In no particular order:
There's No "Q" in Sakura! And No "Mini"!! Sa-koo-ra Yo-ko-mee-nay. Say it fast with equal emphasis on each syllable and you'll be fine. Never mind that the romanized "r" in Japanese is somewhere between an English "r" and "l"--too tough to learn for just one week. Although if you can learn how to lisp "Atha" and "Motho," why not go the extra mile for one of the JLPGA's best players ever? [Update (7/26/14, 9:33 am): Also, Sakura's no "meanie" (although Kirk and Wright might beg to differ after that shot on 17 Friday!). Yo-ko-mee-nay, people!]
Speaking of Sakura... She's got a John Daly-esque swing. And I think we saw it once on the 18th hole. C'mon, people!
First-Tee Footage?! Everyone talked about how emotional (in so many ways) the 1st drive of the 1st tee was this week. Yet did Golf Channel shoot it, save it, and replay it for us? Noooo!!!!! I know playing every national anthem would have taken too long. But how about a quick montage with the last 2 seconds of each country's anthem and reaction shots by the players during it and right after they knew where their 1st shots went? Or feature the best reactions at the top of Day 2's coverage?
Show More Tee Shots! When something even remotely dramatic happens on the tee--shot in the woods, player hits fairway after partner puts it in woods, one bomber outdrives another, whatever--we oughtta see it. Everything matters in match play and with so few groups on the course, we should be able to get a good sense of how every match is unfolding and not have to rely so much on Juli Inkster's summaries of what happened.
Know Your Matches. I can't believe that Anna Nordqvist and Caroline Hedwall--the Vikings of the Solheim Cup--struggled so much in the 1st 12 holes yesterday against struggling young Okinawans Mika Miyazato and Mamiko Higa. So much for Solheim Cup experience and heroics, eh? You know what else I can't believe? That we barely saw a shot of the latter's great play and not even much of the former's great comeback. This was a made-for-tv David vs. Goliath deal, but we saw very little of it. (True, most of the fireworks from Team Japan occurred in the 1st 5 holes. But this is what they make highlights for.)
Speaking of Balance... Man, the cameras loved Teams USA and Spain, and I wholeheartedly endorse that decision. But if 2 seconds per shot of golfers walking, standing, and consulting with each other and their caddies on non-pivotal shots were cut, just think of how much more could have been shown of the Vikings vs. the Okinawans, Karrie Webb and Minjee Lee taking it to Na Yeon Choi and In-Kyung Kim (with attendant speculation on how the pressure is affecting the half of Team ROK that isn't coming into this week with a whole lot of confidence), and Inbee Park and So Yeon Ryu lighting up the course?
And Now a Word from Our Sponsors. Given how many commercials that GC gets to show at the end of each day, wouldn't it be nice if they cut back a little midway through the coverage?
[Update 1 (8:00 am): Ruthless Mike wants more credit given where it's due to Team Taiwan. HappyFan gives Judy Rankin credit for mentioning the Japan-Korea almost-annual team matches during an interview, but rightly criticizes the bulk of the coverage for pretending as if the Asian and other non-Solheim Cuppers have no professional team experience. I wish I had thought of both (or, more accurately, remembered the latter). I mean, nobody remembers the Lexus Cup?]
Showing posts with label butting heads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label butting heads. Show all posts
Friday, July 25, 2014
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Juggernaut: Inbee Park Wins the US Open
The #1 ranked player in the world did it again. With a four-shot lead going into the round, Inbee Park cruised to a four-shot win. Park has won the last three tournaments, the last three LPGA major championships, and every LPGA major played in 2013.
Park opened the final round with her closest challenger being In-Kyung Kim. Inky, my nickname for In-Kyung, was one of my picks for this week and one of my favorite players. I was pulling for her but Inky didn't get closer than three shots to Inbee. No other golfer contended and Park won without much of a struggle.
Let's put Park's win in perspective. She has joined Se Ri Pak as the only South Korean golfer to win three different LPGA major championships. Pak has won five majors in her career. Park has four triumphs. Her first was the 2008 US Open. Park has won the last three LPGA tournaments played. She has won ALL three LPGA major championships this year. The last time a LPGA golfer won three majors in one year was Pat Bradley in 1986. Mickey Wright also won three major championships in 1961. The only other golfer besides Park to win the first three major championships in a year was Babe Didrickson Zaharias in 1950! 1950 was the LPGA Tour's first ever season. Tiger Woods is the last golfer to win three majors in one year. He did it in 2000. Woods won four consecutive majors. The last three of 2000 and the 2001 Masters. It was titled the 'Tiger Slam'. In 1961 and 1962, Mickey Wright won four straight majors but I might be about the only person to note it in recent memory. She won the last two majors of 1961 and the first two of 1962. Ben Hogan won three majors in 1953. Bobby Jones remains the only golfer to complete a Grand Slam. He did it in 1930. Note- Hogan won all three major championships he played in that year. The British Open and PGA Championship at that time were played at almost the same time. Hogan won the British Open but couldn't compete in the PGA.
Park is one win away--The Women's British Open, which she finished 2nd at in 2012--from becoming the seventh golfer to win four different LPGA Major Championships. The others are Mickey Wright, Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, Juli Inkster, Louise Suggs and Pat Bradley. Ordinarily a Park British Open triumph would give Park a career Grand Slam, except the LPGA has designated the Evian Masters as a major championship also. Beginning THIS YEAR. So Park would have to win two more majors this year to do a Bobby Jones. Memo to LPGA Commissioner Michael Whan--Do you wish now that the Evian wasn't made into a major championship? Honestly, I'm not being critical of Whan, just giving a friendly poke. Whan isn't a prophet. He's done a much better job as LPGA Commissioner than Carolyn Bivens did. People who are familiar with my blogging know how critical I was of Bivens. Inbee Park BTW is the defending Evian Masters champion. So Park will be going for four majors in one year in a little over a month. It will be played at St. Andrews, the same course Tiger Woods completed a career Grand Slam at back in 2000.
A run at golf or any other sports history like this would ordinarily gather lots of media attention but I'll be surprised if the Women's British Open gets more than a minor increase in coverage. Golf bloggers who I won't mention are paying attention to silly things from golfers with wet pants to a player firing their caddy in the middle of a round. Newspapers will have the story buried on page 8. They can hardly be bothered to write about a LPGA major and I'm not expecting much from them on the WBO. ESPN does broadcast the WBO, but I again will be surprised if they do anything extra for this year's tournament. That Park is South Korean, has something to do with it. The ugly reality is that a good chunk of the media has a bias against the Asian players. I will admit, however, the 4th major being not in the United States will be one reason for the limited coverage though the Men's British Open rarely has trouble getting talked about. If it were Paula Creamer going for the Slam five weeks from now in say New Jersey, there would be plenty of people writing and talking about it. With Park trying to do it in Scotland, hardly anybody.
Let's put Park's win in perspective. She has joined Se Ri Pak as the only South Korean golfer to win three different LPGA major championships. Pak has won five majors in her career. Park has four triumphs. Her first was the 2008 US Open. Park has won the last three LPGA tournaments played. She has won ALL three LPGA major championships this year. The last time a LPGA golfer won three majors in one year was Pat Bradley in 1986. Mickey Wright also won three major championships in 1961. The only other golfer besides Park to win the first three major championships in a year was Babe Didrickson Zaharias in 1950! 1950 was the LPGA Tour's first ever season. Tiger Woods is the last golfer to win three majors in one year. He did it in 2000. Woods won four consecutive majors. The last three of 2000 and the 2001 Masters. It was titled the 'Tiger Slam'. In 1961 and 1962, Mickey Wright won four straight majors but I might be about the only person to note it in recent memory. She won the last two majors of 1961 and the first two of 1962. Ben Hogan won three majors in 1953. Bobby Jones remains the only golfer to complete a Grand Slam. He did it in 1930. Note- Hogan won all three major championships he played in that year. The British Open and PGA Championship at that time were played at almost the same time. Hogan won the British Open but couldn't compete in the PGA.
Park is one win away--The Women's British Open, which she finished 2nd at in 2012--from becoming the seventh golfer to win four different LPGA Major Championships. The others are Mickey Wright, Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, Juli Inkster, Louise Suggs and Pat Bradley. Ordinarily a Park British Open triumph would give Park a career Grand Slam, except the LPGA has designated the Evian Masters as a major championship also. Beginning THIS YEAR. So Park would have to win two more majors this year to do a Bobby Jones. Memo to LPGA Commissioner Michael Whan--Do you wish now that the Evian wasn't made into a major championship? Honestly, I'm not being critical of Whan, just giving a friendly poke. Whan isn't a prophet. He's done a much better job as LPGA Commissioner than Carolyn Bivens did. People who are familiar with my blogging know how critical I was of Bivens. Inbee Park BTW is the defending Evian Masters champion. So Park will be going for four majors in one year in a little over a month. It will be played at St. Andrews, the same course Tiger Woods completed a career Grand Slam at back in 2000.
A run at golf or any other sports history like this would ordinarily gather lots of media attention but I'll be surprised if the Women's British Open gets more than a minor increase in coverage. Golf bloggers who I won't mention are paying attention to silly things from golfers with wet pants to a player firing their caddy in the middle of a round. Newspapers will have the story buried on page 8. They can hardly be bothered to write about a LPGA major and I'm not expecting much from them on the WBO. ESPN does broadcast the WBO, but I again will be surprised if they do anything extra for this year's tournament. That Park is South Korean, has something to do with it. The ugly reality is that a good chunk of the media has a bias against the Asian players. I will admit, however, the 4th major being not in the United States will be one reason for the limited coverage though the Men's British Open rarely has trouble getting talked about. If it were Paula Creamer going for the Slam five weeks from now in say New Jersey, there would be plenty of people writing and talking about it. With Park trying to do it in Scotland, hardly anybody.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Paging the Asahi Shimbun
I've never had to call out an entire newspaper before, but after reading "S. Korean golfers dominate Japan, world," by Atsuo Negishi and Issei Sakakibara (courtesy of a thread at Seoul Sisters.com), I have to question the Asahi Shimbun's editorial judgment. The premise of the article is that the top men's and women's professional golf tours in Japan, the JGTO and JLPGA, are all of a sudden in danger because Kyung-Tae Kim and Sun-Ju Ahn, both South Koreans, each won their respective tour's money title in 2010. Oh, and because Korean women won 15 of 34 JLPGA events and 9 of 25 LPGA events in 2010. And because there are more Korean women ranked in the top 50 in the world than Japanese and Americans combined (20 vs. 19). And because Korean golfers dominated the Asian Games in 2006 and 2010. And because as the number of Koreans on the LPGA has increased, its schedule has shrunk. And because Carolyn Bivens floated an English-language requirement for LPGA membership. And because Japan's only and Asia's 1st winner of an American major is lobbying the Japanese government to increase funding to develop world-class Japanese women golfers. And because an anonymous tournament organizer implied Japanese tv viewers can't stand to see Japanese corporate types hand winner's checks to Korean winners of tournaments they sponsored. And because tv ratings went down significantly for the JLPGA's season-ending major, the Ricoh Cup. And because a Japanese tv producer envisions vague and dramatic globalization-induced changes.
Yeah, the whole thing is thinly-veiled, badly-organized, barely-thought-out editorializing--and my paraphrase actually attempted to find some coherence in the article's writing and reasoning. With its logic deficits, context gaps, and genre ambiguities, I doubt it would get better than a C- in any university-level intro to newspaper writing course (and that's after grade inflation). And yet it appeared on the English-language website of the Asahi Shimbun on January 7th!
I don't have time to do a full-blown critique--we just got back to our soon-to-be-old home from picking up the keys at the new one and are trying to push our own move up 3 days--so I'll just offer a sketch of one here.
(1) Shaky understanding of recent JLPGA history.
Consider a sentence like this: "The women's golf industry in Japan has succeeded and gained as much popularity as men's golf because female golfers became top prize winners. But this business model is becoming shaky."
What does this mean? Japanese women have been "top prize winners" on the JLPGA for its entire history, except when Ai-Yu Tu had great years and now, decades later, when Sun-Ju Ahn did. No, what kick-started the JLPGA to a new level was Ai Miyazato winning as a high schooler--and then continuing to win as a pro--on a tour that seemed utterly dominated by Yuri Fudoh. Their rivalry and all it symbolized fuelled the JLPGA's ascent and contributed to the JGTO's relative decline. Until Ai-chan left for--and struggled on--the LPGA, that is, and another high schooler won--and continued to win as a pro--on the JGTO. Ryo Ishikawa has more to do with any real or imagined shakiness of the JLPGA business model than any Korean golfer. And perhaps Mika Miyazato does, as well.
It's not like the authors are completely ignorant of this. Indeed, the sentences before the one I quoted covers virtually the same time period I discussed in the previous paragraph: "Female Japanese golfers have also been performing well and gaining in popularity since Ai Miyazato debuted as a teenager on the JLPGA Tour in 2004. In her footsteps have followed other talented young golfers such as Momoko Ueda, Miho Koga, Sakura Yokomine and Mika Miyazato." Never mind that Ai-chan's debut actually was in 2003, the real problem with the second sentence is the way it lumps Mika Miyazato, who's of an entirely different golfing generation than her sempai, into a follower of Ai-sama's footsteps. What makes Mikan distinctive is the way she didn't follow the Ai-sama path but instead chose to make her pro debut on the LPGA rather than the JLPGA. Given Mikan's big leap into the LPGA's top 20 and win and T2 in the 2 JLPGA majors she entered in 2010, she might well have provided a similar spark of a generational showdown that pushed the JLPGA to the forefront of public attention around 8 years ago had she decided to follow Ai-sama's path.
But let's face it, there's a deeper problem than lack of historical context going on here. Are the authors really claiming that the Japanese golf industry's "business model" is to hope for an extraordinarily talented Japanese teenager to come along and do nothing but wait for the next one? Where is the evidence that this really is the JLPGA's business model?
(2) Shaky use of logic and evidence.
Let me turn to a different passage that illustrates the severity and scope of these problems: "Japan is also fearing the affect [sic] that victories by South Korean golfers will have on corporate sponsors and ad revenue."
