By now you've probably already read about the Kraft Nabisco Championship losing its title sponsor after this April's major is contested and the USGA opening up international sectional qualifying sites for the U.S. Women's Open in England, Japan, Korea, and China. I see a link between the changes in 2 of the LPGA's biggest majors: the effect of globalization on the women's professional golf world.
The globalization connection is pretty obvious when it comes to the U.S. Women's Open. Se Ri Pak's victory there has been legendary in Korea almost since the moment she took off her golf shoes and socks, so I'm curious to see how many entries the Korea site gets. Golf is growing quickly in China and the number of entries per year will be one good index of its acceleration. I'm thinking that more Japanese golfers will be willing to give the USWO a try if they don't have to travel to Hawaii or California to do it. Like the KLPGA, the JLPGA has events on either side of the May 19th qualifier, so it'll be interesting to see how many members of both tours adjust their schedules--and who! In Europe, there's an LET event in Amsterdam a few days after the USWO qualifier, so it shouldn't interfere with qualifying attempts by more of its members.
But what does the KNC have to do with globalization? Mike Whan has publicly committed to keeping the KNC at Mission Hills and perpetuating the tradition of the winner's leap into Poppie's Pond, goals I fully endorse (I'd add a 3rd goal of bringing back "Dinah Shore" into the official title of the event, as well). Perhaps there will be a big-time global sponsor from outside the U.S. who will want to make it happen, either a former LPGA partner like Samsung or Toyota or a new sponsor that wants to be associated with the tournament's LGBTQ-friendly history and traditions (like maybe Subaru?). But if no international or domestic sponsor (calling State Farm! calling ADT!) steps up to the plate, I'm hoping the LPGA can get creative. The HSBC Women's Champions event is near-major quality and worthy of an Evian-like upgrade, so there's always the option of convincing HSBC to alternate the LPGA's 1st major of the season between Singapore and Mission Hills. Another possibility is to hook up with the LET's World Ladies Championship at Mission Hills in China and either alternate sites or link the two events (perhaps by sending better American teams to China and opening up more spots in the LPGA event to LETers). Or the LPGA could bypass the LET entirely and create a separate relationship with the CGA or CLPGA to alternate Mission Hills sites. The chance to keep the KNC at Mission Hills while also making it the LPGA's 1st Asian major would be almost as good an outcome as replacing Kraft-Nabisco with a different title sponsor. Call its the LPGA's 1st transnational major and run with it!
Under Mike Whan, the LPGA has embraced its identity as a truly global golf tour. The latest major news underscores that identity and gives the tour opportunities to take it to the next level. Let's see what comes of it!
[Update 1 (3/20/14, 8:15 am): Ruthless Mike has some interesting observations on the KNC and other challenges/opportunities facing Mike Whan and his team!]
Showing posts with label transnationalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label transnationalism. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
When the Personal Meets the Professional Meets the National Meets the Global: Lydia Ko Edition
There are so many layers to the most recent twist in the Lydia Ko story that it's no surprise onions are a New Zealand export. If the break-up only a few days before Christmas of an 11-year player-coach mentoring relationship--one often compared to sibling or parental dynamics to convey its depth and scope--isn't enough to bring you to tears of sadness, maybe the paucity of hard facts and the complicated agendas of those who best know them but aren't sharing them are enough to evoke tears of frustration. I mean, we should be used to the eagerness of onlookers and outsiders to quip and judge on what amounts to a whim--it is the intertubes, after all--but when a teenager the media has helped build up seems to turn on her on a dime, handing stones to the stoners.... Well, let's just say, welcome to the big time, Lydia Ko!
For those interested in the truth, very little of what's been said publicly stands up to much scrutiny.
Probably the truth is a little embarrassing for all the parties involved. Like contract negotiations with Wilson broke down when IMG refused to offer him enough to move to the States or make his trans-hemispheric travel worthwhile....
