On NHK Coverage of the Japan Women's Open

Most JLPGA events are covered by Japanese cable channels, so despite having TV Japan through my own cable system, I almost never get to watch the top female golfers in Japan on tv.  But NHK, which supplies the feed for TV Japan, does cover the Japan Women's Open.  And the last 9 holes of the final round made it onto TV Japan.  So I got to see first-hand the differences between NHK and Golf Channel's approaches to covering women's golf.

Give the Audience What They Want.  In the U.S., Sunday coverage is all about the leaders and who's going to win.  On NHK, I didn't see the leader Teresa Lu until 13 minutes into the coverage, and then, only to see her make her 1st bogey of the day when she missed a 20-foot par attempt.  I did see a lot of Yun-Jye Wei, who became the co-leader upon Lu's miss, but that's mostly because she was playing with the media's new darling Ai Suzuki, who got the majority of coverage in the 1st 20 minutes, along with 17-year-old amateur Kana Nagai.  Apparently NHK's audience wants to see Suzuki sizing up putts and Nagai walking up fairways, running off greens, and taking her rain jacket on and off, because the cameras followed their every move.  We did get to see footage of Nagai's amazing eagle with a fairway wood on the 428-yard par-4, but instead of recapping their rounds and showing highlights that would help explain how they each got to -6, 2 shots off the lead after Lu's bogey, they relied on the announcers to set things up and instead focused on Suzuki's and Nagai's faces and reactions in the present.  Lu had made 6 birdies in her 1st 11 holes to jump out to the lead, but mostly what the camera showed was how tiny and high-energy Nagai is and how Suzuki was reacting to the pressure of trying to win her 2nd major in a row (pouting a little after knocking her 30-foot birdie try 10-feet past, flashing a nervous smile after her par save lipped out).  The NHK coverage certainly succeeded in establishing a quasi-intimacy with both young Japanese golfers, but to someone used to following the leaders on a Sunday, it was certainly strange that we saw only 2 shots from Lu and no tournament recap or highlights in the 1st 20 minutes!

What Have You Done for Me Lately?  The other thing I'm used to from American golf coverage is a focus on the stars of the LPGA.  How many times have we checked in on Paula Creamer over the years even when she's not in contention?  It's an understatement to note that Michelle Wie and Lexi Thompson get plenty of tv time, too.  But for all that global golf fans criticize American tv for focusing so much on American stars, Golf Channel and the networks do a much better job of catching us up on all the stars of the LPGA than NHK on Japan Women's Open Sunday did for even established Japanese stars in the field.  The only player besides Suzuki and Nagai to even get mentioned was Mika Miyazato, and that was during an interview with Suzuki.  I can understand that Miyazato, Chie Arimura, Sakura Yokomine, Shiho Oyama, Rikako Morita, Misuzu Narita, and Momoko Ueda didn't have a chance to win, but not even to show a single shot from them in the 1st 20 minutes of coverage was frankly shocking to me.  Same goes for money-list leader Bo-Mee Lee, #2 Sun-Ju Ahn, and #3 Ji-Yai Shin.  Sure, they were well behind Lu and Wei, but they are the top 3 players on tour and both Shin and Ahn started the day with a great chance to pass Lee on the money list.  I mean, Mikan was playing with Lu and Ahn with Nagai, but we only saw Mikan's approach on 18 just past the hour mark (too bad she went on to 3-putt!) and mostly just caught glimpses of Ahn at the corners or edges of shots of Nagai or her shots until the 18th hole, when she stuck her approach to 12 feet and made the birdie to finish in solo 4th.

Game on!  Things got a little better after the 20-minute mark.  We saw Na-Ri Lee around 22 and a half minutes into the coverage, who had gotten to -6 thanks to back-to-back birdies to close out the front (which again they chose not to recap for us), leave a long birdie try on 12 well short and make the 6-foot par save right after Suzuki got up-and-down from a bad lie near the green and Wei failed to.  We saw Lu's approach to pin-high on the 365-yard par-4 15th right after she became the solo leader.  We saw the 2nd page of the leaderboard for the 1st time.  We saw Lee make a 30-footer on the par-3 13th to move to -7.  We saw Lu hit her birdie putt through the break.  We saw Wei struggle with the wet rough and Suzuki with the green-side bunker's wet sand as they both bogeyed the 11th.  We saw Lu land her approach on the par-5 16th a foot past the pin but bound 16 feet away.  We saw Nagai hit the middle of the green on the 15th and Lee barely avoid a green-side bunker on the 14th.  We saw Lu just miss the right-to-left sweeping birdie try.  And so on.  The NHK's coverage definitely found its rhythm in the next half-hour, although they still spent the most time on Suzuki's shots and gave the announcers plenty of time to talk about every aspect of her play.

Nice Tech!  I liked the bullseye with blue 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10-meter circles they'd superimpose around some of the pins on certain approach shots.  I also liked how they'd sometimes show a map of the hole to the left of the player about to hit their drives, or show the exact length of a putt by superimposing a line and the distance in meters on the green, or show arcs from the bullseye on sand shots so we could see how far the player was from the pin and how the terrain and the distance from the hole interacted.  It was informative without being distracting.

Down to the Wire!  Yes, they spent far too much time on Wei's bogey train on the back, but as it got down to the wire, Lu and Lee got a lot more coverage.  Lu made a great lag on the 406-yard 18th from maybe 60 feet to par out and finish her week at -8, just before Lee left a 8-foot downhill big breaker 10 inches short on the 16th to remain 1 back.  They spent a lot of time on the 17th tee as Lee chose a utility club, sized up her shot to the back-left pin, and pulled it into the front of the greenside left bunker--and focused on her face for almost the entire walk up the 180-yard par 3.  And they did a fantastic job on her shot from the sand and reaction to the ball going in the hole to tie her for the lead, showing it live and in slow motion twice.  Even as she pulled her drive on 18 into the left rough, they spent a lot of time on the green with Nagai (who just missed sinking a 50-footer for birdie and was beaming as she walked off the green) and Ahn (who had a great reaction to making her birdie try).  Lee could barely get her approach over the pond 50 yards short of the green and faced a tough uphill pitch from an uphill lie in deep rough.  When she failed to carry it to the top tier and the ball rolled backwards to about 40 feet from the pin, she needed a miracle to force a playoff, but her putt was off-line from the start.  She did well to save par from 6 feet and finish in solo 2nd.

After the End.  At that point, the last 2 pairings still on the course had virtually no chance to force a playoff.  How did NHK fill the rest of their air time?  With more Suzuki and Wei, of course!  But once they failed to get holes in 1 on 17, guaranteeing that Lu would win, the coverage pretty quickly shifted into an interview with Nagai, who had the best finish of any amateur in the history of the JWO.  They even showed her her eagle and got her reaction to it at the very end of the interview--very cute!  Before going back to Suzuki and Wei on the 17th green, they showed a list of low amateurs in the past 15 years or so and wondered aloud about who would make Team Japan in the 2016 Olympics.  They showed Lee leaving the course, Lu hanging around the scorer's tent, and Ji-Yai Shin and Ah-Reum Hwang putting out on 18.  After showing Wei's and Suzuki's approaches to 18, they finally went to the tapes, mentioning how Lu won the tournament with 3-straight birdies to start her round and showing how she sank 3 more in a 4-hole stretch as she made the turn, then focusing on key par putts down the stretch.  (Apparently Lu didn't want to be interviewed before the awards ceremony.)  So after Suzuki and Wei finished, it was back to Nagai's eagle and the 1st view of her birdie on 10, along with her best pars coming home, before showing the awards ceremony.  After answering the first couple of questions in simple Japanese, she went back and forth between English and Japanese the rest of the interview, but mostly in English.  After that, they moved so quickly into face time for their announcing crew and the closing montage that they barely had time to include defending champion Mika Miyazato congratulating new champion Teresa Lu from the awards ceremony in between.

And then, after 2 hours and 15 minutes of the most important women's golf tournament in Japan, a cute show on cats walking around in an Italian city began.  Only in Japan!

LPGA/JLPGA Sunday Set-Up

Caroline Hedwall passed Stacy Lewis during moving day at the Reignwood LPGA Classic with 6 birdies during a 10-hole stretch but Lewis caught her at the finish line with 4 birdies in her last 6 holes to move to -13 as well.  Both lead Brittany Lang and Mirim Lee by 2 shots, Inbee Park and Caroline Masson by 3, Suzanne Pettersen, Sun Young Yoo, Belen Mozo, and Ilhee Lee by 4, and So Yeon Ryu, Mi Jung Hur, Chella Choi, Haeji Kang, and Yuting Shi by 5.  Hedwall's looking for her 1st (and long overdue) LPGA victory, while Lewis is trying to chase down history (and showed incredible resilience after going +3 with no birdies over her 1st 12 holes).  Just missing a hole in 1 on the par-3 13th seemed to spark Lewis's charge.  Can she pick up where she left off yesterday and keep the pedal to the metal today?