Putting aside the image of a personified Mt. Fuji appearing to one of the authors in a dream and the goddess Amaterasu appearing to the other, each with a mission to convey this urgent message on behalf of an anxious nation, as well as an error in word choice I see about 10 times a week from my own students (99% of whom grew up in English), this really is all about the affect--the feelings of Japanese television viewers and corporate executives. Here's the authors' Exhibit A:
Clearly the convenient unsourced quote is meant to provide a gloss on the facts that precede it. But hold on just a second there. Rewind. Pause. Let's do a little experiment here. Read over my Ricoh Cup posts from 2009 (Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4) and 2010 (Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4). What did you notice? Perhaps something like this:
Yeah, the whole thing is thinly-veiled, badly-organized, barely-thought-out editorializing--and my paraphrase actually attempted to find some coherence in the article's writing and reasoning. With its logic deficits, context gaps, and genre ambiguities, I doubt it would get better than a C- in any university-level intro to newspaper writing course (and that's after grade inflation). And yet it appeared on the English-language website of the Asahi Shimbun on January 7th!
I don't have time to do a full-blown critique--we just got back to our soon-to-be-old home from picking up the keys at the new one and are trying to push our own move up 3 days--so I'll just offer a sketch of one here.
(1) Shaky understanding of recent JLPGA history.
Consider a sentence like this: "The women's golf industry in Japan has succeeded and gained as much popularity as men's golf because female golfers became top prize winners. But this business model is becoming shaky."
What does this mean? Japanese women have been "top prize winners" on the JLPGA for its entire history, except when Ai-Yu Tu had great years and now, decades later, when Sun-Ju Ahn did. No, what kick-started the JLPGA to a new level was Ai Miyazato winning as a high schooler--and then continuing to win as a pro--on a tour that seemed utterly dominated by Yuri Fudoh. Their rivalry and all it symbolized fuelled the JLPGA's ascent and contributed to the JGTO's relative decline. Until Ai-chan left for--and struggled on--the LPGA, that is, and another high schooler won--and continued to win as a pro--on the JGTO. Ryo Ishikawa has more to do with any real or imagined shakiness of the JLPGA business model than any Korean golfer. And perhaps Mika Miyazato does, as well.
It's not like the authors are completely ignorant of this. Indeed, the sentences before the one I quoted covers virtually the same time period I discussed in the previous paragraph: "Female Japanese golfers have also been performing well and gaining in popularity since Ai Miyazato debuted as a teenager on the JLPGA Tour in 2004. In her footsteps have followed other talented young golfers such as Momoko Ueda, Miho Koga, Sakura Yokomine and Mika Miyazato." Never mind that Ai-chan's debut actually was in 2003, the real problem with the second sentence is the way it lumps Mika Miyazato, who's of an entirely different golfing generation than her sempai, into a follower of Ai-sama's footsteps. What makes Mikan distinctive is the way she didn't follow the Ai-sama path but instead chose to make her pro debut on the LPGA rather than the JLPGA. Given Mikan's big leap into the LPGA's top 20 and win and T2 in the 2 JLPGA majors she entered in 2010, she might well have provided a similar spark of a generational showdown that pushed the JLPGA to the forefront of public attention around 8 years ago had she decided to follow Ai-sama's path.
But let's face it, there's a deeper problem than lack of historical context going on here. Are the authors really claiming that the Japanese golf industry's "business model" is to hope for an extraordinarily talented Japanese teenager to come along and do nothing but wait for the next one? Where is the evidence that this really is the JLPGA's business model?
(2) Shaky use of logic and evidence.
Let me turn to a different passage that illustrates the severity and scope of these problems: "Japan is also fearing the affect [sic] that victories by South Korean golfers will have on corporate sponsors and ad revenue."
Putting aside the image of a personified Mt. Fuji appearing to one of the authors in a dream and the goddess Amaterasu appearing to the other, each with a mission to convey this urgent message on behalf of an anxious nation, as well as an error in word choice I see about 10 times a week from my own students (99% of whom grew up in English), this really is all about the affect--the feelings of Japanese television viewers and corporate executives. Here's the authors' Exhibit A:
TV viewer ratings stood at 12.4 percent when Sakura Yokomine won the last event of the 2009 JLPGA Tour, according to Video Research Ltd. But the ratings slipped to 7.6 percent when Park In-bee won the final tournament of 2010.
"When a non-Japanese golfer wins, viewers will change the channel before the corporate sponsor's presidents appear to hand out trophies," said a tournament organizer who wished to remain anonymous. "That's disappointing for corporate sponsors."
Clearly the convenient unsourced quote is meant to provide a gloss on the facts that precede it. But hold on just a second there. Rewind. Pause. Let's do a little experiment here. Read over my Ricoh Cup posts from 2009 (Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4) and 2010 (Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4). What did you notice? Perhaps something like this:
- Ai Miyazato and Momoko Ueda in the hunt in 2009. Not playing in 2010.
- Sakura Yokomine, Shinobu Moromizato, and Chie Arimura all vying to win the tournament and break Shiho Oyama's single-season-winnings record in the process in 2009. Sun-Ju Ahn having already clinched the money-list title the week before the Ricoh Cup in 2010, but without any hope of breaking any winnings record.
- Good scoring in 2009. Bad scoring in 2010.
- An exciting, wide-open shootout that came down to the final holes in 2009. A boring battle of attrition on Sunday in 2010.
"The next few years will be a period of dramatic change," said golf tournament producer Sho Tobari. "While the U.S. LPGA tour is reducing the number of tournaments, the European LPGA tour is aiming to expand its market size by becoming more international. Japan will be caught in that trend, too." [...] "In the short term, the golf tournament market in Japan may shrink, and the number of tournaments may decline," Tobari said. "But the golf market itself will not shrink. Corporate sponsors will have to consider ways to disseminate their message to the rest of the world and not just to the Japanese market."Huh? What does this have to do with those darn Koreans again? Somebody help me out here! From where I sit, the JLPGA is looking like an increasingly attractive option for golfers from around the world who don't want to be part-time professionals. Some, like Mi-Jeong Jeon, who's quoted explaining why she loves competing in Japan, may even choose to make the JLPGA their only, or their primary, tour. But this is a sign of the strength of the JLPGA and its potential for future growth. What am I missing?
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Paging Steve Elling
Steve Elling took the misguided meme of "parity" on the LPGA to an absurd extreme yesterday. That's the only way to understand his suggestion that having half a dozen players at the top of their games at about the same time and duelling for every single season-long award and honor this week is nothing to get excited about. Why? Because "good is not great"--it's more like "mediocre."
The fact is, we have no way of knowing if Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, Se Ri Pak, and Lorena Ochoa would have been able to dominate Na Yeon Choi, Ji-Yai Shin, Ya Ni Tseng, Suzann Pettersen, Cristie Kerr, and Ai Miyazato this season. Sure, in their peak years they each posted lower scoring averages than Choi's 69.79 (not counting the 1st 2 rounds of the LPGA Tour Championship) and racked up more wins than Miyazato's 5. And one of them must have won more majors than Tseng's pair in one of their career seasons, right? But please point to a year when there were 5 players with sub-70 scoring averages--as is still statistically possible this season. Or when 5 players averaged 4 or more birdies per round (which is statistically possible this season). OK, OK, how about a year when 6 players made more than $1.5M in a season? (Yes, Miyazato needs a huge charge this weekend to become the 6th, but roll with the possibilities for a while.)
There is no way these kind of stats are products of mediocrity (that would characterize the many big names between #29 and #49 on the money list) or even just good play (which would characterize #17 through #28). In fact, everyone from #7 Song-Hee Kim through #16 Amy Yang have had very good years. It's just that the Big 6 have been excellent. Sure, only time will tell how great they'll each be. But let's wait 2 more rounds and see who has how many Hall of Fame points at what age, shall we? And then let's see how long they can sustain this level of play and who among them and their lead chase pack can find another gear and force everyone else to play catch-up (for a time). Greatness can be a product of consistent excellence, even if it doesn't result in long stretches of dominance.
The bottom line is that even if Cristie Kerr, Paula Creamer, Suzann Pettersen, and Ji-Yai Shin were in the best position to make the leap to instant greatness when Lorena Ochoa bowed out earlier this year, it's no aspersion on them that it didn't happen. If Kerr had been a little less shaky on a few Sundays over the past 2 seasons, or if the latter 3 had been healthier this season, we'd be having an entirely different conversation right now. But their losses have been Ai Miyazato's, Ya Ni Tseng's, and Na Yeon Choi's gains. At different points this season, they each played some truly fantastic golf to put themselves in the mix and in the conversation. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see In-Kyung Kim, Inbee Park, Morgan Pressel, Song-Hee Kim, and Amy Yang making similar moves next season. But the point is that very soon the battles among the Big 6 will be settled for this season. The issue at hand is not dominance or greatness but who can play the best golf over the next 36 holes. After the dust settles from this week, we can start looking back on this season and looking ahead to the next. Let's keep our eyes on the ball, shall we, Steve?
Me, I'm hoping Elling's essay has the same effect on the Big 6 that posting in your locker room what an opposing team's player or coach says is supposed to have on your team. Most of them are playing pretty crappy golf this week, truth be told. Time to get fired up, ladies! Right now, most of the mainstream golfy media (exemplified by Elling's absurdity) are on the opposing team. How about every time one of them makes a birdie this week, they tell the cameras, "This is for you, Steve!"?
[Update 1 (7:11 am): Compare Mike Southern, who attempts to put the week's world of golf in come perspective, and you'll see what's lacking in Elling's attempt to tell the LPGA it isn't all that.]
The fact is, we have no way of knowing if Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, Se Ri Pak, and Lorena Ochoa would have been able to dominate Na Yeon Choi, Ji-Yai Shin, Ya Ni Tseng, Suzann Pettersen, Cristie Kerr, and Ai Miyazato this season. Sure, in their peak years they each posted lower scoring averages than Choi's 69.79 (not counting the 1st 2 rounds of the LPGA Tour Championship) and racked up more wins than Miyazato's 5. And one of them must have won more majors than Tseng's pair in one of their career seasons, right? But please point to a year when there were 5 players with sub-70 scoring averages--as is still statistically possible this season. Or when 5 players averaged 4 or more birdies per round (which is statistically possible this season). OK, OK, how about a year when 6 players made more than $1.5M in a season? (Yes, Miyazato needs a huge charge this weekend to become the 6th, but roll with the possibilities for a while.)
There is no way these kind of stats are products of mediocrity (that would characterize the many big names between #29 and #49 on the money list) or even just good play (which would characterize #17 through #28). In fact, everyone from #7 Song-Hee Kim through #16 Amy Yang have had very good years. It's just that the Big 6 have been excellent. Sure, only time will tell how great they'll each be. But let's wait 2 more rounds and see who has how many Hall of Fame points at what age, shall we? And then let's see how long they can sustain this level of play and who among them and their lead chase pack can find another gear and force everyone else to play catch-up (for a time). Greatness can be a product of consistent excellence, even if it doesn't result in long stretches of dominance.
The bottom line is that even if Cristie Kerr, Paula Creamer, Suzann Pettersen, and Ji-Yai Shin were in the best position to make the leap to instant greatness when Lorena Ochoa bowed out earlier this year, it's no aspersion on them that it didn't happen. If Kerr had been a little less shaky on a few Sundays over the past 2 seasons, or if the latter 3 had been healthier this season, we'd be having an entirely different conversation right now. But their losses have been Ai Miyazato's, Ya Ni Tseng's, and Na Yeon Choi's gains. At different points this season, they each played some truly fantastic golf to put themselves in the mix and in the conversation. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see In-Kyung Kim, Inbee Park, Morgan Pressel, Song-Hee Kim, and Amy Yang making similar moves next season. But the point is that very soon the battles among the Big 6 will be settled for this season. The issue at hand is not dominance or greatness but who can play the best golf over the next 36 holes. After the dust settles from this week, we can start looking back on this season and looking ahead to the next. Let's keep our eyes on the ball, shall we, Steve?
Me, I'm hoping Elling's essay has the same effect on the Big 6 that posting in your locker room what an opposing team's player or coach says is supposed to have on your team. Most of them are playing pretty crappy golf this week, truth be told. Time to get fired up, ladies! Right now, most of the mainstream golfy media (exemplified by Elling's absurdity) are on the opposing team. How about every time one of them makes a birdie this week, they tell the cameras, "This is for you, Steve!"?
[Update 1 (7:11 am): Compare Mike Southern, who attempts to put the week's world of golf in come perspective, and you'll see what's lacking in Elling's attempt to tell the LPGA it isn't all that.]
Friday, December 3, 2010
Paging Geoff Shackelford
Yo, Geoff! You love it when players mouth off about ridiculous (re)designs, right? Well, get a load of what Laura Davies said after her opening 70 at the LPGA Tour Championship left her 3 shots behind leaders Seon Hwa Lee and Amy Yang:
So of course the golf gods punished her with a 2nd-round 84 that ended her disappointing LPGA campaign in 2010 on a sour note. But she can still get her 6th LET win of the season next week in Dubai and take their money title. Any of this interesting to you in the slightest?
[Update 1 (11:18 pm): Nice rapid response by the Shack!]
[Update 2 (11:45 pm): Hey, visitors from Shack-land, check out this Randall Mell piece for more on Davies's year!]
[Update 3 (11:50 pm): More Randall Mell, this time with quotes from Brittany Lincicome and Paula Creamer on the greens at Grand Cypress.]
[Update 4 (12/4/10, 12:36 am): Geoff's regulars might be amused to see that I was nice to him here compared to Steve Elling. It's all about the love here at Mostly Harmless.]
Q. Tell us about the course. It's pretty challenging. What do you think of it?
LAURA DAVIES: This one? It's my favorite course in Florida. We played here years ago in the late 90s and 2000. It's always been my favorite course in Florida. I like the grass here. It's better. It's not so--the weird grass that Florida has. I don't know the difference between them but it's much spongier and I like it. The layout is fantastic, but the grass is good, too. I don't know what they did with the greens. Someone went mental on the greens. I don't know what happened there. Someone said Jack Nicklaus did it, but I don't believe that. Someone said Jack changed it; well, he must have been having a very bad day. (Laughter).
Q. Someone said that he had to oversee it for it to remain a Nicklaus design.
LAURA DAVIES: Well, he might have been in a helicopter above (laughter) or flown over and said "that will do" or something. There's no way Jack Nicklaus designed these greens. They are mental.
So of course the golf gods punished her with a 2nd-round 84 that ended her disappointing LPGA campaign in 2010 on a sour note. But she can still get her 6th LET win of the season next week in Dubai and take their money title. Any of this interesting to you in the slightest?
[Update 1 (11:18 pm): Nice rapid response by the Shack!]
[Update 2 (11:45 pm): Hey, visitors from Shack-land, check out this Randall Mell piece for more on Davies's year!]
[Update 3 (11:50 pm): More Randall Mell, this time with quotes from Brittany Lincicome and Paula Creamer on the greens at Grand Cypress.]