Rather than go down that speculative road myself, however, I'd rather focus on what others' speculations reveal about the intersecting personal/professional/national/global relationships brought out by Lydia Ko's meteoric rise to the top 5 in the world of women's golf.
Randall Mell is on to something when he points out that nationalism has a lot to do with the intensity of the reaction to Ko's decision coming out of many in the New Zealand media and golfing establishment:
Admittedly, these players aren't perfect examples, as they lived in their home countries for a long time and are natural-born, not naturalized, citizens. But who would be a good example? Amy Yang didn't move to Australia until she was 15 and didn't stay Down Under long enough for a sense of pride in her accomplishments to turn into a widespread sense of betrayal or ingratitude at her departure. Maybe the Wongluekiets/Songs? Well, they chose their father's nationality when they turned pro instead of their mother's, while both Ko's parents are South Korean. And therein lies the rub. Already you can find in some corners of the intertubes the same criticisms of Ko's parents being floated and tried on for size as have been circulated ad nauseum about Michelle Wie's parents. Greedy. Controlling. Clueless.
I guess personal and professional and national loyalty is a particularly touchy issue for immigrants-turned-citizens. (And not just in New Zealand.) It's almost as if someone who's chosen to become a citizen of another country has to keep making that choice whenever her circumstances change in the slightest. Don't get me wrong: this is a huge change. And Ko's only been a New Zealand citizen for something like 4 years (or a quarter of her life), even though culturally she's been a Kiwi for almost 3 times that long. Sure, the level of concern at possibly losing Ko helps outsiders understand how much she is valued and appreciated by her fellow citizens and how crucial her success is to building a new New Zealand identity. But Kiwis who might be tempted to turn on Ko out of a feeling that she did one of their own wrong or who jump to conclusions about her parents' motivations or her future plans should understand that they run the risk of inflaming a backlash that could do more to drive her out of the country than anything else.
I think it's time for everyone involved to be their best selves and set an example for the rest of us. The Kos ought to find as many ways as possible to thank the individuals and organizations who helped Lydia become the golfer and person she is, reassert her commitment to Kiwi Nation, and give back in tangible and intangible ways to golf in New Zealand. Wilson ought to speak for himself, stick up for his former student, and encourage his mates to show a little more respect for Ko's decision. Leadbetter and Hogan had better be praising Wilson effusively every time Ko does something good in 2014 (which should be quite often).
Let's face it: what's done is done. As much as onlookers, outsiders, and even insiders may wish New Zealand were closer to the places Ko will be competing, and that Ko could maintain an uncomplicated Kiwi identity for the rest of her life, that's not going to happen. There will be complications no matter what she chooses. For those who wish she had brought her entire New Zealand team with her to the States--bringing a little bit of home to her new base of operations in a time of transition--consider that her team would have been facing culture shock just as intensely as she would and would have had to be learning the ropes and putting down roots for themselves while allowing Ko to focus single-mindedly on golf. For those who wish she had waited till after Christmas and New Year's to make her decision, consider that Wilson's holidays would have been ruined by stress, anxiety, and uncertainty as surely as they've been ruined by rejection and disappointment. And given that the new LPGA season starts in January in the Bahamas, Ko couldn't have kept everyone on the hook for much longer.
The bottom line is that things are going to get more complicated for Ko down the road, not less. I don't know whether she's a dual citizen of New Zealand and South Korea, but let's assume for the moment that she is. If New Zealand's and South Korea's citizenship laws are anything like the U.S.'s and Japan's, Ko has about 4 years before she has to decide which one to keep and which one to drop; if they're more liberal (and sensible), she could remain a dual citizen for the rest of her life. It gives me a headache to even start thinking about what country's (or which countries') tax laws are going to apply to her in 2014, much less beyond!