Meanwhile, on the JLPGA, Chie Arimura (75) and Mika Miyazato (74) succumbed to the pressure of trying to win the biggest tournament in women's golf in Japan and moved backwards to -3 at the Japan Women's Open, Miyazato with a 39 on the front and Arimura with one on the back.  That leaves them 5 shots behind co-leaders Ai Suzuki (69) and Yun-Jye Wei (68), 3 behind former world #1 Ji-Yai Shin, 2 shots behind Ah-Reum Hwang and Hiroko Azuma, 1 shot behind Sun-Ju Ahn, Mi-Jeong Jeon, Na-Ri Lee, Erika Kikuchi, and amateur Kana Nagai, and tied with Teresa Lu.  The 20-year-old Suzuki is looking to make her 2nd JLPGA victory her 2nd major title in a row, while the veteran Wei is looking for her 5th win on tour and 1st since 2010.

So we have some old-fashioned barn burners going on right now in Asia, with lots of great stories to share besides those of the dual co-leaders.  Come midnight, I'll be sharing them with you as I not-quite-live-blog both tournaments!  Stay tuned!

World Ladies Championship Saturday: World #1 Inbee Park Catches #2 Suzann Pettersen at -18 with 62

OK, I'm a huge JLPGA fan and still believe it's the 2nd-best women's professional tour, behind the LPGA and ahead of the KLPGA and LET.  And I'm definitely excited about the possibilities in their season-opener's closing round tomorrow, as I just finished explaining.  But even I have to admit that the LET's World Ladies Championship over at Mission Hills in Hainan, China, is blowing the Daikin Orchid Ladies away this week.

Let me count the ways:

• World #2 Suzann Pettersen has been playing great golf, going 67-68-66 to move to -18 and lead the Melee at Mission Hills every day of the tournament.  Thus far, I should say.  Because world #1 Inbee Park just shot an 11-under-par 62 to join her at the top of the leaderboard.  I'd say the highlight of her round was the 6 birdies in a row that she made between holes 9 and 14, but that would be downplaying her 5 other birdies, 3 before and 2 after the train.  Pettersen needed a bogey-free 32 on the back to avoid getting blown away, as Park opened with a 32 and closed with a 30!  So a showdown between the top 2 players in the world definitely trumps a showdown between the top 2 players on the JLPGA from last season.  Throw in #5 So Yeon Ryu (70, -12) and there are brighter stars playing better on the LET than on the JLPGA this week (yes, Ji-Yai Shin, Mika Miyazato, and Sun-Ju Ahn are within striking distance of the lead in Okinawa)--even if #7 Shanshan Feng is stuck at T18 after a 69 brought her only to -6 in her home country.
• You like young guns?  The World Ladies Championship's got young guns galore.  Sure, Rikako Morita, Mamiko Higa, Ayaka Watanabe, and Kumiko Kaneda have some name recognition in Japan, but if by some chance you haven't yet heard of Ariya Jutanugarn (67, -13), In Gee Chun (68, -11), Minjee Lee (69, -11), or Ha Na Jang (69, -8), you'll know who they are after tomorrow's round.
• How about lesser-known players trying to make a name for themselves this week?  Ye Na Chung (68, -14), Joanna Klatten (66, -10), Amelia Lewis (67, -10), and Holly Clyburn (64, -7) are playing great golf this week.  Clyburn's bogey-free round would have headlined almost any other round in any season, after all.  How well do Onnarin Sattayabanphot, Airi Saitoh, and Esther Lee stack up against them?  Pretty well, but when you consider that Chung has the best chance of anyone in Mission Hills to headhunt the world #1 and #2 tomorrow, well....
• How about complete unknowns trying to play Cinderella?  Taiwan's Yi Chen Liu (67, -11) may not have much of a chance to actually win this thing, but she's certainly in the running for a top-3 finish!  15-year-old Okinawan Hina Arakaki may be closer to the lead and more likely to repeat as low amateur in the Daikin Orchid Ladies (the only other one to make the cut, 17-year-old Anri Iha, is 3 shots behind her), but I've got to give the nod to Liu for hanging with the big girls double digits under par thus far, even if only those from China would consider her to be playing in her home country this week!
• Plus, the World Ladies Championship has a team element, which Korea is going to win once more.  But the U.S., France, China, and Thailand are in a real race for 2nd.

Probably the best chance the JLPGA has to grab some headlines is if former world #1 Ji-Yai Shin were to come from 3 behind tomorrow and put her name firmly in the running for the last spot on Team Korea at the LPGA's International Crown.  But if Ha Na Jang plays well enough to pass In-Kyung Kim in the Rolex Rankings, even a Shin win would most likely play second fiddle.  And while Shin's 6th JLPGA victory and 1st since 2010 would be the main story out of Okinawa, Jang is only one subplot of many coming out of Mission Hills.  There's just no beating a Park-Pettersen shootout!

So, yeah, I'll keep waving my Japanese flag over here at Mostly Harmless, but this week the JLPGA's finest are definitely getting overshadowed--and rightly so!

Oh, How the Times Have Changed! Q-School Edition

Take a look at this post from 3 years ago where I argued that the JLPGA attracted more talent via its Q-School than the LPGA did.

First point:  boy, was I ever right.  New JLPGA members (at the time) Shanshan Feng, Hee Young Park, and Bo-Mee Lee turned out to be world-class talents, Shiho Oyama, Teresa Lu, Soo-Yun Kang, Onnarin Sattayabanphot, Kaori Ohe, and Kumiko Kaneda have proven themselves to be among the best on the tour, and several others maintained their membership for years.  Yes, Jessica Korda, Pornanong Phatlum, and Tiffany Joh have had varying degrees of LPGA success, and I still have fairly high hopes for Belen Mozo, Pernilla Lindberg, Dewi Claire Schreefel, and Paola Moreno, but the rest haven't established themselves as LPGA regulars.

Second point:  oh, how the times have changed!  Compare LPGA Q-School and the rookie class of 2014 to the JLPGA's and LET's Q-School results and you'll notice that no prominent or even struggling LPGAers sought out dual membership for 2014 (with Harukyo Nomura giving up her JLPGA membership, there are only 4 dual LPGA-JLPGA members in 2014, Shanshan Feng, Ji-Yai Shin, Momoko Ueda, and Teresa Lu).  The LPGA attracted the KLPGA's Mi Rim Lee, the LET's Lee-Anne Pace, Ashleigh Simon, Maria Hernandez, Line Vedel, Joanna Klatten, and Xiyu Lin, and the ALPG's Kristie Smith.  Even putting aside Lydia Ko and Giulia Molinaro, who got to the LPGA by other means, the LPGA's '14ers are more impressive than either other tour's.  I'd put youngsters Jaye Marie Green, Yueer Cindy Feng, Xiyu Lin, Amy Anderson, Erica Popson, Lindy Duncan, and Natalie Sheary up against the JLPGA's Hikari Fujita and Haruna Taguchi or the LET's Sally Watson, Nobuhle Dalimi, Karolin Lampert, and Nina Muehl with great confidence.  And the caliber of the LPGA's returning players--from Lorie Kane to Silvia Cavalleri to Seon Hwa Lee to Lee-Anne Pace to Ashleigh Simon and beyond--is way higher than either other tour's (although I am excited about Na Zhang's comeback on the JLPGA and happy for LET medalist Caroline Martens, who's bouncing back from serious injuries to both her shoulders earlier this season).

Yup, the LPGA is the place to be once again.  Even though the JLPGA is attracting more KLPGAers, that's its only advantage over the LPGA now.  And you can make an argument that the LET is catching up to the JLPGA in terms of attracting new (but not returning) talent, although that might just mean that it's tougher to break into the JLPGA because it's a stronger tour (in terms of talent and schedule) than the LET.

So congratulations are in order to LPGA commissioner Mike Whan and his leadership team, but even more to the LPGA members who have set such a high standard for the rest of the world and made most of the top players on the planet eager to compete against them.  We're going to have to wait awhile for the likes of Sun-Ju Ahn, Bo-Mee Lee, Ha Na Jang, Hyo Joo Kim, Ha Neul Kim, Ariya Jutanugarn, Rikako Morita, Mamiko Higa, and Charley Hull to make it to the LPGA, but it's hard to doubt that most of them will be coming soon.  I wouldn't have had such confidence about similar-caliber non-LPGAers in 2010.

Stacy's #1 and Jane Park's on Top at the Kia!

Congrats to new world #1 Stacy Lewis and pole position player heading into round 2 of the Kia Classic Jane Park!  They've got a lot of bogeys on their tails (in the flying ace sense, hopefully not the golf sense), but I have no time to enjoy the air show, as I'm still swamped with work heading into spring break.  Be back when I can!  Until then, enjoy Jane Park's (and everyone else's) interview!

And, no, I still haven't recovered from Ai Miyazato's wedge approach on 16 last Sunday that cost her the RR Donnelley.  (In fact, I was suffering that day in London, Ontario, while we tried to enjoy the gala performance at the World Figure Skating Championships, on which more later.  I had a bad stomach bug and fever, but The Full Metal Archivist took the wheel and I napped in the family play area and we all were able to get in and watch some amazing and entertaining skating.  Still feeling the aftereffects of that illness, but at least my weight has dropped to its lowest in 20 years....)

Make It BABYMETAL in 2012!