[Update 4 (12/4/10, 12:36 am): Geoff's regulars might be amused to see that I was nice to him here compared to Steve Elling. It's all about the love here at Mostly Harmless.]
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Is It Even Worth Paging the AP at This Point?
How it is possible that the AP's main preview story for the CVS/pharmacy LPGA Challenge gets basic facts wrong about the 2 most prominent golfers in the tournament's field, Cristie Kerr and Paula Creamer?
It's hard to tell which is worse. The one about Creamer matters less to the major thrust of the article, but it reveals how little effort was put into the writing or editing of the piece. Look, I'm not expecting anyone who doesn't cover the LPGA regularly to visit Hound Dog's site or mine, but a quick trip to LPGA.com's pre-tournament interviews page or Paula Creamer's season performance rundown page would show that this couldn't possibly be Creamer's 2nd tournament back since surgery--more like her 10th!
The more I think about that mistake, though, the worse it feels. Making Creamer an afterthought in an article with a flawed major premise puts even more pressure on that premise. The New York Times at least softens the problem by titling the piece "Kerr Trying to Regain No. 1 Ranking," and while its core claim is technically correct, it nevertheless leaves key details out:
It's almost as if the AP's reporter is unaware that while Miyazato, Tseng, and Pettersen are indeed resting or travelling this week, Shin is playing in the JLPGA's Fujitsu Ladies. Given that she's only .24 points behind Kerr and .32 points behind Miyazato in the latest Rolex Rankings, a Shin win in Japan could complicate matters in next week's ranking considerably. The scenario in which Kerr passes Miyazato but Shin passes both of them isn't even in the realm of possibility for the AP's writer. How many points each player is losing from the event 2 years ago that's dropping out of the ranking will have an impact on how likely this scenario is.
You'd think that with so much attention on Tiger and Phil--and lately Lee and Martin--in the race for the #1 ranking in the OWGR, someone working for the AP would realize the Rolex Rankings use a similar methodology--if not the writer, then maybe a fact-checker or editor. I'm not saying Kerr can't or won't be #1 with a win this week in Northern California. I'm just pointing out that the same week Miyazato won on the LPGA and Shin on the JLPGA earlier this season, it was the latter who was the 1st to overtake Lorena Ochoa and become the LPGA's new #1. Shouldn't the AP have investigated the possibility that Shin could spoil Kerr's bid to replace Miyazato at the top of the world of women's golf?
[Update 1 (8:52 am): Randall Mell gets it. Why can't the AP?]
[Update 2 (9:03 am): You can trust the local media to get Creamer's story right. So why not the national media?]
It's hard to tell which is worse. The one about Creamer matters less to the major thrust of the article, but it reveals how little effort was put into the writing or editing of the piece. Look, I'm not expecting anyone who doesn't cover the LPGA regularly to visit Hound Dog's site or mine, but a quick trip to LPGA.com's pre-tournament interviews page or Paula Creamer's season performance rundown page would show that this couldn't possibly be Creamer's 2nd tournament back since surgery--more like her 10th!
The more I think about that mistake, though, the worse it feels. Making Creamer an afterthought in an article with a flawed major premise puts even more pressure on that premise. The New York Times at least softens the problem by titling the piece "Kerr Trying to Regain No. 1 Ranking," and while its core claim is technically correct, it nevertheless leaves key details out:
Miyazato, who has held the No. 1 ranking for eight straight weeks, tied for 27th at the Navistar Classic but is skipping this week's Northern California stop on the tour. Shin, Suzann Pettersen and Yani Tseng also are bypassing the tournament.
That means Kerr can regain the No. 1 ranking for third time this year with a win. Even a top-five finish will likely push her past Miyazato.
It's almost as if the AP's reporter is unaware that while Miyazato, Tseng, and Pettersen are indeed resting or travelling this week, Shin is playing in the JLPGA's Fujitsu Ladies. Given that she's only .24 points behind Kerr and .32 points behind Miyazato in the latest Rolex Rankings, a Shin win in Japan could complicate matters in next week's ranking considerably. The scenario in which Kerr passes Miyazato but Shin passes both of them isn't even in the realm of possibility for the AP's writer. How many points each player is losing from the event 2 years ago that's dropping out of the ranking will have an impact on how likely this scenario is.
You'd think that with so much attention on Tiger and Phil--and lately Lee and Martin--in the race for the #1 ranking in the OWGR, someone working for the AP would realize the Rolex Rankings use a similar methodology--if not the writer, then maybe a fact-checker or editor. I'm not saying Kerr can't or won't be #1 with a win this week in Northern California. I'm just pointing out that the same week Miyazato won on the LPGA and Shin on the JLPGA earlier this season, it was the latter who was the 1st to overtake Lorena Ochoa and become the LPGA's new #1. Shouldn't the AP have investigated the possibility that Shin could spoil Kerr's bid to replace Miyazato at the top of the world of women's golf?
[Update 1 (8:52 am): Randall Mell gets it. Why can't the AP?]
[Update 2 (9:03 am): You can trust the local media to get Creamer's story right. So why not the national media?]
Thursday, July 8, 2010
How Low Can the AP Go?
I haven't made the effort to identify who's responsible for the latest U.S. Women's Open preview from the Associated Press, but talk about using old talking points! The title: "Americans No Longer Dominate U.S. Women's Open." The theme: how badly Americans have been doing lately against international competition on women's golf's biggest stage.
The problems:
(1) Even Beth Ann Baldry, who's not the best-informed writer on women's golf in the world, knows that Cristie Kerr is the favorite to survive and maybe even tame Oakmont. Yet our anonymous AP writer takes 5 seconds on LPGA.com's stats page and decides that because she "doesn't rank among the LPGA's Top 10 in driving distance, accuracy or putting," the fact that she's #1 in scoring average and putts per green in regulation, #2 in wins, winnings, Player of the Year points, rounds in the 60s, and rounds under par, #4 in birdies per round, and #5 in greens in regulation (72.2%) and top-10-finish rate--oh, and by the way, is averaging almost 257 yards off the tee, hitting 72.4% of her fairways, and averaging 28.68 putts per round--just doesn't matter. 2 wins in the last 3 events? Pshaw. A 2-tournament winning streak in her last 2 events entered? Not even worth mentioning.
And when he (I'll betcha anything a guy wrote this!) tries to praise Kerr, he even gets the storyline wrong:
Um, dude, Kerr had chances to win 2 majors last year and let them slip through her fingers. Nobody stepped up to challenge her in the LPGA Championship for any serious length of time. Kerr still has to prove she's a closer in majors. That and the fact that she won at Locust Hill with a leaky driver--something that Oakmont will penalize much more severely--are the doubts that any knowledgable writer should be emphasizing about Kerr's chances to get her 2nd Open, 3rd major, and 15th career victory on the LPGA. Read Mike Dudurich or Randall Mell or Tim Maitland if you want to understand where Cristie Kerr is this season. Not this hack.
(2) So when most writers (and even Seouls Sisters fans like bangkokbobby) are focusing on how important for the tour and how inspiring for other American golfers Kerr's dominating victory at the LPGA Championship has been--do you think it's a coincidence that Christina Kim almost followed Kerr's formula (change putters, get focused mentally, and bring it on) to the letter last week and moved from 73rd to 59th in the Rolex Rankings with her playoff loss to Na Yeon Choi in the process?--our dogged correspondent decides to dig even deeper. What has he discovered?
I have 2 responses. 1st, how is this news? The supposed lack of American dominance has been going on for 15 years! But 2nd, is it really fair to American golfers to hold them to a higher standard than the golfers of every other nation? Read that paragraph again: Americans have won the Open more time than golfers from any other nation in the world! We're still #1, baby! w00t!!
Let's break this down further. Of the 8 players last year with the best chance to win, 4 were American (including naturalized citizen Candie Kung). Even with Inbee Park winning by a comparatively large margin in 2008, 3 Americans were among the 9 in the mix at some point on that Sunday. Yeah, Cristie Kerr basically carried the flag alone when she won in 2007, but the year before that 4 Americans were challenging Annika Sorenstam (who beat Pat Hurst in a playoff) and Se Ri Pak among those few players less than 7 shots off Sorenstam's and Hurst's pace. In 2005, Birdie Kim beat 2 promising American amateurs, Morgan Pressel and Brittany Lang (who have since developed into elite professionals), by 2 shots with her miraculous walkoff hole-out from the bunker, and Natalie Gulbis made it 3 Americans in the top 5. My point in bringing up all this not-so-ancient history is that Americans have disproportionately been in the mix in the Open, even in the last few years when the women's game's globalization has intensified exponentially.
Yes, I know there's a big difference between being in contention and winning. My point is that expecting American domination on the LPGA is incredibly out-of-date, just as it would be to expect Korean domination, or Japanese domination, or Spanish domination--or, for that matter, any single country's domination. The world of women's golf is by no means flat, and its center of gravity may well have shifted to Asia sometime last decade, but that's all the more reason to face reality with something less than jaw-on-the-ground stupefaction and incredulity.
(3) The U.S. Women's Open has actually been the staging ground for a lot of American cinderellas in recent years, from Michelle Wie to Stacy Lewis to Alexis Thompson to Jean Reynolds. And as Stuart Hall points out, it's become the locus of a debate about attending college vs. turning pro for teenagers of all nationalities. It's pretty significant that long-heralded, big-hitting Hawaii native Kimberly Kim turned pro at about the same time that just-shy-of-Hall of Famer Meg Mallon announced her retirement, eh? And that, as David Shefter and Rhonda Glenn point out, there are plenty of great stories from other new pros and top amateurs--including Americans Jennifer Song (ok, she had dual citizenship with South Korea, so both countries get to claim her) and Tiffany Joh (who's made the Open for the 1st time in her life!).
(4) Finally, it's not like I'm loving the new flavor of the week--how gosh ding dang tough the USGA can make an already over-the-top Oakmont--but at least that one's a case of lowering casual viewer/reader expectations scoring-wise (when it's not an excuse for having fun with a damsels in distress storyline). Americans having just a slightly better chance of winning this Open than golfers from any other single country is just "dog bites man" these days.
Look, it's not that I'm expecting Pulitzer-prize winning material from the AP when it comes to covering the LPGA. I'd accept just basic competence, thank you very much. That, and this Stephanie Wei interview with Paige Mackenzie edited down into a short article and sent around to every newspaper in the country!
The problems:
(1) Even Beth Ann Baldry, who's not the best-informed writer on women's golf in the world, knows that Cristie Kerr is the favorite to survive and maybe even tame Oakmont. Yet our anonymous AP writer takes 5 seconds on LPGA.com's stats page and decides that because she "doesn't rank among the LPGA's Top 10 in driving distance, accuracy or putting," the fact that she's #1 in scoring average and putts per green in regulation, #2 in wins, winnings, Player of the Year points, rounds in the 60s, and rounds under par, #4 in birdies per round, and #5 in greens in regulation (72.2%) and top-10-finish rate--oh, and by the way, is averaging almost 257 yards off the tee, hitting 72.4% of her fairways, and averaging 28.68 putts per round--just doesn't matter. 2 wins in the last 3 events? Pshaw. A 2-tournament winning streak in her last 2 events entered? Not even worth mentioning.
And when he (I'll betcha anything a guy wrote this!) tries to praise Kerr, he even gets the storyline wrong:
Give her the 36- or 54-hole lead, like she owned last year at cross-state Saucon Valley before losing out to Ji, and it may be difficult to get it back.
Um, dude, Kerr had chances to win 2 majors last year and let them slip through her fingers. Nobody stepped up to challenge her in the LPGA Championship for any serious length of time. Kerr still has to prove she's a closer in majors. That and the fact that she won at Locust Hill with a leaky driver--something that Oakmont will penalize much more severely--are the doubts that any knowledgable writer should be emphasizing about Kerr's chances to get her 2nd Open, 3rd major, and 15th career victory on the LPGA. Read Mike Dudurich or Randall Mell or Tim Maitland if you want to understand where Cristie Kerr is this season. Not this hack.
(2) So when most writers (and even Seouls Sisters fans like bangkokbobby) are focusing on how important for the tour and how inspiring for other American golfers Kerr's dominating victory at the LPGA Championship has been--do you think it's a coincidence that Christina Kim almost followed Kerr's formula (change putters, get focused mentally, and bring it on) to the letter last week and moved from 73rd to 59th in the Rolex Rankings with her playoff loss to Na Yeon Choi in the process?--our dogged correspondent decides to dig even deeper. What has he discovered?
An American victory in its national championship, once all but a certainty, now would be a surprise. Cristie Kerr is the only American to win in the last five years and, since 1995, there have been nearly as many South Korean champions (4) as U.S. winners (5). By comparison, Americans won all but five Women's Opens from 1946-1994.
I have 2 responses. 1st, how is this news? The supposed lack of American dominance has been going on for 15 years! But 2nd, is it really fair to American golfers to hold them to a higher standard than the golfers of every other nation? Read that paragraph again: Americans have won the Open more time than golfers from any other nation in the world! We're still #1, baby! w00t!!
Let's break this down further. Of the 8 players last year with the best chance to win, 4 were American (including naturalized citizen Candie Kung). Even with Inbee Park winning by a comparatively large margin in 2008, 3 Americans were among the 9 in the mix at some point on that Sunday. Yeah, Cristie Kerr basically carried the flag alone when she won in 2007, but the year before that 4 Americans were challenging Annika Sorenstam (who beat Pat Hurst in a playoff) and Se Ri Pak among those few players less than 7 shots off Sorenstam's and Hurst's pace. In 2005, Birdie Kim beat 2 promising American amateurs, Morgan Pressel and Brittany Lang (who have since developed into elite professionals), by 2 shots with her miraculous walkoff hole-out from the bunker, and Natalie Gulbis made it 3 Americans in the top 5. My point in bringing up all this not-so-ancient history is that Americans have disproportionately been in the mix in the Open, even in the last few years when the women's game's globalization has intensified exponentially.
Yes, I know there's a big difference between being in contention and winning. My point is that expecting American domination on the LPGA is incredibly out-of-date, just as it would be to expect Korean domination, or Japanese domination, or Spanish domination--or, for that matter, any single country's domination. The world of women's golf is by no means flat, and its center of gravity may well have shifted to Asia sometime last decade, but that's all the more reason to face reality with something less than jaw-on-the-ground stupefaction and incredulity.