But that's part of the deal these days when it comes to trying to make history on a global stage, as Ko is no doubt focused on doing. What's exciting about the attempt is that no matter how many scripts she's trying to write or how many the rest of the world is trying to impose on her, none of us know which ones will end up being performed and enacted, or for how long before they get disrupted or replaced. All that's certain is that Ko will need every ounce of resilience and persistence she's accumulated over her 1st 16 years to make the next 16 truly amazing!
[Update 1 (1:28 pm): Paul Lewis of the New Zealand Herald makes very good points about Ko's future challenges.]
For those interested in the truth, very little of what's been said publicly stands up to much scrutiny.
- Ko's emphasis on the logistical complications of her moving to the States and competing full-time on the LPGA while her life-long coach Guy Wilson remains in New Zealand begs the question of whether she asked him to go with her, belies the fact that they had made a quasi-long-distance relationship work quite well during her amazingly successful amateur and early professional career, and fuels speculation that her new representatives at IMG are really behind the switch to Sean Hogan and David Leadbetter.
- Wilson's generous and moving statement in response to his firing (reprinted in full by Golfweek) is frankly undermined if Steve Williams was acting as his surrogate when he was interviewed on Radio New Zealand. Williams's "I don't think he had any inkling" of the decision can't possibly be right when ONE Sport mentioned, in an article posted on November 21, that Williams was "among those stunned Lydia Ko has yet to sort out her coaching and management team." (Matt Richens confirms that neither Ko nor Wilson had been acting normally over the past month.) Williams's claim that Wilson has "had no compensation for his time and effort" similarly stretches credulity (particularly when we don't know the terms of their relationship, much less what kind of Christmas gifts or New Year's bonus the Kos are planning for Wilson).
- Leadbetter's claim that Ko and her family initiated contact with him is also a little hard to believe, given his partnership with IMG:
David Leadbetter knew the sensitivities involved w/ leaving Guy Wilson: "But when someone of that ilk asks, you don't turn them down."
— Randall Mell (@RandallMellGC) December 23, 2013
At least Leadbetter understands the catch-22 he's in. As he told Randall Mell, "If she plays well, it will be because she's a great player.... If she doesn't, we will be the bad guys."Probably the truth is a little embarrassing for all the parties involved. Like contract negotiations with Wilson broke down when IMG refused to offer him enough to move to the States or make his trans-hemispheric travel worthwhile....
Rather than go down that speculative road myself, however, I'd rather focus on what others' speculations reveal about the intersecting personal/professional/national/global relationships brought out by Lydia Ko's meteoric rise to the top 5 in the world of women's golf.
Randall Mell is on to something when he points out that nationalism has a lot to do with the intensity of the reaction to Ko's decision coming out of many in the New Zealand media and golfing establishment:
There’s more behind the emotional reaction to Ko’s decision than just coaching implications. For New Zealanders, it’s about her Kiwi connections and nationalistic pride. In fact, in presenting news of the coaching change, a Television New Zealand reporter asked if it might “signal a shift away from New Zealand Golf.”
Ko is something of a national treasure in New Zealand, and her rise in fame has brought with it concerns over loyalties and how she plans to align herself in the future. During Ko’s first news conference after announcing she was turning pro in October, New Zealand media peppered her with questions about where she planned to establish her professional base and even what nationalistic affiliation she planned for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Ko was born in South Korea but her family moved to New Zealand when she was 6. She became a New Zealand citizen when she was 12. That evolved partly out of her former coach’s push for citizenship so Ko would become eligible for national funding. In fact, New Zealand Golf has funded Ko’s world travels the last three years. There are questions back in New Zealand over whether Ko will re-establish her connection to South Korea, where women’s golf is immensely popular and more endorsement opportunities for women abound.Matt Richens is one of the New Zealanders raising such questions:
If this is a Ko decision, it seems an odd one. The pair have always seemed to get on well off the course and their success on it was first rate.
Ko was the world's No 1 amateur as a 13-year old, a title she held until turning professional. She won four professional tournaments as an amateur and one as a professional and has never missed a cut in any of her 27 professional tournaments.