Happy New Year from Mostly Harmless!  Enjoy some BABYMETAL, what looks like an elementary-school-aged kawaii metal band from Japan, to kick off 2012:



OK, so even though Laughing Squid thinks they're teenagers, I'm going with Blabbermouth, who has the lead singer at 13 and the 2 dancers/screamers at 12, not least b/c it fits my '12 theme.  Anyway, if you think they look young in this video, check out this fan montage, which lays the "Doki Doki Morning" track over clips of Sakura Gakuin performing live (that's the band they are an offshoot of):



It's going to be a great year!  Or at least a weird one!  How could it not be when a fan came out with a computer-game style video of their debut song within 8 days of its official release?

On Morgan Pressel, Mika Miyazato, In-Kyung Kim, Career Trajectories, and Expectations

As you'd expect, final round 71s by Morgan Pressel and Mika Miyazato that put them in 2nd and T8, respectively, at the Wegmans LPGA Championship, as well as In-Kyung Kim's 72, which dropped her to T12, were completely overshadowed by Ya Ni Tseng's historic win and dominating performance. But given that I picked Kim to win, thought Miyazato was playing well enough to win (and predicted a bronze for her), and predicted a top 10 for Pressel, I was curious to hear from them right after their Sunday rounds on what they thought of and how they felt about their weeks.

Pressel was in high spirits, having recovered from a birdieless +2 start over her 1st 11 holes with 3 birdies in her last 7 holes of bogey-free golf, most encouragingly with ones on the tough 12th and 14th. I jokingly asked her, "How does it feel to deny Cristie Kerr her 4th-straight 2nd-place finish?" (or words to that effect--I was a little tongue-tied!). Pressel replied in kind (but much more articulately):

You know, that's what I told her. I said, "At least you didn't finish second four times in a row." She goes, "I would have taken it." I said.... I told her, I said, "I wanted to make that birdie on 17 so that I would save your record of winning by 12 shots."

Considering her account of her comeback to Kerr was interrupted by a fan asking for an autograph (at the "...."), her delivery was excellent. But when I joked that now she knows how Jason Day feels, she replied in a somewhat more serious mode:

I guess. I'll take a second and a third in the first majors. I'm trending upwards, though. The next one's going to be better!

What I take from that brief walk from the putting green to the entrance to the players' locker room is that Pressel had reconciled herself while still out of the course to being unable to put any pressure on Tseng that day. Although she clearly wants her 2nd LPGA major, 3rd worldwide major (she got one on the JLPGA in 2010), and 3rd LPGA win really really badly, she understood this was Ya Ni's week and was already putting her own performance in perspective. Rather than beat herself up for not pulling off a Sunday miracle, Pressel was experienced and self-confident enough to know she had played well enough to win any normal LPGA Championship and was already looking forward to the U.S. Women's Open. Considering that her performance moved her 5 spots up in the latest Rolex Rankings to #12, that she's now #7 on the money list with almost $500K in winnings in only 10 starts, that she's playing very good golf this year, and that she's broken 70 5 times in her last 8 rounds, I'd say she has every right to feel the way she does. She seems to be in a great place where she can maintain very high expectations for herself and recognize how close she is to meeting them without letting the gap get her down.

I'd say about the same is true for Mika Miyazato, but given that she started on the LPGA 3 years after Pressel and is in an entirely different generation as a result, what counts as high expectations is very different for her than for Pressel. Sure, Miyazato also posted a convincing win in a JLPGA major last year and is accustomed to contending just about whenever she competes in Japan, but she knows she's just one of many very talented players without a win or a major on the LPGA (I think she's one of the best, but still...). In addition, after her 12-event top-25 streak on the LPGA that lasted from late last August to early this April came to a grinding halt with a missed cut at the Avnet, a disappointing T22 at the Salonpas Cup the following week on the JLPGA, a 1st-round loss at the Sybase, a weak T42 at the ShopRite, and a halfway-decent T23 at the State Farm, her top 10 at the Kraft Nabisco Championship was something of a distant memory. Still, with the best ball-striking stats of her short LPGA career to her credit in 2011, she knows that all she has to do is get her putter going to start seriously contending on the LPGA (she's averaging 1.84 putts per green in regulation this year, compared to 1.78 last year). And it almost happened last week. Her 6-birdie 68 on moving day shows what she's capable of when she gets on a roll--it was quite an impressive performance, as she didn't birdie a single par-5 that day and even bogeyed the par-5 4th hole!--but the way she hung in there when she couldn't find the flow was even more impressive to me. Even under Sunday pressure, she finally played Locust Hill's par 5s well; with birdies on the 2 easier ones, the 8th and 17th, she brought her total for the week on the par 5s to -1. All in all, Miyazato's T8 performance this week wasn't her best at the Wegmans (she finished T4 there as a rookie in 2009 when it was a standalone LPGA event), but it was her 3rd-straight top 15 at Locust Hill and 2nd-straight top 10 in an LPGA major.

All things considered, then, Mika Miyazato was a pretty satisfied golfer when I talked to her on Sunday after 1st taping 15 minutes of interviews with both tv and print media from Japan. From what the Full Metal Archivist conveyed to me about those interviews, most of what Mikan was doing during them was dealing with the praise and attention that comes from being the low Japanese golfer in the field. It seemed to me as I struggled to understand the questions and answers that Mikan was trying to convey just how challenging the course set-up was. She kept emphasizing how narrow the fairways were, how tough the rough was, how tucked the pins were for the final round, how difficult it was to gauge the speed of the greens all week, how she learned to deal with the frustrations of that kind of golf (the word "gaman"--put up with it/endure patiently/suffer stoically--came up a lot), how she handled the stress of playing in an LPGA major, and how happy she was with her overall performance and final results. Of course she also got questions about the U.S. Women's Open and her decision to donate her winnings in LPGA majors to reconstruction efforts in Japan by the American Red Cross. In addition, the Japanese media were quite familiar with her back story--how her friendship with Ya Ni Tseng was what drew her to start her pro career on the LPGA (rather than, as is usual for promising young Japanese amateurs and pros, to play at least a few years on the JLPGA)--so she fielded a number of questions about Tseng, as well. In a sense, then, Mikan was helping the Japanese media put not only her performance but also the missed cuts by Ai Miyazato and Chie Arimura, the final-round collapse by Momoko Ueda (who dropped from -4 at the end of Saturday to E the next day), and the -19 from Tseng in context for their viewers and readers.

That sense of perspective comes from a golfer who knows she could have done better but was happy with another good week in Rochester. When I asked her what she likes about Locust Hill, she replied,

This golf course, fairways very narrow and the greens small. Very difficult situation, but [and here she shifted to Japanese, so I'm paraphrasing the FMA's translation] it suits my game and I like that style of golf.

When I asked her if she feels Locust Hill prepares her well for the Broadmoor in 2 weeks, she answered:

Yes, absolutely. That course, the holes and the rough is very long, and if I miss the fairway, very difficult second shot. I played there last week and the greens very big. I need still to practice my short game.

So the need to keep the ball in the fairway, hit good shots from the rough, and play good recovery shots around the greens at Locust Hill all prepare her well for the challenges posed by the Broadmoor, but clearly she's expecting to have difficulty reaching some par 4s in regulation if she misses the fairways, so she's anticipating that she'll need a very sharp 50 yards and in wedge game to score well on that much longer course.

I was curious if she felt any added pressure down the stretch on Sunday, knowing that the size of her donation for Japan reconstruction efforts would be affected by her score, but she replied, "No, no pressure. I just wanted to play well today." In response to my final question about whether she sees herself doing in the future what Tseng was doing that week, she expressed the hope that she'd be playing soon with Ya Ni on a weekend, although she acknowledged that Ya Ni was "very strong" right now.

Even more important than her exact words was the tone of her interviews with the Japanese media and me. She was much more relaxed than last year; even if she hadn't reached the polish of an Ai Miyazato just yet, she was much more comfortable in the limelight and pleased at how close she had come to meeting her expectations for the week. She's clearly a young player who's coming into her own.

The contrast between Pressel and Miyazato's moods, on the one hand, and Kim's, on the other, was stark. Inky had battled her way to -6 with 7 holes left to play, despite a balky driver that led to 7 missed fairways out of 14 in all that day. But she bogeyed 12, 14, and 15 and needed a birdie on 17 to snag a T12. That finish, as good as it was, broke a streak of 4-straight top 10s in LPGA majors. So even though she extended her top-25 run on the LPGA to 12 events (and counting) dating back to the end of last October, her results this week were disappointing for a player who's had 1 win, 1 runner-up, 4 bronzes, 10 top 5s, and 15 top 10s since last year's LPGA Championship--and only 2 of those 21 starts outside the top 25. And it was clear from the way she answered my question about how her last year had been on the course since she had last been to Locust Hill. In a noncommittal tone of voice, she replied,

It's been good. I've been playing well, you know. Just, uh.... There's a lot of good finishes. I'm looking forward to playing in the next couple of weeks.

I wonder where that train of thought she decided not to share was taking her! She was similarly unimpressed with her results this week:

Um...I mean, it's gotten better, actually, on the weekend. Just started off kind of shaky, but I'm hitting the ball much better. I just have a few mistakes out there. But, you know, it happens.

She got interested in a question about adjusting to the changing course conditions after all the rain in the middle of the week:

I think it actually helped a lot of players, the soft conditions. The greens were I think a little slower, a few times, and downhill so fast, you know what I mean? So it was hard to adjust to the speed of the greens.

