Congrats to Tim Clark, condolences to Lee Westwood, get well soon to Tiger, and many, many thanks to the golfy media for telling us more about what a mean little kid said at TPC Sawgrass than about Morgan Pressel's victory in the JLPGA's 1st major of 2010. When The Squire at Golf Babes beats Randall Mell at Golf Channel to the punch by 5 hours yesterday and hardly anyone else in the golfy media has yet picked up even the scent of a squib of a story, I have to wonder about their priorities--and competence.
Come on, y'all, you don't have to imitate The China Post's plagiarizing part of my post, but doesn't an American winning in Asia warrant more than a sentence from Steve DiMeglio? Melissa Reid breaking through for her 1st professional win in Turkey on the LET deserves the 1-sentence treatment. Another major victory for Pressel, over the top players from their respective tours--Sakura Yokomine from the JLPGA, Sophie Gustafson from the LET, and Hee Kyung Seo from the KLPGA--not to mention fellow LPGAers Ai Miyazato, Ya Ni Tseng, and Inbee Park--deserves far more than silence from ESPN's golf page, Golf.com, Golf World, and Golfweek!
10 comments:
why WOULD there be a story in the US about a JLPGA major, no matter who won ? Think what you want about the JLPGA, it is still a minor tour. They aren't flooding the world with great players like Korea, and their best player is on the US LPGA Tour.
glass half full - Pressel's win got top billing over Andersson-Hed's Euro Tour victory, which was on xxx Golf Channel all week.
guess I should add...didn't mean to denegrate the actual tournament. The field itself drew half a dozen or so well ranked players plus Ai Miyazato as the highest ranked player in the field.
Pressel had to beat some good players.
Yeah, it's only a JLPGA event; I get that. But when you talk about the Golf Channel, isn't golf what they cover? Why should we who are interested continue to visit the Golf Channel and never hear much of anything about the players on the women's tour? In my opinion, so what if it was a Japanese tour event. Honestly, I would have been more interested in that than in the European tour stuff or the Nationwide tour stuff that typically clutters their airtime. The fact that an American player was doing well in this event, in fact leading most of the way, makes it worthy of their attention. Consider how ESPN handled the perfect game thrown by an unknown pitcher on a poor team this weekend -- it got lots of coverage. Morgan's victory should have gotten some decent coverage. Seems like the Golf Channel shoots itself in the foot in not giving us much at all about the ladies, unless and until we see their second-rate coverage of an LPGA tour event -- coverage that typically focuses only on the leader and the three or four most prominent players other than the leader. They never promote, follow, permit much interest in other players who might be up and comers or who might drive interest.
Of course (good grief) there is the Natalie Gulbis exception. No offense to Gulbis, but it's just tired TV knowing we'll typically get plenty of her short skirts and long legs while other players in the field will get short shrift. Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for short skirts and long legs. But maybe they could be somebody else's once in a while. Why, when she is not in contention, do we get plenty of Gulbus, but not much of others similarly out of contention?
Shame on you, Golf Channel, and even ESPN, for not giving Morgan well-deserved coverage for this performance and victory over a quality international field.
Be honest and take a look at xxx Golf Channel - they haven't been The GOLF Channel in years. They barely keep up with anything outside the PGA Tour and live tournament action from the LPGA, Euro Tour, Nationwide, and Champions Tours.
xxx Golf Channel is a fairly successful commercial venture that puts its energy where they get the most attention with the least effort.
Weird, I posted agreement with your 2nd comment, CG, and now it's not showing up. The Blog Gods must have intervened to prevent such an earth-shattering event.
Look, when 10 of the top 25 are playing (and 12 of the top 30), plus it's a major, plus an American wins, that makes it newsworthy. Period.
Hey, TC, give me a little credit for mentioning Morgan's win (and that it was a major) in my weekly wrap-up, which focuses on the PGA because of the limerick. ;-)
The fact is, everybody says the right things about women's golf but nobody does anything about it. For all their talk, TGC apparently doesn't believe women's golf is that important. I think the LPGA really should try to work out some kind of direct-to-LPGA.com broadcast; the quality wouldn't need to be great, so it wouldn't require cutting-edge (i.e., expensive) equipment to pull it off.
I think it's going to take a grassroots act like that to build the audience. A free live broadcast over the Net, with the ability to replay it at your leisure in case you missed it, could build the audience in an entirely different way than the traditional sports model. As technology changes, that may be the best way for them to circumvent the system and build their audience.
Agree completely, Mike, and did try to figure out how to acknowledge your sentence. But in the end I decided to attack DiMeglio's one sentence than praise yours!
LMAO ! Con, maybe you suspended yourself for symbolic foul language in the headline and then sensored your reply.
Speaking of suspending yourself, this article explains Yuko Mitsuka's WD in Round One:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/may/12/japanese-golfer-yuko-mitsuka-bans-herself
Thanks, IceCat! Had to wait till later in the morning to post my response:
http://mlyhlss.blogspot.com/2010/05/on-yuko-mitsuka-and-angela-park.html
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