(3) The U.S. Women's Open has actually been the staging ground for a lot of American cinderellas in recent years, from Michelle Wie to Stacy Lewis to Alexis Thompson to Jean Reynolds. And as Stuart Hall points out, it's become the locus of a debate about attending college vs. turning pro for teenagers of all nationalities. It's pretty significant that long-heralded, big-hitting Hawaii native Kimberly Kim turned pro at about the same time that just-shy-of-Hall of Famer Meg Mallon announced her retirement, eh? And that, as David Shefter and Rhonda Glenn point out, there are plenty of great stories from other new pros and top amateurs--including Americans Jennifer Song (ok, she had dual citizenship with South Korea, so both countries get to claim her) and Tiffany Joh (who's made the Open for the 1st time in her life!).
(4) Finally, it's not like I'm loving the new flavor of the week--how gosh ding dang tough the USGA can make an already over-the-top Oakmont--but at least that one's a case of lowering casual viewer/reader expectations scoring-wise (when it's not an excuse for having fun with a damsels in distress storyline). Americans having just a slightly better chance of winning this Open than golfers from any other single country is just "dog bites man" these days.
Look, it's not that I'm expecting Pulitzer-prize winning material from the AP when it comes to covering the LPGA. I'd accept just basic competence, thank you very much. That, and this Stephanie Wei interview with Paige Mackenzie edited down into a short article and sent around to every newspaper in the country!
Friday, November 27, 2009
Paging Mick Elliott
I'm beginning to think Golf Fanhouse has it in for the LPGA. After getting rid of Shane Bacon, who at least caddies for Erica Blasberg every once in a while, they've come up with a new winner in Mick Elliott, who won't let an opportunity to diss the LPGA go by without taking another cheap shot. The latest case in point? His piece promoting the Legends Tour (and in turn being promoted on Golf.com's main page).
Don't get me wrong: it's a great thing for women's golf that the LPGA's veterans have a league of their own--someday it should have all the appeal of the men's Champions Tour and more. This is the tour for golf fans who harken back to the good ol' days when women golfers were as well-known and respected as their male counterparts, when all the golfers were white, and when Americans were brave. Let the LPGA reach out to new fans in this country and around the world--who cares about that "global youth" demographic anyway? As living legend Nancy Scranton knows,
Wait, you've never heard of Nancy Scranton? Shame on you! You know, she's the player who won 3 times over a celebrated 23-year career in which she finished in the top 20 on the money list twice? The player whose last good seasons on the LPGA were in 2000 and 2001, when she helped hold the line against the barbarian invasion lead by the likes of Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, Se Ri Pak, and Grace Park? If this isn't jogging your memory, than you're probably going to find it hard to relate to the players on the Legends Tour. Going from quotes like this, it's almost as if Elliott is trying to make it sound like the Legend Tour's target market is limited to those who believe the LPGA has been on a steady decline since the beginning of the Sorenstam Era in the mid-1990s. Why else would he throw in a gratuitous swipe at LPGA Tour Championship winner and Annika disciple Anna Nordqvist early in his piece?
Obviously there are many impressive players on the Legends Tour. Even lesser-known golfers like breast cancer survivor Colleen Walker, a 9-time champion on the LPGA, Vare Trophy winner in 1988, and winner of the du Maurier Classic, a major in 1997, would be a blast to watch, 27 years after her rookie season. But why set the LPGA and the Legends Tour against each other? Surely it's beneath Walker to concern-troll the LPGA for Golf Fanhouse, but there she is, quoted as saying, "It's kind of sad, all the work we did as players and to see it kind of tumble. I remember when we had 45 events. Now they're going to have 24 and most aren't even full field." Maybe if Walker's career had started a decade earlier, she'd have a better perspective on the possibility of the LPGA bouncing back from the depths. If the LPGA could recover from an American economy in the early '70s rocked by disputes over civil rights, desegregation, Vietnam, and Watergate, and roiled by the oil crisis, it can certainly bounce back by the 20-teens from a global financial meltdown.
The bottom line is, there's no need to bash the LPGA to promote the Legends Tour. With Sherri Steinhauer kicking off her return to competitive golf from 2 hip surgeries with a win at Innisbrook in the tour's 1st major this past Sunday, it's clear the tour can provide opportunities for the LPGA's mid-40-somethings to tune up their games and prepare for comebacks. As Tom Watson's near-miss at the '09 Open Championship shows, not to mention the collective successes of the PGA's own 40-somethings this decade, age does not have to be a barrier to success on the top tours in the world. Still, as Hall of Famers Juli Inkster, Sorenstam, and Webb approach the age requirement for entry into the Legends Tour, I'm hoping that these players known for nurturing young talent and supporting the LPGA take on leadership roles in it and help put a stop to the friendly fire.
If the Legends Tour were to provide a bridge between generations of LPGA fans by seeking partnerships and synchronizing schedules with the Futures Tour, both tours would benefit. Imagine if tomorrow's stars were doing pro-ams with today's legends early in the week, followed by the legends' competition in the middle of the week, and leading up to the Futures Tour event itself on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Both tours could yield expanded schedules, bigger crowds, increased purses, and more charitable giving from such an investment. Working together, they'd strengthen the LPGA and help grow the game. What's not to like about that?
Here's hoping for more 1st-time winners in 2010!
It won't be long before this year's crop are as well-known as anyone in golf not named Tiger Woods:
[Update 1 (4:36 am): Ouch, now Steve Elling, in his year-end Up & Down column, piles on the "LPGA spending too much time abroad next season" meme. What Elling fails to get is that 4 of the international events are in North America and that playing in Asia actually gives you the jump on getting your scores in the morning paper in the U.S. He's absolutely right, though, that in a schedule with so many gaps in it already, there's little reason to put the majority of the LPGA's majors in the shadow of the PGA's majors. At least with the golfy media the way they have been acting. Now, if Michelle Wie keeps being the biggest story in American golf the way Ji-Yai Shin even overshadowed figure skater Yu Na Kim last week in Korea--Elling points out the tape-delayed (?) Ochoa Invitational doubled the fall series PGA event's ratings the week before--things might change. But Elling needs to realize what it means that the LPGA has so many players who are among the biggest names in their countries' sports pantheons: Karrie Webb in Australia, Lorena Ochoa in Mexico, Suzanne Pettersen in Norway, Ai Miyazato in Japan, Ya Ni Tseng in Taiwan, Shanshan Feng in China, and so on. The LPGA would be foolish not to capitalize on one of its greatest strengths. Once more, with feeling: globalization is not the problem; the solution is for U.S. and North American sponsors to step up!]
[Update 2 (4:45 am): It's really saying something when Mark Reason, who earlier this season called on the LPGA to enact protectionist measures and limit the number of foreign players on tour, is more optimistic about the LPGA's embrace of globalization than most any American reporter. It took Michelle Wie winning to get him to go there, but hey, I'll take what I can get at this point. Not that I'm giving him a pass for his passing along the "lack of relateability" meme and dissing Western NY as the host site of an LPGA major--not to mention his lack of understanding of the complex relations between nationalisms and globalization--but if someone who recently saw the LPGA's only hope as pushing the barbarians back outside the gates now sees hope in Wie leading an American global resurgence, that's progress in my book.]
[Update 3 (12/4/09, 6:18 am): LPGA.com should be featuring the photo of Na Yeon Choi featured in this Seoul Sisters.com thread. Not bad for someone who's never owned a skirt and heels before!]
Don't get me wrong: it's a great thing for women's golf that the LPGA's veterans have a league of their own--someday it should have all the appeal of the men's Champions Tour and more. This is the tour for golf fans who harken back to the good ol' days when women golfers were as well-known and respected as their male counterparts, when all the golfers were white, and when Americans were brave. Let the LPGA reach out to new fans in this country and around the world--who cares about that "global youth" demographic anyway? As living legend Nancy Scranton knows,
[T]he people who grew up watching us are the ones who go to golf tournaments anyway. It's not the 20-somethings. It's the mid-40s and older. And they are like, "wow, I can get right up next to Pat Bradley or Patty Sheehan or Jan Stephenson and everybody is happy to chat."
....I don't want to bad-mouth the LPGA. But we are more recognizable. And fans can relate to us more.
Wait, you've never heard of Nancy Scranton? Shame on you! You know, she's the player who won 3 times over a celebrated 23-year career in which she finished in the top 20 on the money list twice? The player whose last good seasons on the LPGA were in 2000 and 2001, when she helped hold the line against the barbarian invasion lead by the likes of Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, Se Ri Pak, and Grace Park? If this isn't jogging your memory, than you're probably going to find it hard to relate to the players on the Legends Tour. Going from quotes like this, it's almost as if Elliott is trying to make it sound like the Legend Tour's target market is limited to those who believe the LPGA has been on a steady decline since the beginning of the Sorenstam Era in the mid-1990s. Why else would he throw in a gratuitous swipe at LPGA Tour Championship winner and Annika disciple Anna Nordqvist early in his piece?
Obviously there are many impressive players on the Legends Tour. Even lesser-known golfers like breast cancer survivor Colleen Walker, a 9-time champion on the LPGA, Vare Trophy winner in 1988, and winner of the du Maurier Classic, a major in 1997, would be a blast to watch, 27 years after her rookie season. But why set the LPGA and the Legends Tour against each other? Surely it's beneath Walker to concern-troll the LPGA for Golf Fanhouse, but there she is, quoted as saying, "It's kind of sad, all the work we did as players and to see it kind of tumble. I remember when we had 45 events. Now they're going to have 24 and most aren't even full field." Maybe if Walker's career had started a decade earlier, she'd have a better perspective on the possibility of the LPGA bouncing back from the depths. If the LPGA could recover from an American economy in the early '70s rocked by disputes over civil rights, desegregation, Vietnam, and Watergate, and roiled by the oil crisis, it can certainly bounce back by the 20-teens from a global financial meltdown.
The bottom line is, there's no need to bash the LPGA to promote the Legends Tour. With Sherri Steinhauer kicking off her return to competitive golf from 2 hip surgeries with a win at Innisbrook in the tour's 1st major this past Sunday, it's clear the tour can provide opportunities for the LPGA's mid-40-somethings to tune up their games and prepare for comebacks. As Tom Watson's near-miss at the '09 Open Championship shows, not to mention the collective successes of the PGA's own 40-somethings this decade, age does not have to be a barrier to success on the top tours in the world. Still, as Hall of Famers Juli Inkster, Sorenstam, and Webb approach the age requirement for entry into the Legends Tour, I'm hoping that these players known for nurturing young talent and supporting the LPGA take on leadership roles in it and help put a stop to the friendly fire.
If the Legends Tour were to provide a bridge between generations of LPGA fans by seeking partnerships and synchronizing schedules with the Futures Tour, both tours would benefit. Imagine if tomorrow's stars were doing pro-ams with today's legends early in the week, followed by the legends' competition in the middle of the week, and leading up to the Futures Tour event itself on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Both tours could yield expanded schedules, bigger crowds, increased purses, and more charitable giving from such an investment. Working together, they'd strengthen the LPGA and help grow the game. What's not to like about that?
Here's hoping for more 1st-time winners in 2010!
It won't be long before this year's crop are as well-known as anyone in golf not named Tiger Woods:
[Update 1 (4:36 am): Ouch, now Steve Elling, in his year-end Up & Down column, piles on the "LPGA spending too much time abroad next season" meme. What Elling fails to get is that 4 of the international events are in North America and that playing in Asia actually gives you the jump on getting your scores in the morning paper in the U.S. He's absolutely right, though, that in a schedule with so many gaps in it already, there's little reason to put the majority of the LPGA's majors in the shadow of the PGA's majors. At least with the golfy media the way they have been acting. Now, if Michelle Wie keeps being the biggest story in American golf the way Ji-Yai Shin even overshadowed figure skater Yu Na Kim last week in Korea--Elling points out the tape-delayed (?) Ochoa Invitational doubled the fall series PGA event's ratings the week before--things might change. But Elling needs to realize what it means that the LPGA has so many players who are among the biggest names in their countries' sports pantheons: Karrie Webb in Australia, Lorena Ochoa in Mexico, Suzanne Pettersen in Norway, Ai Miyazato in Japan, Ya Ni Tseng in Taiwan, Shanshan Feng in China, and so on. The LPGA would be foolish not to capitalize on one of its greatest strengths. Once more, with feeling: globalization is not the problem; the solution is for U.S. and North American sponsors to step up!]
[Update 2 (4:45 am): It's really saying something when Mark Reason, who earlier this season called on the LPGA to enact protectionist measures and limit the number of foreign players on tour, is more optimistic about the LPGA's embrace of globalization than most any American reporter. It took Michelle Wie winning to get him to go there, but hey, I'll take what I can get at this point. Not that I'm giving him a pass for his passing along the "lack of relateability" meme and dissing Western NY as the host site of an LPGA major--not to mention his lack of understanding of the complex relations between nationalisms and globalization--but if someone who recently saw the LPGA's only hope as pushing the barbarians back outside the gates now sees hope in Wie leading an American global resurgence, that's progress in my book.]
[Update 3 (12/4/09, 6:18 am): LPGA.com should be featuring the photo of Na Yeon Choi featured in this Seoul Sisters.com thread. Not bad for someone who's never owned a skirt and heels before!]
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Paging Bill Huffman...and Geoff Shackelford
Bill Huffman is a very angry man right now. And it's hard for me to blame him. If it were the Wegmans in Rochester that had bitten the dust and not the Phoenix event in his neck of the, uh, desert, I'd be far madder than he is. But with Geoff Shackelford egging him on, the twin targets of Huffman's rant are likely to be lost, with the spotlight likely to be on the "LPGA leaving Phoenix," as Shackelford puts it, and not on Huffman's more accurate "we will rue the day we let this tournament get away" line.
What Huffman inconsistently acknowledges is that it takes 2 to tango (see my 4th and 5th points in my own hitchhiker's guide to the 2010 schedule). If there's no LPGA tournament in Phoenix next season, they have only themselves to blame. Check the following lines from his piece where he as much as acknowledges this:
So just who should Huffman be pissed off at here? Michael Whan for recognizing that the women's game has gone global? Uh, Bill, it was Marty Evans and Zayra Calderon who were in charge of salvaging the 2010 schedule after Bivens left town with 9 tournaments set in stone. How about the LPGA leadership for taking the tour where the most committed fans, sponsors, and tv entities are based? So they're supposed to pass up opportunities abroad out of, what, patriotism? OK, how about the tour for not having the financial resources to float the Phoenix event for the 2nd-straight year? Ah, now we're on to something! Huffman is mad because the LPGA wouldn't provide Phoenix with another year of corporate welfare. Let's see, they're losing revenues, laying people off, on the hook for the LPGA Tour Championship (which is riddled with TBAs and TBDs), and they should make their #1 priority doing for Phoenix what Phoenix can't do for itself?