Kim joined the LPGA 1 year after Pressel did, and her results and expectations have kept rising ever since. I don't know if it was the frustration at her start or finish to the week that was driving her to be so hard on her performance and results, or if it was also the number of close calls she's had in the last calendar year, but whatever it was, Inky was not at all satisfied with her play and not at all hesitant to say so. Whether she can put that frustration to good use in the coming weeks remains to be seen, but I think it speaks volumes to her situation as someone fighting to join the LPGA's super-elite. She's just about a point behind Na Yeon Choi on the Rolex Rankings and, at #1 in the Golfweek/Sagarin Performance Index, barely ahead of Suzann Pettersen, Choi, Cristie Kerr, Tseng, and Ji-Yai Shin (they're all within a quarter-point of her!), so she knows that her finish this week doesn't help her cause all that much, and certainly not as much as it could have.

So it's no wonder that Miyazato, who's moved up to #24 in the RR and #23 in the GSPI, would be happy with a result that ends a rough patch in May and early June for her, whereas Kim would be angsting over mightabeens and Pressel would be licking her lips for the next major. The trick for Miyazato will be to keep raising her expectations and preparing herself to keep meeting them, while for Kim and Pressel it will be figuring out what it takes to keep up with theirs. Keep an eye on these players the next few weeks. While the length of the Broadmoor will likely present them with some problems, Evian and Carnoustie had better watch out!

How Ya Ni Tseng and Suzann Pettersen Are Preparing for the Wegmans LPGA Championship

I got a chance to talk briefly with Ya Ni Tseng at Locust Hill's putting green and Suzann Pettersen as she was leaving its driving range in the early evening yesterday. What they told me about how they're preparing for the LPGA's 2nd major of the year was actually pretty revealing--about the strengths and weaknesses of their games, about what they anticipate the biggest challenges will be this week for them, and about how much planning and effort goes into fine-tuning 2 of the hottest players on the planet right now.

For Tseng, her key will be keeping her driver in play and on the fairway as much as possible. With her length, she can give herself a lot of birdie chances if she hits her irons as well as she has been this season. But the big question mark for her is whether she can go from a win 2 weeks ago at the wide-open Panther Creek Country Club to one at Locust Hill, which features super-narrow fairways, trees in play on virtually every hole, and rough that's getting tougher by the minute (as the rain falls as intensely now as it has all morning). The other key for her yesterday was working on her putting, focusing especially on getting the speed of the greens down. Hopefully that'll come in handy when the rains take the weekend off and the greens dry off again (knock wood).

For Pettersen, who as I already mentioned was on the driving range working on her 3/4 wedges, the focus is on controlling the shape and trajectory of her irons and approach shots--and being as precise as possible with her 80 yards and in game. Even though she's been putting a lot better this season than in recent ones, she's barely in Hound Dog's top 40 in total putting, as compared to 7th in driving and 1st in greens in regulation. Basically, she's honing the true strength of her game--her accuracy with her irons--knowing she can count on her driving and hoping to take as much pressure off her putting and chipping as possible.

It may sound funny that Pettersen, who's been reaching the fairway this season 76.8% of the time, and Tseng, who's been doing the same a fantastic 71.1% of the time--both of whom are contending to take Annika's and Lorena's mantles as straight-up bombers (Tseng is averaging over 271 yards off the tee while Pettersen is approaching 262)--have such different approaches to honing their long games. But I think each has taken the approach that's right for her--and right for the course conditions as they were experiencing them on Monday and Tuesday. With fast and firm and hilly fairways, it's easy for Tseng's drives to go all over the lot. And with fast and firm and undulating greens, it's difficult for even someone who's as pure with her irons as Pettersen to consistently put it close to the pin.

I think both players I talked to yesterday are secretly rejoicing at today's rains. Anything that makes Locust Hill's fairways and greens easier to hit yet makes the course longer for the tour's precision players works to their benefit. They're going off the 1st tee in back-to-back groups Thursday morning--Tseng with Ai Miyazato and Juli Inkster at 9:05 am and Pettersen with Paula Creamer and Sandra Gal at 9:16--so as long as they don't run into conditions or delays strikingly different from what the afternoon pairings have to deal with, look for them to have a big advantage!

T-Joh in Da Hunt!

Unlike in the U.S. Open, where Rory McIlroy is dominating the field and course like Cristie Kerr did at last year's LPGA Championship, any number of players can win the Futures Tour's major, the Tate & Lyle Players Championship. After a moving-day 68, Tiffany Joh is 1 shot behind Valentine Derrey and 2 shots ahead of Jane Rah, Lisa Ferrero, Mo Martin, and Sofie Andersson heading into tomorrow's final round. I'd love to see her pull out the win and move back into the race for the top 5 on tour. She's actually been playing solidly on the LPGA but struggling to make cuts. Playing well tomorrow could be just the confidence boost she needs heading into the Wegmans LPGA Championship next week!

As the World Turns III

This irregular Mostly Harmless feature seems to becoming a monthly thing! Check out my March and April installments!

It Couldn't Have Happened to a Nicer Person! Mariajo Uribe fired a 66 to win the HSBC Brazil Cup by 1 shot over Lindsey Wright and 2 over Maria Hjorth. How do I know Uribe is nice? Read on!

Who Comes after the New Blood? Given that I've named the rookie classes of 2006-2008 the Young Guns and 2009-2011 the New Blood, what should I call the next LPGA generation? I better think fast, as there are some high-quality college golfers turning pro this summer, among them U.S. Women's Amateur champion Danielle Kang, LSU's Megan McChrystal, Arizona State's Carlota Ciganda, USC's Lizette Salas, Auburn's Cydney Clanton, Wake Forest teammates Natalie Sheary and Michelle Shin, Florida's Jessica Yadloczky, recent U.S. Women's Open qualifier Joanna Coe, and Arkansas's Kelli Shean. [Update (6/1/11): Add Stacey Miller to the list!]

Hope they all get their applications to the 1st stage of LPGA Q-School in soon--they're due between June 1st and July 15th for everyone not already on a Rolex Rankings-recognized tour or in its top 100 on 7/12/11.

Cannonade of Babies! It's well-known that Annika's 2nd child, Will, is now home and doing well and that Lorena's expecting, but I wonder how many people are following Jeong Jang on facebook or via Seoul Sisters.com? Well, the recently-married Jang is also expecting and has decided to take the entire year off from competitive golf. Congrats to all the LPGA's new and expecting moms and here's hoping that more choose to follow in the footsteps of Juli Inkster. Especially JJ!

Corning Classic Reboot Coming? That's what the local papers in Corning, NY, were buzzing about last week. Here's hoping we see a new and improved tournament by 2013!

Me and Sergio Down on the Back 9.... What is it about golf where you can go from Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll so quickly and find it so hard to even get back to playing decently? In my 3rd round of the year, I was playing Harvest Hill in Orchard Park for the 1st time and out of the blue fired a bogey-free 33 on the front and recovered from a 3-putt bogey on the par-5 10th with a birdie on the par-3 12th to get back to -3. 6 holes later, I ended up with a 77! The turning point? One skanky drive way right off the 13th tee, then a pull-hooked 3-wood into the heather on the same hole, and I had no idea where my next miss was going. It took 9 horrible holes the next morning on the same course to get back to playing at least halfway-decent golf again on the same back 9 I collapsed on the day before. My best-ball over those 2 rounds: 71. My worst-ball: 95. I know it's the early season and all, but this is ridiculous! Good thing the Buffalo District Mid-Am is tomorrow, eh?

Here's a Loaded Question for You!

All right, there's a neutral question I could ask you all stemming from my observations of the 1st 2 majors of 2011, the Kraft Nabisco Championship and the Masters: what conclusions can we draw from these 2 events about the state of women's and men's professional golf? But I'm actually more interested in your thoughts on the more loaded question: is men's professional golf deeper, better, and more exciting than women's professional golf?

Recommended Reading: Lisa Mickey and Happy Fan Remind Us What Thanksgiving Is All About

Check out these amazing Thanksgiving stories from Happy Fan and Lisa Mickey when you get a chance tonight!

Check This Out! Ai Miyazato/Brittany Lincicome Swing Comparison

Turns out it's Brittany Lincicome's birthday. Check out where Ai Miyazato's swing is at when Brittany's hit the ball....



Wow! Who has 5 wins this season?



Ai-sama puts her style of play and swing tempo in context before the Canadian Women's Open:

Canadian Women's Open Saturday: Wie-Shin Showdown in the Works

Even though Michelle Wie missed more greens yesterday than in the previous 2 days combined and gave back every 1 of her 3 birdies with a corresponding bogey in rainy conditions, she kept her hopes for a wire-to-wire win at the Canadian Women's Open alive. It took Ji-Yai Shin a flurry of 3 birdies in her last 6 holes to tie Wie for the 54-hole lead at -10, but she may be the only real challenger left in the field, as Suzann Pettersen, Na Yeon Choi, and Jee Young Lee couldn't get many birdie putts to fall and are 4 back, while the only really low rounds of the day--a 66 by Rachel Hetherington, 67s by Catriona Matthew, Cristie Kerr, and Mina Harigae, and 68s by Christina Kim, Se Ri Pak, Brittany Lang, Mika Miyazato, and Lorie Kane--came by players who started the day so far back they'll need to shoot in the mid-60s or lower today to have a ghost of a chance of getting in the mix. In short, very few players with a chance of stopping Wie from getting her 2nd career LPGA tour victory made much of a move on moving day. Sometimes when you open the door, very few people walk through it.