She's brilliant and Wilson has played a huge part in that. It also continued while Ko was travelling and Wilson stayed in New Zealand.
If it's not Ko's decision, but one from IMG, then there is more reason to worry for New Zealand.
If IMG can persuade her to leave her longtime coach and someone with whom she shared more of a brother-sister relationship than a coach-player one, then what else can it do?
In October, Ko said she would always play for New Zealand and wanted to represent this country at the 2016 Olympics.
But should IMG start throwing its considerable weight around, what's to stop it working out it could get a far bigger bang for its buck in the Asian market if Ko played under the Korean flag and turned her back on New Zealand all together.
If IMG is calling the shots, it could happen.I can see why the worries are so intense that Ko might choose Kimchi Nation over Kiwi Nation as part of an IMG-led effort to turn her into a global brand, but it seems to me they're at least a bit overblown. Let's face it, a huge part of what makes Ko so distinctive globally is precisely her New Zealand connection. That video with her buddy from the All-Blacks in which she announced she's going pro? Brilliant. That accent and attitude? Endearing. Why would she reject her adopted country, her hyphenated identity, and national hero status to become one of at least a dozen world-class South Korean golfers? Why would IMG think that's a more profitable path? Yes, she's leaving the nest, moving to the U.S., and taking on the world via the LPGA. But Ai Miyazato is no less Japanese for doing that. Se Ri Pak is no less Korean. Karrie Webb is no less Australian. Suzann Pettersen is no less Norwegian. Lorena Ochoa was no less Mexican. Annika Sorenstam was no less Swedish. And so on.
Admittedly, these players aren't perfect examples, as they lived in their home countries for a long time and are natural-born, not naturalized, citizens. But who would be a good example? Amy Yang didn't move to Australia until she was 15 and didn't stay Down Under long enough for a sense of pride in her accomplishments to turn into a widespread sense of betrayal or ingratitude at her departure. Maybe the Wongluekiets/Songs? Well, they chose their father's nationality when they turned pro instead of their mother's, while both Ko's parents are South Korean. And therein lies the rub. Already you can find in some corners of the intertubes the same criticisms of Ko's parents being floated and tried on for size as have been circulated ad nauseum about Michelle Wie's parents. Greedy. Controlling. Clueless.
I guess personal and professional and national loyalty is a particularly touchy issue for immigrants-turned-citizens. (And not just in New Zealand.) It's almost as if someone who's chosen to become a citizen of another country has to keep making that choice whenever her circumstances change in the slightest. Don't get me wrong: this is a huge change. And Ko's only been a New Zealand citizen for something like 4 years (or a quarter of her life), even though culturally she's been a Kiwi for almost 3 times that long. Sure, the level of concern at possibly losing Ko helps outsiders understand how much she is valued and appreciated by her fellow citizens and how crucial her success is to building a new New Zealand identity. But Kiwis who might be tempted to turn on Ko out of a feeling that she did one of their own wrong or who jump to conclusions about her parents' motivations or her future plans should understand that they run the risk of inflaming a backlash that could do more to drive her out of the country than anything else.
I think it's time for everyone involved to be their best selves and set an example for the rest of us. The Kos ought to find as many ways as possible to thank the individuals and organizations who helped Lydia become the golfer and person she is, reassert her commitment to Kiwi Nation, and give back in tangible and intangible ways to golf in New Zealand. Wilson ought to speak for himself, stick up for his former student, and encourage his mates to show a little more respect for Ko's decision. Leadbetter and Hogan had better be praising Wilson effusively every time Ko does something good in 2014 (which should be quite often).