Look, Bill, this is no time to wax nostalgic:
Don't mourn: organize! If Huffman would take a chill pill, stop, and think, he'd realize he should be talking to everyone in Phoenix (and, I suppose, some people in Portland) about putting in a bid to host the LPGA Tour Championship next season in Arizona. If the LPGA is going to lose domestic events in the short run, far better to upgrade the tournaments that have shown the most loyalty and support to the tour than to let them die. With the LPGA Championship coming to Rochester, NY--masking, as Hound Dog pointed out, a net loss of 1 tournament from the 2008 schedule--why doesn't Phoenix follow suit and put up some serious money to host the tour's season-ending event?
For the longer term, the issue is not globalization or the success of golfers of Asian descent. I'm a fan of both trends, but even I don't see all that much room for the LPGA to expand in the Asian Pacific. Let's say Whan follows my advice and seeks co-sponsorships with the tours in that region, so that, say, by 2012--following the return of the ADT Championship to Florida and the upgrading of the unofficial event in Rio to the HSBC Women's World Match Play Championship in late January--the LPGA goes from Korea (with the KLPGA) to Thailand (with the JLPGA) to Taiwan (and now I'm really dreaming here, with the CLPGA) to Australia (with the LET and ALPG) to Singapore (with everyone) for 6 events in February and March--all regular full-field tournaments, with cuts. Wouldn't taking the risk on that kind of international travel be a better deal for the LPGA's rank-and-file than tuning up on the Cactus Tour and the SunCoast Series? After all, the top players can miss cuts just like everyone else. That's kind of how they stop being top players.
Not only could such globalization benefit American players, but so would moving the later Asian swing to follow fairly directly upon the European swing, as Happy Fan has suggested over at Seoul Sisters.com, and upgrading them to full-field events with cuts. The weather would be better in late August and early September than late October and early November in China, Korea, and Japan (and perhaps 1 or 2 more Asian countries, but more likely India than Malaysia or the Philippines, as Huffman snarks at the end of his piece), plus it would be a great follow-up to the annual mid-August synchronized Solheim/Kyoraku-Pinx Cup global showdown I've been calling for for awhile now. And best of all, doing this would allow the LPGA to concentrate its North American events--including the ones in Canada and Mexico, which almost everyone not named Bill Jempty is counting toward the international total when they're played in the same time zones as American ones--in a stretch run in the fall that could capitalize on the momentum from the late summer abroad and drum up more interest in what are just as likely to be tight pennant races then as now.
So even a globalization booster like myself can't envision more than 10-12 LPGA events in the Asian Pacific and South America in the medium term--and just about all of them would be co-sponsored with other women's tours, if I had my way. That puts the ball squarely in the court of the LPGA's North American sponsors. If they would step up and commit to doubling the number of events outside North America, the LPGA would have a minimum of 30-36 events by 2012 and globalization would end up being a win-win for everyone. I don't see why this scenario is any less realistic than Huffman's Chicken Little act.
In the meantime, there's nothing stopping American players from trying to get dual membership on the KLPGA (or, more likely) the JLPGA starting in 2011. Let's say you're a LPGA player or hopeful who doesn't finish in the top 100 on the money list or the top 20 in Q-School at the end of 2010. Why supplement your limited LPGA schedule in 2011 by playing the Futures Tour for peanuts when you could be making a half-million dollars on a minimal schedule on the JLPGA? Sure, the competition is tougher over there than on the FT, but the rewards are much much greater. And if you're tanking against LPGA competition, struggling to make $125K and keep your card for the following season by finishing in the top 80 on the money list, why not play more events and give yourself a fighting chance for the top 50 on the JLPGA (where you'll be making the equivalent of $150K or more)? Language barriers? Culture shock? Fear of the unknown? Ah, so you must really believe the Asian players who come over here are a lot better than you, eh?
The bottom line is, American sponsors and players are going to have to step up their games if they want to compete on a planetary scale. Enough ranting and joking, already! It's time to get serious!
[Update 1 (9:00 am): Are my eyes deceiving me? Is Sal Johnson making more sense than Bill Huffman? Well, Huffman remains the better writer, that's for sure. But Johnson is showing himself to be the better thinker, on the schedule and on Whan, in particular.]
[Update 2 (2:15 pm): Wonder if John Paul Newport has been drinking the Mostly Harmless koolaid, as well?]
[Update 3 (2:25 pm): Hmm, unofficial talks with ADT for 2011? The only change I'd want to see in the format is start with 64, get it down to 32 with a stroke-play cut, then do 2 rounds of match play, and have the final 8 play 18 for $1M.]
[Update 4 (2:30 pm): Nice job by Randall Mell on the players and Whan. And Wie's ankle.]
[Update 5 (11/23/09, 12:53 pm): Karen Crouse looks at how one bad season has affected Reilley Rankin's finances and how the 2010 schedule puts extra pressure on her to perform in her final events this season. Too bad for her she's +6 over her last 18 holes at the LPGA Tour Championship after putting herself in contention over the 1st 25....]
[Update 6 (3:12 pm): Just noticed Bill Jempty's critique of Huffman. Check his link to Dave Seanor's piece, too.]
[Update 7 (7:34 pm): Just got a chance to actually read Seanor's piece. Turns out it's literally SF. And Seanor makes the mistake of many bad SF writers of extrapolating from blips. His look at the "International LPGA" in 2019 is basically calling for all women's tours to merge (saving their national tours as developmental paths to the planetary circuit) and then to merge with the PGA Tour. I don't see it happening in this half of the 21st century. As anyone who paid attention to the globalization bust after the '90s bubble popped knows, there's nothing inevitable about it. Competitive nationalism, particularly among the Asian tours, will only increase with the run-up to the 2016 and 2020 Olympics. Barring a serious economic crisis in Asia, there's no way the fast-growing CLPGA and KLPGA would agree to merge with the JLPGA, much less the LPGA. Furthermore, Seanor's scenario is predicated on the LPGA continuing to decline domestically. I just don't see that happening.]
[Update 8 (1/4/09, 6:41 am): Don't know how I missed Jeff Skinner's mid-October call for the LPGA to embrace globalization.]
What Huffman inconsistently acknowledges is that it takes 2 to tango (see my 4th and 5th points in my own hitchhiker's guide to the 2010 schedule). If there's no LPGA tournament in Phoenix next season, they have only themselves to blame. Check the following lines from his piece where he as much as acknowledges this:
After all, it wasn’t that long ago--2005--that the LPGA left Tucson after a similar run ended with no corporate sponsor.
In fact, with no real group in charge of pushing to bring the women's tour back to the Valley any time soon, there was not even anyone to call locally for a reaction. I did try the Portland-based Tournament Golf Foundation, which had managed the event for the past six years, but its spokesperson failed to call back....
[W]hen the LPGA's shrunken 2010 sked was released Wednesday, there really were no surprises as far as Phoenix was concerned. Most people had expected Arizona to be left off the master plan chiefly because corporate sponsorship for golf in the Valley has been nil since the economy went belly up. Or did you forget that the Champions and Nationwide tours met a similar demise here, and that the FBR Open is desperately searching for a title sponsor?
So just who should Huffman be pissed off at here? Michael Whan for recognizing that the women's game has gone global? Uh, Bill, it was Marty Evans and Zayra Calderon who were in charge of salvaging the 2010 schedule after Bivens left town with 9 tournaments set in stone. How about the LPGA leadership for taking the tour where the most committed fans, sponsors, and tv entities are based? So they're supposed to pass up opportunities abroad out of, what, patriotism? OK, how about the tour for not having the financial resources to float the Phoenix event for the 2nd-straight year? Ah, now we're on to something! Huffman is mad because the LPGA wouldn't provide Phoenix with another year of corporate welfare. Let's see, they're losing revenues, laying people off, on the hook for the LPGA Tour Championship (which is riddled with TBAs and TBDs), and they should make their #1 priority doing for Phoenix what Phoenix can't do for itself?
Look, Bill, this is no time to wax nostalgic:
What's hard to believe is the LPGA in Phoenix died without a whimper despite it being so successful, annually drawing over 100,000 fans for the week. A truly amazing downward spiral considering all that’s happened here since one-time superstar Jan Stephenson captured the original event in Sun City way back in 1980.
I mean who can forget Annika Sorenstam's one-and-only 59 recorded here in 2001, one of her three victories in Phoenix? Or Laura Davies' record-breaking four in row at Moon Valley from 1994 to 1997? Or the fact that Lorena Ochoa helped propel herself to No. 1 in the world thanks in part to her back-to-back victories at Superstition Mountain in 2007-08, a stunning feat that thrilled her Hispanic following and created a truly rare moment in the lily-white sport of golf?
Don't mourn: organize! If Huffman would take a chill pill, stop, and think, he'd realize he should be talking to everyone in Phoenix (and, I suppose, some people in Portland) about putting in a bid to host the LPGA Tour Championship next season in Arizona. If the LPGA is going to lose domestic events in the short run, far better to upgrade the tournaments that have shown the most loyalty and support to the tour than to let them die. With the LPGA Championship coming to Rochester, NY--masking, as Hound Dog pointed out, a net loss of 1 tournament from the 2008 schedule--why doesn't Phoenix follow suit and put up some serious money to host the tour's season-ending event?
For the longer term, the issue is not globalization or the success of golfers of Asian descent. I'm a fan of both trends, but even I don't see all that much room for the LPGA to expand in the Asian Pacific. Let's say Whan follows my advice and seeks co-sponsorships with the tours in that region, so that, say, by 2012--following the return of the ADT Championship to Florida and the upgrading of the unofficial event in Rio to the HSBC Women's World Match Play Championship in late January--the LPGA goes from Korea (with the KLPGA) to Thailand (with the JLPGA) to Taiwan (and now I'm really dreaming here, with the CLPGA) to Australia (with the LET and ALPG) to Singapore (with everyone) for 6 events in February and March--all regular full-field tournaments, with cuts. Wouldn't taking the risk on that kind of international travel be a better deal for the LPGA's rank-and-file than tuning up on the Cactus Tour and the SunCoast Series? After all, the top players can miss cuts just like everyone else. That's kind of how they stop being top players.
Not only could such globalization benefit American players, but so would moving the later Asian swing to follow fairly directly upon the European swing, as Happy Fan has suggested over at Seoul Sisters.com, and upgrading them to full-field events with cuts. The weather would be better in late August and early September than late October and early November in China, Korea, and Japan (and perhaps 1 or 2 more Asian countries, but more likely India than Malaysia or the Philippines, as Huffman snarks at the end of his piece), plus it would be a great follow-up to the annual mid-August synchronized Solheim/Kyoraku-Pinx Cup global showdown I've been calling for for awhile now. And best of all, doing this would allow the LPGA to concentrate its North American events--including the ones in Canada and Mexico, which almost everyone not named Bill Jempty is counting toward the international total when they're played in the same time zones as American ones--in a stretch run in the fall that could capitalize on the momentum from the late summer abroad and drum up more interest in what are just as likely to be tight pennant races then as now.
So even a globalization booster like myself can't envision more than 10-12 LPGA events in the Asian Pacific and South America in the medium term--and just about all of them would be co-sponsored with other women's tours, if I had my way. That puts the ball squarely in the court of the LPGA's North American sponsors. If they would step up and commit to doubling the number of events outside North America, the LPGA would have a minimum of 30-36 events by 2012 and globalization would end up being a win-win for everyone. I don't see why this scenario is any less realistic than Huffman's Chicken Little act.
In the meantime, there's nothing stopping American players from trying to get dual membership on the KLPGA (or, more likely) the JLPGA starting in 2011. Let's say you're a LPGA player or hopeful who doesn't finish in the top 100 on the money list or the top 20 in Q-School at the end of 2010. Why supplement your limited LPGA schedule in 2011 by playing the Futures Tour for peanuts when you could be making a half-million dollars on a minimal schedule on the JLPGA? Sure, the competition is tougher over there than on the FT, but the rewards are much much greater. And if you're tanking against LPGA competition, struggling to make $125K and keep your card for the following season by finishing in the top 80 on the money list, why not play more events and give yourself a fighting chance for the top 50 on the JLPGA (where you'll be making the equivalent of $150K or more)? Language barriers? Culture shock? Fear of the unknown? Ah, so you must really believe the Asian players who come over here are a lot better than you, eh?
The bottom line is, American sponsors and players are going to have to step up their games if they want to compete on a planetary scale. Enough ranting and joking, already! It's time to get serious!
[Update 1 (9:00 am): Are my eyes deceiving me? Is Sal Johnson making more sense than Bill Huffman? Well, Huffman remains the better writer, that's for sure. But Johnson is showing himself to be the better thinker, on the schedule and on Whan, in particular.]
[Update 2 (2:15 pm): Wonder if John Paul Newport has been drinking the Mostly Harmless koolaid, as well?]
[Update 3 (2:25 pm): Hmm, unofficial talks with ADT for 2011? The only change I'd want to see in the format is start with 64, get it down to 32 with a stroke-play cut, then do 2 rounds of match play, and have the final 8 play 18 for $1M.]
[Update 4 (2:30 pm): Nice job by Randall Mell on the players and Whan. And Wie's ankle.]
[Update 5 (11/23/09, 12:53 pm): Karen Crouse looks at how one bad season has affected Reilley Rankin's finances and how the 2010 schedule puts extra pressure on her to perform in her final events this season. Too bad for her she's +6 over her last 18 holes at the LPGA Tour Championship after putting herself in contention over the 1st 25....]
[Update 6 (3:12 pm): Just noticed Bill Jempty's critique of Huffman. Check his link to Dave Seanor's piece, too.]
[Update 7 (7:34 pm): Just got a chance to actually read Seanor's piece. Turns out it's literally SF. And Seanor makes the mistake of many bad SF writers of extrapolating from blips. His look at the "International LPGA" in 2019 is basically calling for all women's tours to merge (saving their national tours as developmental paths to the planetary circuit) and then to merge with the PGA Tour. I don't see it happening in this half of the 21st century. As anyone who paid attention to the globalization bust after the '90s bubble popped knows, there's nothing inevitable about it. Competitive nationalism, particularly among the Asian tours, will only increase with the run-up to the 2016 and 2020 Olympics. Barring a serious economic crisis in Asia, there's no way the fast-growing CLPGA and KLPGA would agree to merge with the JLPGA, much less the LPGA. Furthermore, Seanor's scenario is predicated on the LPGA continuing to decline domestically. I just don't see that happening.]