But when the player who did may well be the best woman golfer in the world, it doesn't really matter that she's virtually alone. In a classic showdown between bomber and precision player, Shin will get to put pressure on Wie with her approach shots all day today. Only problem for Shin is that her ball-striking has been surprisingly suspect this week. She's hit 2/3 of her fairways and just under 2/3 of her greens in regulation, which would be acceptable for most top-level players, but are simply sub-par results (and not in a good way) for her. Unlike many of her fellow precision players, Shin does not seem to have an extra gear off the tee. While many are putting up straight-shooter-like numbers on St. Charles's firm fairways, Shin is barely averaging more than 250 yards off the tee. And while many of her fellow pea-shooters are also having trouble hitting fairways and greens this week--check out Morgan Pressel's numbers for a representative example (and note that she went +3 in her final 8 holes yesterday to fall out of contention), but see also Paula Creamer and In-Kyung Kim--it's Shin's putter that's keeping her alive thus far. She's not only made a lot of birdie putts but also a lot of par saves.

So in a day of marquee pairings--most notably Brittany Lincicome and Katherine Hull at 10:49, Ai Miyazato and Amy Yang at 10:57, Cristie Kerr and Christina Kim at 11:45, and Paula Creamer and Morgan Pressel at 11:53--all eyes will be on the final group. But it's worth noting that each of the final 3 pairings

Start Time: 12:09 PM
Suzann Pettersen
Catriona Matthew

Start Time: 12:17 PM
Jee Young Lee
Na Yeon Choi

Start Time: 12:25 PM
Ji-Yai Shin
Michelle Wie

feature 1 player who's significantly longer than her playing partner. Can Pettersen, Lee, and Wie take advantage of their length today? If Wie does, Shin is the only player in the field who can beat her. Should be pretty interesting, whether it turns into a shootout between Wie and Shin in their 4th round in a row together or a Sunday free-for-all. I may just have to bother one of my friends who has Golf Channel in a few hours!

flora flora flora

Reassessing the Quality of Play on the LPGA Relative to the Futures Tour: Observations and Implications

I've heard it said that the top third of the players on the Futures Tour are at least as good as the bottom third on the LPGA, but I wonder if the conventional wisdom is undervaluing the quality of play on the LPGA's developmental tour.

Consider 1st that the Futures Tour's money list leader, Cindy LaCrosse, has earned almost as much as the player in 65th place on the LPGA money list, Sarah Jane Smith. LaCrosse had to do it in 5 more starts than Smith, but look at how their stats stack up.

Scoring Average: LaCrosse 69.53, Smith 72.04
Birdie Rate: LaCrosse 4.03, Smith 2.91
Greens in Regulation: LaCrosse .739, Smith .687
Putting Average: LaCrosse 28.77, Smith 30.53

Maybe all this shows is that the courses on the Futures Tour are a lot easier than those on the LPGA, but aren't the differences striking?

Consider next that Kristie Smith, who's spent most of the season leading the LET's Rookie of the Year race until In-Kyung Kim overtook her last week, has won once in 4 starts on the Futures Tour and has earned enough (just over $20K) to sit at #21 on their money list. The closest player to $20K on the LPGA, Allison Fouch, has the 102nd spot nailed down on their money list right now, but it took her 9 starts to get there. Because Smith has played so few FT events, she's not eligible to be listed on their stats page, but we do know her scoring average is 70.00 while Fouch's is 74.33. Again, this might be explainable simply by positing that it's easier to score on the FT, and we find some support for it by looking at Smith's LET scoring average (73.00). However, given Smith's LET birdie rate of 3.56 exceeds Fouch's of 2.46, her LET greens in regulation rate of .722 blows away Fouch's of .591, and that her LET putting average of 30.58 is comparable to Fouch's of 30.55, isn't it just possible that Smith has been playing better than Fouch this year? That is, isn't it possible that the #21 player on the Futures Tour is playing better than the #102 player on the LPGA?

Of course, Fouch herself made the leap from the Futures Tour to the LPGA relatively recently. And a couple of years ago, back when she was playing well, she made an interesting observation, in response to the question of what she learned about the LPGA that she would want to pass along to Futures Tour players:

I would tell them that the way they hit the ball, putt and chip is good enough or better than the bottom half of the LPGA Tour. Other than the top 30 players in the world, stop putting the LPGA Tour players on such high pedestals. With the exception of the top 10 finishers each week, the rest of the LPGA field is shooting around even par. I think it's easy to get lost in what the winners are shooting, rather than looking at the entire field. Sure, the top players in the world get up and down from 100 yards most of the time, but the best players on the Duramed FUTURES Tour have just as much talent. It's a matter of getting experience. Good wedge play and making more birdies was something my game needed to get better to take that next step, and I did it over time. The biggest thing, though, was surrounding myself by people who continuously pointed me in the right direction. You have to manage your game, your thoughts, your emotions, your everything with a lot of help. That has to start before you get to the LPGA.

I've been looking at stats for a lot of players on the LPGA this season, in preparation for my next Best of the LPGA ranking update, and what I found surprised me. Key performance indicators like greens in regulation and putts per green in regulation, along with key results like scoring average and birdies per round, seem quite low to me for the vast majority of the LPGA. Outside the very top tier of players and their lead chase pack, I haven't seen very many with very impressive stats. Only 52 players are hitting greens in regulation more than 65% of the time. Only 52 players are taking fewer than 1.82 putts per green in regulation. Only 55 players have scoring averages below 72.50. Only about 60 players are averaging 3 birdies or more per round. So I would go so far as to argue that there are only about 50 LPGAers who are clearly better than any given top 50 player on the Futures Tour.

Now, it's true that not all top Futures Tour graduates excel immediately on the LPGA. Song-Hee Kim's early struggles on the LPGA are well-known. Vicky Hurst is only beginning to learn how to compete on the LPGA. And Mina Harigae will need to turn it on in the 2nd half of the season to break into the top 100 on the money list and avoid Q-School. It does take time to adjust to courses, travel, and competition on the LPGA. Plus, many players don't stay on the big tour for long. But my point isn't about individuals. It's about odds. The 200 or so professional golfers competing regularly in the United States who aren't among the LPGA's top 50 are very closely bunched together, whatever tour they play exclusively or regularly on.

Why is this so? Part of the reason is that so many former LPGAers or part-time LPGAers play regularly on the Futures Tour. Part of the reason is that the Futures Tour continues to attract top young talent from around the world who don't want to start their professional careers on European or Asian tours. And part of the reason is that the next generation of top American golfers is really good. Over time, they're all going to swell the ranks of the really good players on the LPGA to 75 or 100 players.

But until that happens, the LPGA would do well to rethink its membership and priority status categories. I would recommend shrinking Category 1 to the top 70 on the previous year's money list, down from the top 80 as it stands now. I would expand Category 9 from the top 5 on the previous year's Futures Tour money list to the top 10. And I would expand Category 11, which is currently designed to take 20 players from #81 to #100 on the money list and the top 20 finishers from Q-School, to take players from #71 to #90 on the money list and the top 30 from Q-School. Along with the other categories up to and including #13 (an early promotion for any 3-time Futures Tour winners), all you'd then need to do to make room for this group of "fully exempt" golfers would be to expand all "regular-season" full-field events from 144 to 156 spots, as Hound Dog called for back in April.

In addition, the LPGA would do well to focus on radically expanding the Futures Tour. The measure of any tour's success is how many players can make a living on it. With its small purses, the Futures Tour is not currently a break-even proposition for most of its members. Rather than seeking to raise purses, the Tour's organizers should be focused on expanding playing opportunities, getting more tournaments on the schedule and giving everyone more chances to make cuts and cash checks. $100K purses for new Futures Tour events and $1M purses for new domestic LPGA events would give the non-elite players competing regularly on the U.S. more chances to hone their games and their minds.

If the LPGA and Futures Tour don't take these measures, or similar ones, then fewer international golfers will seek to compete professionally in the United States and more and more American golfers will decide they're better off starting their professional careers abroad. If they do, however, it won't be long before the level of competition on the Futures Tour exceeds the LET and even the KLPGA.

[Update 1 (8/6/10, 4:23 am): If you haven't been reading the comments thread on this post, you should. Because it has a bearing on a very interesting idea that Mike Southern just floated over at Ruthless Golf.]

On Following Mi Hyun Kim, Mina Harigae, and Ai Miyazato

Last Sunday morning at the LPGA Championship, I followed, in turn, Mi Hyun Kim (and Juli Inkster), Mina Harigae (and Stacy Prammanasudh), and Ai Miyazato (and Brittany Lang), for the 1st 4 or 5 holes of their final rounds before I had to leave Locust Hill to pick up the Full Metal Archivist, onechan, and imoto from the hotel to eat lunch (at a great Korean place) and return to the course Sports Zone/Wegmans tent area. I'm happy to report that onechan learned both the dog paddle and a rudimentary backstroke that weekend at the hotel pool, but that's not the subject of this post. No, what I want to get at is how small the differences are between a bad (Harigae), good (Kim), and great (Miyazato) round and to share some insight I gained into Ai-sama's mental approach to the game from what I observed and what I asked her (embarrassingly incoherently) at the media center after her round.

