Honourable Society of Edinburgh Golfers for attitudes that would not have looked out of place in the Bronze Age. Certain sports might exist as all-male provinces for another generation, not least Formula One, where it has been over two decades since Italy's Giovanna Amati twice drove, but failed to qualify, for the ailing Brabham team. But the 27-year-old Evans is otherwise as plucky a trailblazer as they come. She just needs to be careful not to emulate the indignity of poor Maureen McCarthy, who in a first-round match at the 1998 Benson & Hedges accrued a mere two points. After five miserable frames in which her contributions read 0-1-0-0-1, McCarthy acquired the rather cruel nickname "Binary."