[Update 8 (1/4/09, 6:41 am): Don't know how I missed Jeff Skinner's mid-October call for the LPGA to embrace globalization.]
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Paging Global Golf Post
Following a suggestion from a long-time reader, I subscribed to Global Golf Post, a new Orlando-based digital magazine edited by Brian Hewitt (formerly of Golf Channel), in hopes that I'd learn something new about golf on this planet. Well, after reading their November 9th issue, I've come to the conclusion that the editorial staff put a lot more effort into their media kit.
Consider this: in their 19-page inaugural issue, Futures Tour Q-School got slightly more inches than the Mizuno Classic (and they were better inches, as they were drawn from a Lisa Mickey press release instead of from the AP). And that was it from the world of women's golf. Seriously.
Anything on the joint LET-KLPGA event with the silly name going on that week? On Hee Kyung Seo clinching KLPGA Player of the Year? On Shinobu Moromizato, Sakura Yokomine, Mi-Jeong Jeon, and Chie Arimura battling it out down the stretch on the JLPGA? On the sharp rise in dual LPGA-JLPGA membership attempts this year--mostly from Koreans on the LPGA planning to try out JLPGA Q-School in the last week of November and 1st of December? Or even on the no-brainer: the global nature of the LPGA's pennant races--the tightest since the days when Karrie Webb and Grace Park were challenging Annika Sorenstam for the dominance in wins, winnings, and scoring average? Of course not. But, hey, there was room for a moderately funny (and half-page!) top 10 to-do list for incoming commissioner Michael Whan. w00t!
I mean, come on! Not even a Rickie, Jamie, Rory, Ryo, Danny, Tadd, etc., Global Generation Next piece? Or a cautionary tale on the last crop of Global It Boys' recent travails? You got a week to get each issue out and this is what you come up with? Really?!
As for the sequel, well, I expected to have the link to it in my inbox by now and was eager to see what Hewitt & Co. decided to do with Michelle Wie's breakthrough win in Lorena's tournament in Guadalajara coming the same week Tiger won down under. Hasn't happened. Still waiting.
Opening-issue glitches are no big deal in the big picture. But they do make me worry that the Global Golf Post people don't yet get that their main competition is not print media. The week before their 1st issue came out, I learned more from the blogs on my sidebar and my twitter feed (and yes, the golfy media's web outposts) than they could gather and get permission to reprint. Yeah, it's great that they have Lewine Mair, Lorne Rubenstein, and Leonard Shapiro, among others. But if they don't approach content in a more comprehensive and creative way and really commit to covering the wide world of golf, they won't even be able to keep giving this thing away for very much longer.
To be sure, they're just getting out of the gates...have room to grow...are just finding their sea legs...and all that. Cliches well taken. But the last thing Global Golf Post needs right now is an "Attaboy" or "You go, girl!" They say they "know precisely what super avid core golfers want in a weekly golf publication...and as importantly, what they do not want." I call bullshit. It's not just that they're not even 25% of the way to that "weekly summary of the competitive game as played the previous week at both the professional and amateur levels, around the world" goal from their media kit. No, the problem is much bigger than that. As long as they rely on the "news, results, and commentary" model from print journalism, they are dead dead dead. How about artistry, background, and context? How about depth, expertise, and flair? Shall I go through the rest of the alphabet?
Seriously, the "super avid core golfer digital native" audience Global Golf Post is supposedly targeting already knows how to find out the results of pretty much any competition around the world and can find all kinds of news and commentary from existing corporate media web sites, high- and low-traffic blogs and microblogs, player and fan sites, and google searches. So basically the only ones willing to pay for this digital magazine down the road will be, uh, people who don't want to do any of that for themselves? Aren't those precisely the people who seem to be pretty satisfied with the online offerings of ESPN, Golf.com, Golf Channel, Golf Digest, Golfweek, Golf Observer, and Golfstat.com? Or at least who will reluctantly migrate to them when the last golf magazine has finally been printed? Last I checked, I got plenty of Tiger and Phil in Shanghai and Tiger Down Under from those sources. I don't need more of the same and I don't see why the "super avid core golfer digital newbies" that Global Golf Post is really targeting would, either.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not cancelling my subscription just yet. But basically I'm getting the feeling so far that I'm driving by a car wreck, craning my neck to see who was hurt, how bad the damage was, and what the paramedics are doing. That's not even close to what I was hoping for. Or what Global Golf Post could be and do.
[Update 1 (10:21 am): Whoops, turns out Hewitt doesn't pick up editing responsibilities until January 1, 2010, so I'll give him a little more time to change my mind than most people will give Michael Whan when he starts his job as LPGA Commissioner a few days later!]
Consider this: in their 19-page inaugural issue, Futures Tour Q-School got slightly more inches than the Mizuno Classic (and they were better inches, as they were drawn from a Lisa Mickey press release instead of from the AP). And that was it from the world of women's golf. Seriously.
Anything on the joint LET-KLPGA event with the silly name going on that week? On Hee Kyung Seo clinching KLPGA Player of the Year? On Shinobu Moromizato, Sakura Yokomine, Mi-Jeong Jeon, and Chie Arimura battling it out down the stretch on the JLPGA? On the sharp rise in dual LPGA-JLPGA membership attempts this year--mostly from Koreans on the LPGA planning to try out JLPGA Q-School in the last week of November and 1st of December? Or even on the no-brainer: the global nature of the LPGA's pennant races--the tightest since the days when Karrie Webb and Grace Park were challenging Annika Sorenstam for the dominance in wins, winnings, and scoring average? Of course not. But, hey, there was room for a moderately funny (and half-page!) top 10 to-do list for incoming commissioner Michael Whan. w00t!
I mean, come on! Not even a Rickie, Jamie, Rory, Ryo, Danny, Tadd, etc., Global Generation Next piece? Or a cautionary tale on the last crop of Global It Boys' recent travails? You got a week to get each issue out and this is what you come up with? Really?!
As for the sequel, well, I expected to have the link to it in my inbox by now and was eager to see what Hewitt & Co. decided to do with Michelle Wie's breakthrough win in Lorena's tournament in Guadalajara coming the same week Tiger won down under. Hasn't happened. Still waiting.
Opening-issue glitches are no big deal in the big picture. But they do make me worry that the Global Golf Post people don't yet get that their main competition is not print media. The week before their 1st issue came out, I learned more from the blogs on my sidebar and my twitter feed (and yes, the golfy media's web outposts) than they could gather and get permission to reprint. Yeah, it's great that they have Lewine Mair, Lorne Rubenstein, and Leonard Shapiro, among others. But if they don't approach content in a more comprehensive and creative way and really commit to covering the wide world of golf, they won't even be able to keep giving this thing away for very much longer.
To be sure, they're just getting out of the gates...have room to grow...are just finding their sea legs...and all that. Cliches well taken. But the last thing Global Golf Post needs right now is an "Attaboy" or "You go, girl!" They say they "know precisely what super avid core golfers want in a weekly golf publication...and as importantly, what they do not want." I call bullshit. It's not just that they're not even 25% of the way to that "weekly summary of the competitive game as played the previous week at both the professional and amateur levels, around the world" goal from their media kit. No, the problem is much bigger than that. As long as they rely on the "news, results, and commentary" model from print journalism, they are dead dead dead. How about artistry, background, and context? How about depth, expertise, and flair? Shall I go through the rest of the alphabet?
Seriously, the "super avid core golfer digital native" audience Global Golf Post is supposedly targeting already knows how to find out the results of pretty much any competition around the world and can find all kinds of news and commentary from existing corporate media web sites, high- and low-traffic blogs and microblogs, player and fan sites, and google searches. So basically the only ones willing to pay for this digital magazine down the road will be, uh, people who don't want to do any of that for themselves? Aren't those precisely the people who seem to be pretty satisfied with the online offerings of ESPN, Golf.com, Golf Channel, Golf Digest, Golfweek, Golf Observer, and Golfstat.com? Or at least who will reluctantly migrate to them when the last golf magazine has finally been printed? Last I checked, I got plenty of Tiger and Phil in Shanghai and Tiger Down Under from those sources. I don't need more of the same and I don't see why the "super avid core golfer digital newbies" that Global Golf Post is really targeting would, either.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not cancelling my subscription just yet. But basically I'm getting the feeling so far that I'm driving by a car wreck, craning my neck to see who was hurt, how bad the damage was, and what the paramedics are doing. That's not even close to what I was hoping for. Or what Global Golf Post could be and do.
[Update 1 (10:21 am): Whoops, turns out Hewitt doesn't pick up editing responsibilities until January 1, 2010, so I'll give him a little more time to change my mind than most people will give Michael Whan when he starts his job as LPGA Commissioner a few days later!]
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Paging Steve Elling...Yet Again
My old buddy Steve Elling is at it again in his Up & Down column this week. Sure, he makes some good points about Carolyn Bivens's good points and accurately identifies Ji-Yai Shin as the front-runner for both Rookie of the Year and Player of the Year, but then he takes a swipe at both Ai Miyazato and Na Yeon Choi:
Look, Choi is "unheralded" only to lazy American golf writers. She was a star in Korea before this win, came in 2nd to Ya Ni Tseng in the Rookie of the Year race last year (making over $1M in the process), has never missed a cut in her LPGA career (48 events and counting), and was at the head of the prestigious Mostly Harmless best w/o a win list. Let's get our Koreans straight, Steve: Eunjung Yi was a real long-shot, M.J. Hur was a surprise because of her trouble closing the deal the year before on the Futures Tour, but Na Yeon Choi is a bona fide world-class player. She was #17 on the Rolex Rankings last week and is #12 now.
As for Ai-sama, I'm sick of the insinuations that she's all hype. She's been one of the best players on tour since the middle of last season, when she finally put the previous season's mid-summer injury and subsequent swing meltdown behind her. Here's a secret: it's hard to win on the LPGA. Just ask Lorena Ochoa. Or Michelle Wie. Ai-sama's had half a dozen good chances to close the deal this season and has only done it once. And even though she may only be playing 3 more LPGA events this season, she could still steal the POY from Shin.
Aye, aye, Ai
Just when it appeared that Ai Miyazato was poised for the breakout season that everybody was expecting, oh, about four seasons ago, she went for a swim along the Pacific Coast. Miyazato, a mega-hyped Japanese star who finally won her first LPGA title earlier this year in France, had a one-shot lead at Torrey Pines on Sunday when she dunked her approach shot from 200 yards into the greenside pond, handing the victory to unheralded Na Yeon Choi, who had spit up a seven-shot lead. By the way, an American player hasn't won in the past 13 LPGA starts dating to May 10, extending the tour record for foreign dominance. And yes, I am counting.
Look, Choi is "unheralded" only to lazy American golf writers. She was a star in Korea before this win, came in 2nd to Ya Ni Tseng in the Rookie of the Year race last year (making over $1M in the process), has never missed a cut in her LPGA career (48 events and counting), and was at the head of the prestigious Mostly Harmless best w/o a win list. Let's get our Koreans straight, Steve: Eunjung Yi was a real long-shot, M.J. Hur was a surprise because of her trouble closing the deal the year before on the Futures Tour, but Na Yeon Choi is a bona fide world-class player. She was #17 on the Rolex Rankings last week and is #12 now.
As for Ai-sama, I'm sick of the insinuations that she's all hype. She's been one of the best players on tour since the middle of last season, when she finally put the previous season's mid-summer injury and subsequent swing meltdown behind her. Here's a secret: it's hard to win on the LPGA. Just ask Lorena Ochoa. Or Michelle Wie. Ai-sama's had half a dozen good chances to close the deal this season and has only done it once. And even though she may only be playing 3 more LPGA events this season, she could still steal the POY from Shin.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Dear Media: This Ain't Reality TV
In one of my last updates to my not-quite-live-blogging the final round of the U.S. Women's Open, I had occasion to ask,
Whether it was Leonard Shapiro hoping for a Cristie Kerr win or Michael Arkush bemoaning a Paula Creamer moving day implosion, something fishy was in the air this week, and it wasn't just those doing the color commentary who were the source of it. Consider who among the following 3 pairs of golfers captured the imagination and attention of the national media in the Sunday game stories you read today.
Yeah, yeah, beyond the fact that it's always the blonde American LPGAers who get the word count from the U.S. media, I get it that Kerr and Lincicome have each won a major recently and that Creamer may well be the best player on tour without one. Yes, Suzann Pettersen also made a late birdie to join Creamer and Miyazato as co-leaders in the clubhouse until Lincicome, Kim, and Kung surpassed them, so it's not just the Taiwan-born, Korean, or Japanese players who fall outside the media spotlight. And yes, I'll even confess to feeling the same things that lead to these kinds of oversights: I was disappointed 2 Sundays ago when Morgan Pressel's dramatic comeback on Eunjung Yi at the Farr came just short.
But a 1st LPGA win for my #11-ranked Super Soph is less of a story than my #2-ranked Junior Mint coming back from a mini-slump this season to get her 2nd career win and 1st major with a walkoff birdie on women's golf's biggest stage. And the fact that she beat Kung, Kim, Miyazato, and Pettersen is just as significant as the fact that she beat Kerr, Lincicome, and Creamer.
I'm off to take out my frustrations on the course--for the 1st time since last August, so I'm pretty excited. Maybe in the meantime someone in the national media will prove me wrong and find a compelling way to frame what really happened at Saucon Valley rather than focusing only on the news that's "fit to print" in their eyes. And maybe everyone will realize that the LPGA's future doesn't rest on one individual or nationality, that the point of sports is the thrilling competition itself.
Yeah, and maybe I'll break 75 on The Easiest Course in the World today.
[Update 1 (12:09 pm): Well, I couldn't even break 80 today (the rust on my 30-to-90 yard game was something fierce!), but I got to catch up with one of my golfing buddies from years ago and we had a fun 3 and a half hours. Nice to come back to find that Jay Busbee's got my back (and a link to a very good Brian Murphy piece)!]
[Update 2 (12:18 pm): Also a nice overview from Amy Ellis Nutt out of the Newark Star-Ledger. Have I misunderestimated the national media?]
[Update 3 (12:30 pm): But the basic question remains: will the national media be able to get the story right? My benchmark is whether they understand the tournament and final round as well as long-time LPGA bloggers Hound Dog and Bill Jempty.]
[Update 4 (1:15 pm): The smaller-market golf writers are doing a good job. Here's Mark Wogenrich out of PA's Lehigh Valley, Andrew Shay out of Bethlehem, and Gerry Dulac out of Pittsburgh. But Mike Kirn of the Philadelphia Daily News, Joe Juliano of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Michael Whitmer of the Boston Globe did just fine. Still, the SI guys only focus on Creamer's and Kerr's collapses--the rest is on who will replace Bivens. (More on that in another post.)]