Let me make clear from the start that I didn't see anything all that amazing from anyone in those early holes. I saw a lot of routine pars, some great par saves, several bogeys, and a few good birdie putts. Inkster was the only player under par in the holes I watched; Harigae was the only one over par. Of course, as soon as I left, Ai-sama rattled off birdies on 4 of her remaining 5 holes on the front and Kim birdied 4 of her last 11 holes. But it's not so much the results I want to focus on here as it is on how they came about. There were definitely similarities in the ways the players attacked each of the 1st 4 holes, along with some subtle differences.

I got to the course early enough to watch Mi Hyun Kim, Shanshan Feng, and Chella Choi on the driving range until Kim left for the putting green. Choi was hitting hybrids like a hybrid-hitting machine, but having a little difficulty losing drives to the right every so often. Kim was working up from hybrids to fairway woods to driver. I noticed that her left wrist was lightly wrapped, that she wasn't using a golf glove, and that every so often she's be looking at and touching the tip of her left thumb, like it was bothering her or something. But she was still hitting the ball consistently well. Feng was working on irons. I wasn't as impressed with her swing as I was with Choi's; it seemed to be too compact in a way, as if she wasn't extending her left arm in her initial takeaway as much as I would have expected.

The scene at the 1st tee was pretty cool, although it would have been cooler if the starter hadn't butchered Kim's name ("My Hoon") and had remembered to mention she's an 8-time winner on the LPGA! Miyazato actually took the time in the minute before she was due to hit her drive to hug a male fan she recognized and get introduced to his wife--she was the only player I saw that day who interacted with individual fans right before starting her round. As you may have read in my scouting report of Locust Hill, I expected most players to be able to fly their tee shots on the downhill 1st hole past the corner of the dogleg and give themselves a good look at the green and pin, despite the hole having been lengthened by about 30 yards. But to my surprise, Kim couldn't reach the corner, Harigae and Miyazato were only right at it, and even Inkster and Lang didn't go far past it. So the shorter hitters I was focusing on, who all ended up on the left side of the fairway (or in Harigae's case, the 1st cut of the left rough), faced fairly intimidating 2nd shots with fairway woods from downhill lies, with the left pond definitely in play and perhaps even some overhanging branches from the trees to their left interfering with their lines to the green. It looked to me that each of them attempted the same shot--start the ball at the right bunker and draw it back toward the back-left pin--although in retrospect, it's entirely possible that Kim and Harigae were intentionally laying up short of the right bunker to give themselves a neat little angle on their chips. In any case, that's where they ended up, whereas Miyazato's ball failed to draw and she ended up in the back of the right trap, almost pin high. Kim chipped to about 6 feet and surprisingly missed her par save. Harigae fluffed her pitch a little, ending up about 11 feet short right of the cup and forcing herself to make a tough little comebacker for bogey. Miyazato seemed to leave her shot from the sand behind and to the right of the hole on purpose (unless it just slipped away from her a little), perhaps because it gave her a straighter and flatter par putt. In any case, she sunk the 9-footer. Of everyone, the only player to really attack the 1st was Inkster. She overcooked a hybrid from the right rough and ended up on the back left fringe, a little past pin high, from where she just missed chipping in for birdie. Prammanasudh and Miyazato were the only players to save par. The 1st was definitely playing tough for this group of 6 players.

Although the 2nd was theoretically a birdie hole, the front left pin position, right behind the deep trap guarding that side of the green, was not only tough to get to, but presented the players with tricky birdie attempts from just about every angle. The only ones not to give themselves a good look for birdie were Prammanasudh, who flared her tee shot into the right rough and did well to hit the green from there, and Kim, who fluffed her approach shot a bit and ended up on the false front to the right of the trap, from where she easily got up and down. But everyone else was within 20 feet, Harigae about 11 feet above the hole after nearly holing her approach and Miyazato about 12 feet to the right of the cup. And everyone except Inkster found a way to miss her birdie attempt. It looked to me like Ai-sama pulled hers from the start, although she might have been fooled by the way the ball refused to break right from the mound behind the trap. In any case, whereas the sixsome was +3 on the 1st hole, they were -1 on the 2nd, but it felt like being over par to me.

To my surprise, the 3rd hole gave up the most birdies of any that I saw. Except for Inkster, who ticked some leaves on the trees overhanging the right side of the tee boxes and ended up short right in the fairway, and Lang, who pulled her drive into the left rough, everyone was in prime position to attack the back-left pin. The only one of them not to hit a good approach shot, sadly, was Miyazato, who had needed a ruling because she and her caddie were uncertain what to do when her ball had plugged in the fairway. (Since everyone was playing lift, clean, and place, they wanted to clarify whether they could do that as usual or whether they had to first take relief from the plugged lie and then do LCP.) Coincidentally, while waiting for the rules official to arrive, Ai-sama was able to watch Sakura Yokomine's tee shot on #2. After that delay, which gave Lang a chance to walk to the green and survey her putt from the back fringe, Miyazato left her approach shot in the front right corner of the green, about 35 feet from the pin. Whereas Kim sank a 20-footer from almost pin high to the right of the cup and Harigae and Prammanasudh each made great 15-footers from the center of the green, Miyazato knocked her birdie attempt almost off the green, maybe 7 feet past the cup. But she calmly sank the uphiller as if there were no doubt in the world that she was destined to save par. The group ended up -3 on the 3rd. Not bad! At that point, only Lang was over par and Inkster was under par.

On the 3-shot par-5 4th, a pond to the left of the fairway about 220 yards out that I hadn't noticed in my scouting report added an extra wrinkle to the drive. I had been focused on the big trees overhanging the right side of the fairway about 225-265 yards out from the tee, thinking that you could play a small draw to take them out of play. But instead Kim couldn't even reach them with a drive that Inkster outhit with a hybrid, Harigae blocked her drive into the deep right rough underneath them (after being left her 1st 3 drives, although no worse than 1st cut on her 1st 2 holes), and Miyazato played what appeared to be a fade to end up on the right side of the fairway. From there, everyone's strategy diverged. Inkster, Miyazato, and Lang attacked with their 2nd shots, trying to get up the fairway as far as they could and as close to the left rough as they could to get the best angle into the front right pin. Kim and Prammanasudh laid back a bit, just trying stay in the fairway. Harigae looked like she was trying to play a low draw under the trees with a hybrid, but instead hit a grounder and had to punch out to about 190 out. Everyone from farther out kept their approach shots below the pin (and sometimes short of the green, where Inkster's shot from the left rough ended up, as well). Maybe the fact that it started drizzling while Kim and Inkster were teeing off and actually got raining pretty hard for most of the hole had something to do with their inability to hit the green. In any case, the only really good approach shots I saw were from the twosome who started latest. Lang stuck her approach about 8 feet below and to the left of the pin, while Miyazato put hers inside Lang's, about 3 feet to the left of the hole. But whereas Lang's putt was more uphill, Miyazato's was on a sidehill, and after Lang made hers, Ai-sama couldn't follow up on it, missing on the short side. Kim and Inkster just missed chipping in for birdie, Prammanasudh made a routine par, and Harigae saved her bogey, so the group was again a rather disappointing E on the hole.

I was able to stick around for all of Harigae's 5th hole, where she stuck her approach on the uphill par 3 7 feet right of the pin, after just barely carrying the front right bunker, and missed the birdie putt, forcing herself into a little tester to save par (Prammanasudh failed to get up and down from that trap)--and see her drive on the downhill 6th, which again found the left side of the fairway--before heading back toward the 1st tee to catch Ai-sama's pairing. About an hour later, I saw Miyazato hit a great approach shot to #5, but couldn't stick around to watch her putt, as it was time to make my way to the other side of Jefferson Road where my car was parked near the driving range to check out of the hotel (the fact that the walk from tee to green was probably the sharpest grade on the front had absolutely nothing to do with that decision!). But I came away feeling that Miyazato was in total command of her swing, had amazing distance control, and was so due to start making birdies, while it felt like Kim's round could go either way and Harigae was having small problems with both her driver and her putter.

After lunch and some time at the Sports Zone (onechan chose the golf simulator over the bounce house, maze, and climbing tower while I was there [yay!] and was almost impressed when I put my wedge on Pebble's tiny downhill par 3 5 feet from the pin), I made my way back to the 18th just in time to miss Michelle Wie and Haeji Kang finish out their rounds, and was pleasantly surprised to see on the hand-lettered scoreboard that Kim had shot a 69, but disappointed by Inkster's 74, Harigae's 75, and Prammanasudh's 77. I was shocked to see that Miyazato had turned in a 31 on the front, and even happier when I made my way to the 9th-green scoreboard to see that she had gotten to -5 on her day through 14, then -6 through 15. I didn't get to see that she had gotten to -7 through 16 until I had made my way back to the Sports Zone to let the ladies know what Ai-sama was up to and see if they wanted to watch her play 17 and 18. But they were having fun and I didn't want to jinx her, so after the Full Metal Archivist got the girls to the Wegmans tent, I headed to the 18th green, where I was too late to see her finish. Still, I was in time to watch her get interviewed by Rich Lerner live on Golf Channel, to eventually decide to cross the ropes and join the Japanese media interviewing her afterwards (in the sense that I tried to tape the conversation and stay out of the way of the photographers), to find out from Heather Daly-Donofrio that she would be interviewed at the media tent in English, to stupidly leave for it too soon and lose everyone, to wander back to the putting green trying to find them, to find out from a Japanese reporter in line for an autograph from Paula Creamer that she had only shot a 66, to chat with her caddie for a bit, and after all that to return late to the media tent, where her interview was already in process.

And that's when I got to ask Ai-sama my Embarrassing Question that Inadvertently Revealed Something Important about Her Mindset. What was going through my head was something a lot less coherent than this: if I had started my reign as #1 in the world with a 5-bogey 76, fought my way back to +3 to make the cut (but still offset my 5 birdies with 4 bogeys that day), hit the 45-hole mark at +3, and after making 2 birdies in a row to start my Saturday back 9, followed them up with 11 straight pars to remain at +1, I would have been, well, the slightest bit impatient--ok, frustrated and worried--wondering when I would see results from my improved play. So I wanted to know what she was thinking and how she was feeling before she began her birdie barrage. What came out of my mouth was something even less coherent, although somewhat more so than LPGA.com's transcript (my corrections/additions are in [square brackets]):

Q: Ai, when those birdie putts were[n't] dropping earlier in your round what were you thinking?

AI MIYAZATO (via INTERPRETER): Earlier in the round today?

Q: Yes, the second and fourth holes.

AI MIYAZATO: [Um...] [long pause] Did I have birdie putts on the first few holes? Maybe the fourth, [no,] 3. [No,] I think I made a good [par] putt[s, actually,] the first few holes. I had a good opportunity on No. 5, I guess, on the par-5. After that, but I made birdie, and...

(via INTERPRETER) Up until that hole it didn't feel like I had that many chances.

She was genuinely confused enough by my question that some people in the room laughed nervously after that long pause, during which she had been looking at me in a sympathetic but taken aback kind of way. She literally could not remember anything except her par saves from early in her round!

Come to think of it, that's probably one of the keys to her success. Although she missed a birdie chance at 17 and bogeyed 18 for the 4th-straight day, she played her last 27 holes in 8 under par and her last 14 holes in 6 under par. I suppose she's realized that your chances of going on birdie barrages like that are reduced if you remember the putts that got away or worry about when they'll start dropping. She simply knew she was hitting on all cylinders and that the birdies would come. In her interview with the Japanese media, she emphasized how important her par saves on 10 and 11 were, in terms of keeping her momentum going. I guess that's the way she was thinking about those saves on 1 and on 3--they allowed her to extend what would end up being a 26-hole bogey-free run.

When I contrast Miyazato's finish with Harigae's (+2 over her last 13), Inkster's (+3 over her last 14), Prammanasudh's (+5 over her last 13), and Lang's (birdieless 42 on the back after a bogey-free 33 on the front), I'm so impressed by the results of that calmness and that confidence. But when I consider that fellow Okinawan Mika Miyazato was 3 shots behind Cristie Kerr after 47 holes but ended up losing to her by 18, I'm blown away by Ai-sama's resilience, persistence, and patience. (And I'm even more impressed with Kerr's week: she put together bogey-free streaks of 8, 28, and 22 holes on a tough Locust Hill layout when she wasn't even hitting that many fairways--12 fewer than Miyazato in all!)

Another key factor in Miyazato's performance was how committed she was to her pre-shot routine. Here the contrast to Harigae is telling. I've already noted how great Harigae's routine is for her full swings. But what became clear during the 5-and-a-half holes I watched of her in actual competition is that she doesn't have as effective or repeatable a pre-shot routine for her putts. In contrast to Kim and Miyazato, whose minds were clearly made up before even approaching the ball to begin taking their stances, Harigae seemed to be still deciding on her ultimate strategy even as she was taking her stance. There was a lot more twitching, setting and resetting of her feet and hands, even stepping saway from a putt from the rookie. Whereas Kim's and Miyazato's routines and rhythms never varied, Harigae's did. Plus, she never seemed as locked in on the speed of the greens as the more experienced professionals. Even when Miyazato rocketed her birdie attempt on 3 down the slope past the hole and almost ended up attempting her par save from the fringe, I got the impression that she had taken a calculated risk in an attempt to jump-start her round.

Finally, I'll reiterate the importance of pacing and rhythm that I noted the 1st time I followed Miyazato a couple of years ago at the Wegmans:

When I asked the FMA later what stood out to her about Ai-chan, what she focused on after her leanness and fitness was her rhythm. She was surprised to hear that Ai-chan had been talking about just that in her interviews the 1st 2 rounds. What I realized was that her emphasis even extended to the way she walked on the course, not just her rhythm on her full swings, pitches, and putts. She has a very long stride for such a short person, sets a brisk but effortless-looking pace, and kept to it on every hole. Even though she was struggling a bit while we watched her, she projects a lot of confidence and determination on the course.

Harigae was paired with a very fast-walking player in Prammanasudh, and she may just have picked up her pace a little, perhaps even unconsciously, in an effort to avoid slowing down the long-legged Okie in Tulsa orange (take that, Rickie Fowler!). It may just be a coincidence, but Harigae's timing on her tee shots was off that Sunday compared to the Monday pro-am when I had followed her. 4 of her 5 drives went left, and the one that went right was clearly an overcompensation, where she was protecting against going left and flirting with the pond. I wonder what the result would be if Harigae were to find her own pace and stick with it all round, every round, like Miyazato clearly does.

What I took away from the little time that I spent Sunday morning with Mi Hyun Kim, Mina Harigae, and Ai Miyazato was how big a difference all these little differences can make. While I was watching her, Kim was unfazed by her opening bogey, getting up-and-down easily when she missed the green and making her only birdie attempt. Even though she wasn't hitting the ball all that great by her standards, she was hanging in there and giving herself chances for good things to happen. Harigae was leaking oil on her tee shots, letting birdie opportunities slip away, and forcing herself to work harder than she needed to when it came to saving pars and bogeys. And despite my worries for her, Miyazato was actually this far away from getting into the zone. I think to a casual observer the differences between their starts wouldn't have been that noticeable. They were generally hitting the ball about as far and to about the same areas, after all. But the cumulative effects of those tiny differences--and what they did with their starts--make a huge difference in terms of strokes taken per round and dollars won per tournament.

[Update 1 (7:56 am): Check out Ruthless Golf for some interesting thoughts on getting out of your own way, something both Kerr and Miyazato did very well last week!]

[Update 2 (6/30/10, 4:46 am): Very kind words from Mike Southern, but one word of warning about trying to implement any of his advice or my speculations. Don't try for the first time on a cool day in a 2-club wind! I couldn't even break 85 on the Easiest Course in the World yesterday, and I never gave up on a single shot. Seems like I was remembering all my good putts on the Locust Hill putting green, which meant that I left a lot of birdie and par putts really short at tECitW. But the greens there were harder and faster than I remembered when it came to accepting approach shots, pitches, and chips, so I was going long all day on those. The wind didn't help with that, either, in my defense. So memories are all well and good, but actually adjusting to the reality of the conditions on the ground is highly recommended, as well!]

A Tale of Two Twenty-Year-Olds: Mina Harigae and Mika Miyazato

Over the last few years, I've been keeping my eye on Mina Harigae and Mika Miyazato, both of whom were top junior and amateur golfers in their respective countries (the U.S. and Japan) and are now relatively new professionals at age 20 on the LPGA Tour. Harigae rocked the Futures Tour last year, while Miyazato had a solid rookie season on the LPGA. I've enjoyed reading their respective rookie blogs (here are all Miyazato's posts from last season and Harigae's first from this one) and following their experiments in social media, so one of my top priorities when I visited Locust Hill as an accredited member of the golfy media on Monday and Tuesday was to snag interviews with each one of them. I followed Harigae on the back during the Monday pro-am and interviewed her off the 9th green after her group finished, while Mike Scanlan of the LPGA hooked me up with Miyazato's interpreter/manager, Kie Ito, who set up an interview (during a thunderstorm, as it turned out) on Tuesday morning in the media tent. If I had been really prepared, I would have made sure to ask similar questions to each player, but there were commonalities between what they told me, so I'll focus on those here.

Both 20-year-olds have their sights set firmly on the LPGA. One of my 1st questions to Mika was about her decision to bypass the JLPGA and head straight to the LPGA's Q-School in 2008. She told me that having played with Ya Ni Tseng in the Junior World Championship in 2006 (she was too modest to mention she won with a -16 total, beating Tseng by 3 shots!) and seen what kind of success her friend had in her rookie season, it's been her own dream to play here also. She's proud that she's come from her small island of Okinawa to this big place and appreciates the warmth that galleries in the U.S. have shown her. She doesn't know, however, if other young Japanese players will aim for the LPGA and wasn't sure why comparatively few have tried (at least relative to the dozens of Korean golfers who have followed in Se Ri Pak's footsteps). To my knowledge, she's the 1st-ever female Japanese golfer to begin her professional career on the LPGA. Unlike Ai Miyazato, Momoko Ueda, Ji-Yai Shin, Inbee Park, Young Kim, Seon Hwa Lee, and Teresa Lu, she isn't even maintaining dual membership on both tours. Mina, too, doesn't want to play full-time or even part-time on the JLPGA. While she may play a couple of events in Japan a year, she doesn't plan to shoot for dual membership, reasoning that "this is where you have to make it big." A California girl through and through, she hasn't been to Japan since she was 13 and understands more Japanese than she can speak, so there doesn't seem to be much of a cultural or linguistic gravitational "pull" toward the JLPGA. So whether the path is via Miyazato's global mindset or Harigae's American one, the end goal is clear for both 20-year-olds: make their marks on the LPGA.