[Update 5 (7/14/09, 12:30 pm): John Strege gets it right, as usual.]
When is the national media going to realize that sports are different than a reality tv show and that their job isn't to script an event but to report on it?
Whether it was Leonard Shapiro hoping for a Cristie Kerr win or Michael Arkush bemoaning a Paula Creamer moving day implosion, something fishy was in the air this week, and it wasn't just those doing the color commentary who were the source of it. Consider who among the following 3 pairs of golfers captured the imagination and attention of the national media in the Sunday game stories you read today.
- Cristie Kerr and Candie Kung: the last leader in the clubhouse--and her disappointing bogey on the 71st hole of the tournament--were almost completely eclipsed by the focus on Kerr's struggles with her game.
- Brittany Lincicome and In-Kyung Kim: the player who was actually tied for the lead late on the back 9--and who bogeyed the final hole to fall out of a tie with Kung--gets eclipsed by a player who made a charge early on the back but fizzled from 15 on.
- Paula Creamer and Ai Miyazato: both players made late birdies to become the 1st leaders in the clubhouse (at +4) to actually put a little pressure on those in the final pairings, but you'll only find out about 1 of them if you rely on the national media.
Yeah, yeah, beyond the fact that it's always the blonde American LPGAers who get the word count from the U.S. media, I get it that Kerr and Lincicome have each won a major recently and that Creamer may well be the best player on tour without one. Yes, Suzann Pettersen also made a late birdie to join Creamer and Miyazato as co-leaders in the clubhouse until Lincicome, Kim, and Kung surpassed them, so it's not just the Taiwan-born, Korean, or Japanese players who fall outside the media spotlight. And yes, I'll even confess to feeling the same things that lead to these kinds of oversights: I was disappointed 2 Sundays ago when Morgan Pressel's dramatic comeback on Eunjung Yi at the Farr came just short.
But a 1st LPGA win for my #11-ranked Super Soph is less of a story than my #2-ranked Junior Mint coming back from a mini-slump this season to get her 2nd career win and 1st major with a walkoff birdie on women's golf's biggest stage. And the fact that she beat Kung, Kim, Miyazato, and Pettersen is just as significant as the fact that she beat Kerr, Lincicome, and Creamer.
I'm off to take out my frustrations on the course--for the 1st time since last August, so I'm pretty excited. Maybe in the meantime someone in the national media will prove me wrong and find a compelling way to frame what really happened at Saucon Valley rather than focusing only on the news that's "fit to print" in their eyes. And maybe everyone will realize that the LPGA's future doesn't rest on one individual or nationality, that the point of sports is the thrilling competition itself.
Yeah, and maybe I'll break 75 on The Easiest Course in the World today.
[Update 1 (12:09 pm): Well, I couldn't even break 80 today (the rust on my 30-to-90 yard game was something fierce!), but I got to catch up with one of my golfing buddies from years ago and we had a fun 3 and a half hours. Nice to come back to find that Jay Busbee's got my back (and a link to a very good Brian Murphy piece)!]
[Update 2 (12:18 pm): Also a nice overview from Amy Ellis Nutt out of the Newark Star-Ledger. Have I misunderestimated the national media?]
[Update 3 (12:30 pm): But the basic question remains: will the national media be able to get the story right? My benchmark is whether they understand the tournament and final round as well as long-time LPGA bloggers Hound Dog and Bill Jempty.]
[Update 4 (1:15 pm): The smaller-market golf writers are doing a good job. Here's Mark Wogenrich out of PA's Lehigh Valley, Andrew Shay out of Bethlehem, and Gerry Dulac out of Pittsburgh. But Mike Kirn of the Philadelphia Daily News, Joe Juliano of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Michael Whitmer of the Boston Globe did just fine. Still, the SI guys only focus on Creamer's and Kerr's collapses--the rest is on who will replace Bivens. (More on that in another post.)]
[Update 5 (7/14/09, 12:30 pm): John Strege gets it right, as usual.]
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Vagaries of Golf Journalism
A few puzzlers for you all as we head into the pre-Masters frenzy that consistently overshadows the Kraft Nabisco Championship.
Why is it that Jason Sobel knows how to write a great piece on the coming changing of the guard in the world of men's professional golf, as heralded by Rory McIlroy, Danny Lee, and Ryo Ishikawa, but nobody knows how to write about the exact same thing that's been happening on the LPGA over the last several years--except to whine about the lack of American dominance? Recent writing on the LPGA has felt like a bad flashback to the late '90s--anyone remember how golf journalists then were more anxious than excited at the fact that the international trio of Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, and Se Ri Pak was pushing a generation of great American stars down the leaderboard? Where's the journalist today to declare that the transnationalism of the LPGA's Young Guns and New Blood is something to be celebrated?
It stands to reason that Ron Sirak would be your man for the job. Why, then, didn't he save his column on the holes in the LPGA's schedule for next week and produce as good a preview of the competition then to come in the very strong field at the J Golf Phoenix International last week as good as his Kraft Nabisco Championship preview this one? (Although even in the recent one it would have been great to end with a look at the current contenders as searching as his look at the course and the ways past champions won on it. Is he worried about what Brent Kelley has recently noted--that the LPGA's 1st major has no clear favorite?) The irony here is that Jon Show, who's done as much as anyone to document the LPGA's financial crisis, came out with the most optimistic article in recent memory on the LPGA's prospects the very same week Sirak decided to write on the schedule rather than the players in Phoenix.
Look, Sirak is a talented writer, as his profile of twin sisters Aree and Naree Song shows. But when is he going to get comfortable with the fact that he can't just replicate his success with Annika Sorenstam today with Michelle Wie? With the rise of Ji-Yai Shin, Ya Ni Tseng, Seon Hwa Lee, and Angela Park, joined by another couple of dozen international golfers international players who are capable of winning any given week (and, yes, naturalized U.S. citizen Park is joined by Morgan Pressel, Brittany Lang, Jane Park, Vicky Hurst, and, yes, Wie, to name a few Americans who have already excelled in this cohort), golf journalists who focus on the LPGA have to get a handle on more players and story lines than just the stuff that flies on the PGA: the awesomeness of Tiger's awesome awesomeness and the follow-the-will'o'wisp search for a legitimate rival for him. This is most definitely the Ochoa Era on the LPGA, but the PGA's future is the LPGA's present: that changing of the guard that Sobel wrote about coming in the next 10 years there is happening here right now. When will Sirak write about that?
Speaking of present and future PGA revolutionaries, I want to give credit to Jaime Diaz and Max Adler for writing fantastic profiles of Tiger's mom Tida (in the great Steve Elling tradition) and Danny Lee, respectively. Don't get me wrong, Corina Knoll got some great tidbits in her idiot's guide to identifying some of the top players of Korean descent on the LPGA (outdoing Matt Cooper's fine survey), but wouldn't it be nice for some of them to get the long-form treatment? Until then, we'll just have to endure more great American hope stories, I guess.
[Update 1 (4/3/09, 12:34 am): Hey, is Randall Mell a MH reader? Probably not, but nice job on the Ochoa-Shin pairing and its larger significance, Randall!]
Why is it that Jason Sobel knows how to write a great piece on the coming changing of the guard in the world of men's professional golf, as heralded by Rory McIlroy, Danny Lee, and Ryo Ishikawa, but nobody knows how to write about the exact same thing that's been happening on the LPGA over the last several years--except to whine about the lack of American dominance? Recent writing on the LPGA has felt like a bad flashback to the late '90s--anyone remember how golf journalists then were more anxious than excited at the fact that the international trio of Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, and Se Ri Pak was pushing a generation of great American stars down the leaderboard? Where's the journalist today to declare that the transnationalism of the LPGA's Young Guns and New Blood is something to be celebrated?
It stands to reason that Ron Sirak would be your man for the job. Why, then, didn't he save his column on the holes in the LPGA's schedule for next week and produce as good a preview of the competition then to come in the very strong field at the J Golf Phoenix International last week as good as his Kraft Nabisco Championship preview this one? (Although even in the recent one it would have been great to end with a look at the current contenders as searching as his look at the course and the ways past champions won on it. Is he worried about what Brent Kelley has recently noted--that the LPGA's 1st major has no clear favorite?) The irony here is that Jon Show, who's done as much as anyone to document the LPGA's financial crisis, came out with the most optimistic article in recent memory on the LPGA's prospects the very same week Sirak decided to write on the schedule rather than the players in Phoenix.
Look, Sirak is a talented writer, as his profile of twin sisters Aree and Naree Song shows. But when is he going to get comfortable with the fact that he can't just replicate his success with Annika Sorenstam today with Michelle Wie? With the rise of Ji-Yai Shin, Ya Ni Tseng, Seon Hwa Lee, and Angela Park, joined by another couple of dozen international golfers international players who are capable of winning any given week (and, yes, naturalized U.S. citizen Park is joined by Morgan Pressel, Brittany Lang, Jane Park, Vicky Hurst, and, yes, Wie, to name a few Americans who have already excelled in this cohort), golf journalists who focus on the LPGA have to get a handle on more players and story lines than just the stuff that flies on the PGA: the awesomeness of Tiger's awesome awesomeness and the follow-the-will'o'wisp search for a legitimate rival for him. This is most definitely the Ochoa Era on the LPGA, but the PGA's future is the LPGA's present: that changing of the guard that Sobel wrote about coming in the next 10 years there is happening here right now. When will Sirak write about that?
Speaking of present and future PGA revolutionaries, I want to give credit to Jaime Diaz and Max Adler for writing fantastic profiles of Tiger's mom Tida (in the great Steve Elling tradition) and Danny Lee, respectively. Don't get me wrong, Corina Knoll got some great tidbits in her idiot's guide to identifying some of the top players of Korean descent on the LPGA (outdoing Matt Cooper's fine survey), but wouldn't it be nice for some of them to get the long-form treatment? Until then, we'll just have to endure more great American hope stories, I guess.
[Update 1 (4/3/09, 12:34 am): Hey, is Randall Mell a MH reader? Probably not, but nice job on the Ochoa-Shin pairing and its larger significance, Randall!]
Monday, January 12, 2009
A Hitchhiker's Guide to Mostly Harmless's Golf Writing
Bill Jempty, Ryan Ballengee, and Patricia Hannigan have started a conversation on Sal Johnson's take on the future of golf and the media that's worth contributing to. But how? I have nothing to say about the value of blogging or the tensions between journalists and bloggers that Michael Berube hasn't said better--and much funnier. So what to do? I'll focus here for a start on how I approach golf blogging. In a later post, I'll discuss what I value from the best golf bloggers I've come across.
My training as a scholar and teacher shapes my approach to golf blogging. My aim is to produce quality research, use it to educate a few people, and have a little fun in the process. Which is to say, (1) I don't aspire to become a golf journalist, much less somehow undermine or supplant golf journalism, (2) I follow established academic ethical codes (support claims with evidence, cite sources, and so on) and emergent bloggy ones (link link link!), (3) I pursue what I'm curious, excited, and enjoy writing about in the world of women's golf (with a few visits to other worlds sprinkled in here and there), (4) I try to develop a particular niche and a distinctive voice for my Mostly Harmless golf writing, (5) I am more interested in gaining the respect of the golf writers, bloggers, and commenters that I respect and admire than in making any money off my golf writing, and (6) I won't do anything to draw in a bigger audience to my golf writing that would sacrifice these goals and principles.
On the research side, one thing I enjoy doing is dusting off some ancient and atrophied math skills (back in the day I was a double major in English and math) by developing my Best of the LPGA, Best of the Young Guns, and Best Off the LPGA ranking systems. Although I've made other forays into the wide wide world of golf stats, Hound Dog's the leader of the pack in this neighborhood. So even though I'm sometimes in his league when it comes to predictions and competitions, the math stuff is mostly a fun side gig for me.
Where I actually can make the best contribution, I believe, is by drawing on my own areas of expertise in cultural, ethnic, and postcolonial studies to examine attitudes toward the sport and undercurrents in golf media and fan discourse, not to mention issues of language and culture, race and gender, and globalization and nationalism in golf. What draws me to the LPGA in particular is how global the women's game has become and the range of ways that players, tours, fans, sponsors, and the media have been responding to--and contributing to the (re)construction of--cultural, ethnic, and linguistic differences. With Seoul Sisters.com ably covering the KLPGA and the accomplishments of the LPGA's Korean contingent (along with the top Korean players and golfers of Korean descent on other tours), I've been free to branch out to consider the future of international team golf competitions, the prospects of women's professional golf in China, and the LPGA's new event in Brazil. But my particular research focus has gravitated toward the place of Japan in the world of women's golf and on golf's global youth movement.
I've focused on Japanese golfers on the LPGA and the JLPGA for a variety of reasons, not least among them that I started LPGA blogging while living in Fukuoka and teaching American literature and culture on a Fulbright. My wife is Japanese and my two daughters (onechan, 5, and imoto, 2) have dual Japanese and American citizenship, so it's probably no surprise that Ai Miyazato and Momoko Ueda are among my favorite players (while onechan favors Natalie Gulbis, Paula Creamer, and Karrie Webb), but it took me until last March to work on my rudimentary reading skills in Japanese and dive into the JLPGA web site. In addition to trying last season to produce better round-by-round overviews of JLPGA events than Kyodo News or Golfweek (which was far far easier than it oughtta be), I became interested in who were the JLPGA's finest golfers, why there has been a Se Ri Pak effect but no Ayako Okamoto effect on the LPGA, who from the JLPGA would be most likely to succeed on the LPGA, what American players and the LPGA could learn from Patti Rizzo, and what kind of schedules those with dual JLPGA/LPGA membership might put together in 2009. I still have a ways to go before I'm ready to focus on a book project that's come out of this research, but at least I have the idea and can continue to make progress on it here.