As you might expect, both had interesting perspectives on life on tour, as well. Both had big adjustments to make from what they were accustomed to. For Mika, of course, it meant learning how to navigate in a new country, language, and culture, but both players spoke to on-course differences, as well, particularly in layouts and setups. Mina noted that the quality of the competition and the courses was a huge step up from the Futures Tour and amateur golf. With the greens being much firmer than she was used to, she quickly realized that "you can't just go at everything" on the LPGA and have to think your way around the course much more. Similarly, Mika pointed to the greater length and difficulty of many LPGA courses.

Neither player is satisfied with her progress to date. Harigae has made only 2 cuts in 5 starts and has yet to crack the top 50 this season. Her transition to the LPGA, she said,

Hasn't been quite as smooth as I wanted it to be. All these girls can play. It was a lot harder than I expected. I think it's a good thing, you know? It just shows that these players are really good...they really are the best in the world.

Whereas Miyazato has missed only 1 cut in 9 starts this season, she's cracked the top 20 only once. Having been the 54-hole leader in the '09 Japan Women's Open until enduring a Dustin-Johnson-at-Pebble-like final round and finished T11 at the Women's British Open that season, she has high expectations and seems disappointed that even though she's more familiar with the tournaments and travel routines on the LPGA, she's not on pace yet to improve on her rookie season's results.

Each player is focusing on a different aspect of her short game right now to get her season going. For Miyazato, who finished T4 at last year's Wegmans event at Locust Hill, but who hadn't yet been out on the course this year at the time of our interview, her top priority was her chipping. She hit about 69% of her greens in regulation at Locust Hill, which meant she had to play recovery shots around the greens 22 times that week. And she knows with the course lengthened and the rough up, it's going to be much tougher to hit greens, even for someone who's been hitting the fairway off the tee almost 76% of the time and averaging almost 250 yards off the tee. So clearly her strategy has to do with taking as much pressure off her putter as possible (although she did keep her cards close to her chest during the interview itself).

Harigae, by contrast, thinks the best way to get her season on the right track is by focusing on the flat stick. She thought this week might end up being a "putting contest," plus she's looking ahead to the rest of the season and the fight to keep her card and get into the Rookie of the Year race. As she told me,

A lot of it has to do with confidence. You know, getting off to a tough start is a little hard to come back from, but my game is there. It's all in my head. I just need to believe in myself more.... I think everyone has some sort of things that they have to fight. Right now [for her] it's putting. My ball-striking is generally pretty good. A lot of it has to do with putting and having confidence with those short putts.

She's being modest about her ball-striking, hitting the fairway just over 76% of the time and averaging almost 241 yards off the tee. Although her GIR percentage, like Miyazato's, is low for a precision player (both are hovering around 65%), I would say that from what I observed of Mika last year at the Wegmans and Mina in the Monday pro-am this year, both have great swings. (I particularly like Mina's pre-shot routine, where she first aligns her club to her target, balancing the end of the grip on one hand as she does so, then aligns her body to the club as she takes her grip and stance, readies herself, and uses a small knee bend to trigger her backswing.) Harigae's swing is maybe a little smoother and rhythmic than Miyazato's--I saw her rush her downswing only once off the tee and once from the rough all 9 holes I watched--but both keep the ball in play and put themselves in good positions to attack pins. Given the similarities in their ball-striking, it's striking that Harigae is taking more putts per green in regulation than Miyazato (1.83 to 1.80) and is averaging more putts per round (30.6 to 29.5), as well. That combination of stats suggests that she's absolutely right to be focusing on her putting. That, and the fact that the few times her team missed a green on the back nine, she nearly chipped in every time.

My sense is that both players have the games and attitudes for long-term LPGA success. By my count, Harigae was easily flying her tee shots 240 yards and ending up in the 245-260 range on Locust Hill's soft fairways. She's not at all concerned about distance, saying,

I think more distance will come as I get older. Getting stronger, keep working out. I'm not going to change my swing. I'm already plenty long.... In general I don't feel that long players have an advantage, because you have to keep it in the fairway. Unless they're hitting it straight, they don't have that huge of an advantage.

It's refreshing to hear a 20-year-old be that confident in her game and her future. I think so many great players ran into trouble when Annika upgraded her distance and messed up their swings or their bodies trying to keep up with or catch up to her. The point is to learn how to play your own game to the best of your ability, not someone else's. I think Miyazato, who counts both Tseng and Ji-Yai Shin as her closest friends on tour (she calls Shin "onechan" [big sister] and "sempai" [kind of like leader-mentor, used as a term of respect for someone a little older than you whom you look up to and who takes care of you]), understands this, as well. Tseng is a bomber while Shin is a precision player. Miyazato's game is much closer to Shin's than Tseng's. She knows what it takes to close the gap yet further, what it's like to deal with nerves on the final day of a major, and that no matter what you do travel across the U.S. and around the world will always be "taihen" (difficult/challenging).

Of course, compared to where Ai Miyazato was at age 20, both Harigae and Miyazato are unpolished, both on and off the course. (It didn't help that I was absolutely no polish as an interviewer, either!) But, then, neither of them have had quite the level of early success--and media attention--as Ai-sama. I'm confident that 5 years from now, when they're the age Ai-sama is now, we'll have moved from seeing them as diamonds in the rough to gems of the LPGA.

On Yuko Mitsuka and Angela Park

When reading about Yuko Mitsuka (三塚　優子)'s 2-stroke slow-play penalty during the 1st round of the Salonpas Cup last week, her tearful protest by walking off the course, the huge fine (2 million yen or around $20K), and her multiple apologies and self-imposed suspension for 11 events (including the U.S. Women's Open, Evian Masters, and British Open), I couldn't help but be reminded yesterday of Angela Park's own 2-stroke slow-play penalty while she was in contention in the 2008 SBS Open. Here's why.

Park ran away with the LPGA's Rookie of the Year award in 2007, coming close to winning multiple times and repeatedly being praised by Johnny Miller as having the best swing on tour. And for awhile it looked like her breakthrough win would come during the kick-off event of her sophomore campaign. But after bogeying the 10th hole to drop 2 shots off the pace, she was hit with the slow-play penalty. Paul Arnett focused on her initial reaction, which included a bunch of birdies down the stretch and a lot of tears and criticism after the round. So far there are a lot of similarities with Mitsuka, who is also a 4th-year professional and has already found a lot of success on the JLPGA, having earned Rookie of the Year in 2008 (apparently her 1st full season on tour, even though she played 30 events in 2007), having never finished worse than 14th on the money list, having won once in each of her 1st 3 seasons, and having ended last season ranked 9th after having finished 5th on the money list. Sure, Mitsuka's penalty came on the 1st day of the event rather than the last, her initial reaction to it was more extreme than Park's, and the JLPGA took a much harder line on it than the LPGA did on Park's. But in both cases a rising young star reacted badly to a slow-play penalty and will have to live with the consequences for the rest of her career.

Whereas Park had a successful 2008--thanks in large part to a 7-event run in which she finished T3 at the U.S. Women's Open, T4 at the NW Arkansas event, T2 at the Evian Masters (where she was the 1st to drop out of a 3-way playoff), and T6 at the Safeway Classic--and had 3 top 10s in her 1st 4 events of 2009 (including another disappointing Sunday at the SBS Open when she was in contention), her game has since fallen off the cliff. As her swing and ball-striking deserted her (she went from averaging in the mid 240s off the tee with around 70% of her fairways hit over her 1st 2 seasons to under 230 and around 60% that season), she started skipping and withdrawing from events, prompting rumors late last season that she was going to quit the game. So far this season she hasn't yet been able to avoid the "1 awful round per week" syndrome and continues to struggle to find the fairways and get her length off the tee and swing back. Looking back on her career, the slow-play penalty controversy in early 2008 and her family's reported falling out with Inbee Park's family in mid-2008 were the 1st signs that all was not well in her world.

Mitsuka's struggles seem tame by comparison, amounting mainly to failure at LPGA Q-School at the end of last season and problems with her putter at the beginning of this season. Her birdie rate has dropped from a high of 3.49 last season to 2.63 this season, and her lack of confidence on the greens may have had something to do with the time she took on a difficult putt in the Salonpas Cup that led to the slow-play penalty. Given that her fine was worth about a quarter of her winnings this season, that she's effectively benched herself until mid-August, and that she's missing out on the chance to represent Japan in major international events, I'd say her putting woes are the least of her worries right now.

I'm rooting for comebacks from both Mitsuka and Park, starting for the latter with her 11:50 am appointment at the 10th tee in the Bell Micro LPGA Classic today!

[Update 1 (11:22 am): Head on over to Devil Ball Golf and help Jay Busbee reach the 1000-comment mark for his take on Mitsuka!]