An outgrowth of my attention to Ai Miyazato's and Momoko Ueda's fellow LPGA rookies and to the up-and-coming players on the JLPGA (and, to a lesser extent, the KLPGA) has been my focus on the teens and 20somethings in the world of women's golf who are changing the face of the LPGA. Women's golf's global youth movement picked up a lot of steam in 2008, as Seon Hwa Lee became the 1st among the LPGA rookie classes of 2006, 2007, and 2008 to post multiple wins in a season and Morgan Pressel became the 1st to join her in emerging from the fast-growing pack of 1-time winners in their generation. With Ya Ni Tseng and Louise Friberg from this past year's rookies joining Super Sophs Inbee Park, Eun-Hee Ji, In-Kyung Kim, and Ji Young Oh and Junior Mints Julieta Granada and Meaghan Francella, that's 14 wins and counting from the Young Guns. Who will be next? Na Yeon Choi? Angela Park? Amy Yang? Ai Miyazato? Brittany Lang? Song-Hee Kim? Jane Park? Hee Young Park? Shanshan Feng? Or will Jee Young Lee or Momoko Ueda follow up on their non-member wins (in Korea and Japan, respectively) before them? Or perhaps someone from the much-heralded Class of 2009 will live up to her hype and steal the Young Guns' thunder? When you look at the list of young winners on the KLPGA and JLPGA in recent years not named Ji-Yai Shin--Hee Kyung Seo, Ha Neul Kim, Sun Ju Ahn, He Yong Choi, So Yeon Ryu, Sakura Yokomine, Miho Koga, Mi-Jeong Jeon, Yuko Mitsuka, Hyun-Ju Shin, Bo-Bae Song, Eun-A Lim, Erina Hara, Ayako Uehara, Akane Iijima, Mayu Hattori, Miki Saiki, Yukari Baba, Chie Arimura, Maiko Wakabayashi, and Na Zhang--you have to wonder who else will be coming over to the LPGA soon from Asia and making a big impact on the New Blood generation. (That's to say nothing of the NCAA and Futures Tour, which I plan to pay more attention to in 2009).
One area that I didn't expect to get so interested in researching, despite the fact that it connected closely to my interest in globalization and transnationalism, was the infrastructure (both organizational and financial) of women's professional golf--from how tour schedules get put together to how they connect with TV deals, from the new rules for membership and priority status on the LPGA to a controversy (like over tying membership to language ability--and backtracking [with good reason]) or two. As a result, I'm actually more optimistic than most everyone I've been reading on the LPGA's prospects for a new TV contract for 2010-2015. (But more on that later.)
On the teaching side, my major aims are to help LPGA fans (whether casual or devoted) dig deeper and perhaps even educate the golf media in the process. With no regular AP writer covering the LPGA last season and with many good local golf writers getting the ax in '08, there was a serious lack of context and perspective, not to mention detail, in the game stories that get the widest audience on sports pages and news aggregators. Outside of Annika Sorenstam, Lorena Ochoa, Paula Creamer, and Michelle Wie, the casual sports fan might have heard of only a handful of other LPGA players, mostly American (and blonde), and the AP was doing little (if anything) to change that. Even the magazine writers paid to cover the LPGA left me looking for more on LPGA.com and GolfObserver.com. So I worked out a more systematic approach to previewing and commenting on LPGA events this season than last, trying to uncover the rounds and the players that even the best LPGA bloggers weren't attending to all that closely. (I tried to do the same, on a smaller scale, for the JLPGA in 2008.)
In addition, by raising questions, identifying turning points, noting trends, marking milestones, offering criticisms of bad reporting, analysis, and opinion writing in the golf media (by Steve Elling [twice], Ron Sirak [twice], Jason Sobel [twice], Doug Ferguson, and Sal Johnson [twice]), and looking for future LPGA stars (like Mika Miyazato, Hannah Yun, Cheyenne Woods, Kyung Kim, and others), I built in 2008 on my attempts the previous year to call attention to the quality of competition on the LPGA by organizing LPGA-centric blog carnivals, identifying LPGA generations, and introducing well-known, better-known, and lesser-known LPGA players. I see last week's 6-part series as the culmination of these efforts to highlight the very best players on tour.
But just as important to me has been my attempt to convey the struggles of those trying to make it as professional golfers by following the ups and downs of the budding careers of everyone in the Young Gun generation, not just the heads of the class. In my 1st junior golf tournament, I was paired with Moira Dunn, who would go on to join the LPGA in 1994. I've followed her career ever since and even though she's had a handful of good seasons and has 1 career win, she's been struggling to hold onto her card the last several seasons. While I've been attuned for a long time to following her competition in the middle and lower reaches of the LPGA, I've enjoyed tracking more closely over the past 3 seasons how the newbies have been doing relative to her. I hope my readers gain perspective on career arcs and come to appreciate how good the best of the newbies have to be to outdo tough competitors like Moira.
When I consider my research and teaching efforts as a whole, I'm hoping that those bloggers and journalists who reach a wider audience than me might consider what they can learn from what I've done here and how to incorporate some of it into their own golf writing. In a broader sense, the golf writing I do here at Mostly Harmless is an experiment in how much and what kind of an influence I can have on its various constituencies and institutions, from fans, players, and tournament organizers to writers, sponsors, and tour officials.
So, yes, this blog is for fun--which means I can experiment with more free-form autobiographical pieces and on-course reports (3 of my favorite posts evah), focus on a cute moment between Tiger and Sam Alexis Woods, make poetry out of a Momoko Ueda fingernail injury, explain why the LPGA is more interesting than the PGA, and root on my favorite golfers (Ai-chan, Moira Dunn, Seon Hwa Lee, Ya Ni Tseng, Momo-chan, In-Kyung Kim, Mi Hyun Kim, Jeong Jang, Eun-Hee Ji, Na Yeon Choi, and Jane Park)--but that doesn't mean I take my golf blogging any less seriously.
Simply put, my ultimate aim is to become one of the preeminent American experts on the LPGA and JLPGA on the web. And maybe someday, off it, too. Mostly Harmless is my means to these ends.
My training as a scholar and teacher shapes my approach to golf blogging. My aim is to produce quality research, use it to educate a few people, and have a little fun in the process. Which is to say, (1) I don't aspire to become a golf journalist, much less somehow undermine or supplant golf journalism, (2) I follow established academic ethical codes (support claims with evidence, cite sources, and so on) and emergent bloggy ones (link link link!), (3) I pursue what I'm curious, excited, and enjoy writing about in the world of women's golf (with a few visits to other worlds sprinkled in here and there), (4) I try to develop a particular niche and a distinctive voice for my Mostly Harmless golf writing, (5) I am more interested in gaining the respect of the golf writers, bloggers, and commenters that I respect and admire than in making any money off my golf writing, and (6) I won't do anything to draw in a bigger audience to my golf writing that would sacrifice these goals and principles.
On the research side, one thing I enjoy doing is dusting off some ancient and atrophied math skills (back in the day I was a double major in English and math) by developing my Best of the LPGA, Best of the Young Guns, and Best Off the LPGA ranking systems. Although I've made other forays into the wide wide world of golf stats, Hound Dog's the leader of the pack in this neighborhood. So even though I'm sometimes in his league when it comes to predictions and competitions, the math stuff is mostly a fun side gig for me.
Where I actually can make the best contribution, I believe, is by drawing on my own areas of expertise in cultural, ethnic, and postcolonial studies to examine attitudes toward the sport and undercurrents in golf media and fan discourse, not to mention issues of language and culture, race and gender, and globalization and nationalism in golf. What draws me to the LPGA in particular is how global the women's game has become and the range of ways that players, tours, fans, sponsors, and the media have been responding to--and contributing to the (re)construction of--cultural, ethnic, and linguistic differences. With Seoul Sisters.com ably covering the KLPGA and the accomplishments of the LPGA's Korean contingent (along with the top Korean players and golfers of Korean descent on other tours), I've been free to branch out to consider the future of international team golf competitions, the prospects of women's professional golf in China, and the LPGA's new event in Brazil. But my particular research focus has gravitated toward the place of Japan in the world of women's golf and on golf's global youth movement.
I've focused on Japanese golfers on the LPGA and the JLPGA for a variety of reasons, not least among them that I started LPGA blogging while living in Fukuoka and teaching American literature and culture on a Fulbright. My wife is Japanese and my two daughters (onechan, 5, and imoto, 2) have dual Japanese and American citizenship, so it's probably no surprise that Ai Miyazato and Momoko Ueda are among my favorite players (while onechan favors Natalie Gulbis, Paula Creamer, and Karrie Webb), but it took me until last March to work on my rudimentary reading skills in Japanese and dive into the JLPGA web site. In addition to trying last season to produce better round-by-round overviews of JLPGA events than Kyodo News or Golfweek (which was far far easier than it oughtta be), I became interested in who were the JLPGA's finest golfers, why there has been a Se Ri Pak effect but no Ayako Okamoto effect on the LPGA, who from the JLPGA would be most likely to succeed on the LPGA, what American players and the LPGA could learn from Patti Rizzo, and what kind of schedules those with dual JLPGA/LPGA membership might put together in 2009. I still have a ways to go before I'm ready to focus on a book project that's come out of this research, but at least I have the idea and can continue to make progress on it here.
An outgrowth of my attention to Ai Miyazato's and Momoko Ueda's fellow LPGA rookies and to the up-and-coming players on the JLPGA (and, to a lesser extent, the KLPGA) has been my focus on the teens and 20somethings in the world of women's golf who are changing the face of the LPGA. Women's golf's global youth movement picked up a lot of steam in 2008, as Seon Hwa Lee became the 1st among the LPGA rookie classes of 2006, 2007, and 2008 to post multiple wins in a season and Morgan Pressel became the 1st to join her in emerging from the fast-growing pack of 1-time winners in their generation. With Ya Ni Tseng and Louise Friberg from this past year's rookies joining Super Sophs Inbee Park, Eun-Hee Ji, In-Kyung Kim, and Ji Young Oh and Junior Mints Julieta Granada and Meaghan Francella, that's 14 wins and counting from the Young Guns. Who will be next? Na Yeon Choi? Angela Park? Amy Yang? Ai Miyazato? Brittany Lang? Song-Hee Kim? Jane Park? Hee Young Park? Shanshan Feng? Or will Jee Young Lee or Momoko Ueda follow up on their non-member wins (in Korea and Japan, respectively) before them? Or perhaps someone from the much-heralded Class of 2009 will live up to her hype and steal the Young Guns' thunder? When you look at the list of young winners on the KLPGA and JLPGA in recent years not named Ji-Yai Shin--Hee Kyung Seo, Ha Neul Kim, Sun Ju Ahn, He Yong Choi, So Yeon Ryu, Sakura Yokomine, Miho Koga, Mi-Jeong Jeon, Yuko Mitsuka, Hyun-Ju Shin, Bo-Bae Song, Eun-A Lim, Erina Hara, Ayako Uehara, Akane Iijima, Mayu Hattori, Miki Saiki, Yukari Baba, Chie Arimura, Maiko Wakabayashi, and Na Zhang--you have to wonder who else will be coming over to the LPGA soon from Asia and making a big impact on the New Blood generation. (That's to say nothing of the NCAA and Futures Tour, which I plan to pay more attention to in 2009).
One area that I didn't expect to get so interested in researching, despite the fact that it connected closely to my interest in globalization and transnationalism, was the infrastructure (both organizational and financial) of women's professional golf--from how tour schedules get put together to how they connect with TV deals, from the new rules for membership and priority status on the LPGA to a controversy (like over tying membership to language ability--and backtracking [with good reason]) or two. As a result, I'm actually more optimistic than most everyone I've been reading on the LPGA's prospects for a new TV contract for 2010-2015. (But more on that later.)
On the teaching side, my major aims are to help LPGA fans (whether casual or devoted) dig deeper and perhaps even educate the golf media in the process. With no regular AP writer covering the LPGA last season and with many good local golf writers getting the ax in '08, there was a serious lack of context and perspective, not to mention detail, in the game stories that get the widest audience on sports pages and news aggregators. Outside of Annika Sorenstam, Lorena Ochoa, Paula Creamer, and Michelle Wie, the casual sports fan might have heard of only a handful of other LPGA players, mostly American (and blonde), and the AP was doing little (if anything) to change that. Even the magazine writers paid to cover the LPGA left me looking for more on LPGA.com and GolfObserver.com. So I worked out a more systematic approach to previewing and commenting on LPGA events this season than last, trying to uncover the rounds and the players that even the best LPGA bloggers weren't attending to all that closely. (I tried to do the same, on a smaller scale, for the JLPGA in 2008.)
In addition, by raising questions, identifying turning points, noting trends, marking milestones, offering criticisms of bad reporting, analysis, and opinion writing in the golf media (by Steve Elling [twice], Ron Sirak [twice], Jason Sobel [twice], Doug Ferguson, and Sal Johnson [twice]), and looking for future LPGA stars (like Mika Miyazato, Hannah Yun, Cheyenne Woods, Kyung Kim, and others), I built in 2008 on my attempts the previous year to call attention to the quality of competition on the LPGA by organizing LPGA-centric blog carnivals, identifying LPGA generations, and introducing well-known, better-known, and lesser-known LPGA players. I see last week's 6-part series as the culmination of these efforts to highlight the very best players on tour.
But just as important to me has been my attempt to convey the struggles of those trying to make it as professional golfers by following the ups and downs of the budding careers of everyone in the Young Gun generation, not just the heads of the class. In my 1st junior golf tournament, I was paired with Moira Dunn, who would go on to join the LPGA in 1994. I've followed her career ever since and even though she's had a handful of good seasons and has 1 career win, she's been struggling to hold onto her card the last several seasons. While I've been attuned for a long time to following her competition in the middle and lower reaches of the LPGA, I've enjoyed tracking more closely over the past 3 seasons how the newbies have been doing relative to her. I hope my readers gain perspective on career arcs and come to appreciate how good the best of the newbies have to be to outdo tough competitors like Moira.
When I consider my research and teaching efforts as a whole, I'm hoping that those bloggers and journalists who reach a wider audience than me might consider what they can learn from what I've done here and how to incorporate some of it into their own golf writing. In a broader sense, the golf writing I do here at Mostly Harmless is an experiment in how much and what kind of an influence I can have on its various constituencies and institutions, from fans, players, and tournament organizers to writers, sponsors, and tour officials.
So, yes, this blog is for fun--which means I can experiment with more free-form autobiographical pieces and on-course reports (3 of my favorite posts evah), focus on a cute moment between Tiger and Sam Alexis Woods, make poetry out of a Momoko Ueda fingernail injury, explain why the LPGA is more interesting than the PGA, and root on my favorite golfers (Ai-chan, Moira Dunn, Seon Hwa Lee, Ya Ni Tseng, Momo-chan, In-Kyung Kim, Mi Hyun Kim, Jeong Jang, Eun-Hee Ji, Na Yeon Choi, and Jane Park)--but that doesn't mean I take my golf blogging any less seriously.
Simply put, my ultimate aim is to become one of the preeminent American experts on the LPGA and JLPGA on the web. And maybe someday, off it, too. Mostly Harmless is my means to these ends.
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