Let's face it: what's done is done. As much as onlookers, outsiders, and even insiders may wish New Zealand were closer to the places Ko will be competing, and that Ko could maintain an uncomplicated Kiwi identity for the rest of her life, that's not going to happen. There will be complications no matter what she chooses. For those who wish she had brought her entire New Zealand team with her to the States--bringing a little bit of home to her new base of operations in a time of transition--consider that her team would have been facing culture shock just as intensely as she would and would have had to be learning the ropes and putting down roots for themselves while allowing Ko to focus single-mindedly on golf. For those who wish she had waited till after Christmas and New Year's to make her decision, consider that Wilson's holidays would have been ruined by stress, anxiety, and uncertainty as surely as they've been ruined by rejection and disappointment. And given that the new LPGA season starts in January in the Bahamas, Ko couldn't have kept everyone on the hook for much longer.
The bottom line is that things are going to get more complicated for Ko down the road, not less. I don't know whether she's a dual citizen of New Zealand and South Korea, but let's assume for the moment that she is. If New Zealand's and South Korea's citizenship laws are anything like the U.S.'s and Japan's, Ko has about 4 years before she has to decide which one to keep and which one to drop; if they're more liberal (and sensible), she could remain a dual citizen for the rest of her life. It gives me a headache to even start thinking about what country's (or which countries') tax laws are going to apply to her in 2014, much less beyond!
But that's part of the deal these days when it comes to trying to make history on a global stage, as Ko is no doubt focused on doing. What's exciting about the attempt is that no matter how many scripts she's trying to write or how many the rest of the world is trying to impose on her, none of us know which ones will end up being performed and enacted, or for how long before they get disrupted or replaced. All that's certain is that Ko will need every ounce of resilience and persistence she's accumulated over her 1st 16 years to make the next 16 truly amazing!
[Update 1 (1:28 pm): Paul Lewis of the New Zealand Herald makes very good points about Ko's future challenges.]
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Blazing Saddles and Transatlantic Postmodernism
[Note to my regular readers who come here for women's golf coverage: I'm airing Mel Brooks's 1974 film Blazing Saddles tonight as part of SUNY Fredonia's American Studies film series "Myths of the American West," so decided to share a draft of my opening comments here at Mostly Harmless (which is, after all, "for fun"). I'm aware of the 5-car collision that has lead to my favorite golfer Ai Miyazato withdrawing from this week's LPGA event (and onechan's favorite Paula Creamer being a likely WD candidate) and obviously wish them and everyone else involved in it a full and speedy recovery.]
[Note to my non-regular readers who are coming here after watching Blazing Saddles (or missing it): Hope you enjoy this post and are curious enough after reading it to browse around for other posts here that you may find interesting!]
I was four years old when Blazing Saddles was first released in American theaters and until Shannon McRae--the director of American Studies at SUNY Fredonia and organizer of the program's film series "Myths of the American West"--took seriously my half-joking suggestion to include it in the series and invited me to introduce it, I had never seen it in its entirety until this month. In a semester when I'm teaching American Identities, Introduction to African American Literature and Culture, and Critical Reading, I'm particularly pleased to take Shannon up on her kind offer, and offer a few comments as a new viewer of a movie that's been well-known (even to me) for decades, comments that will hopefully be as useful to students in my classes this semester as everyone else who braved the rains to make it out here tonight.
Growing up, I put Blazing Saddles in the mental category of comedies too raw for me to watch, a remarkably capacious category that in the '70s and too far into the '80s included everything from Monty Python to Mad magazine to Saturday Night Live to just about every famous stand-up comedian of the time. If this reference helps people place where I was at, probably Benny Hill was the rawest thing I got access to before graduate school. Yes, I grew up in a small town in central NY and failed to take advantage of 2nd grade in Palo Alto and 7th grade in Chapel Hill. Nevertheless, I was obsessed with everything comical and comics-al. In high school I started a cartoon series called The Gray Area that, despite its being far too derivative of The Far Side, was seen, nay loved, by regular readers of the Pennysaver and other fine local publications for far too many weeks. Me, I loved everything from Gilligan's Island to Scooby Doo, from Diff'rent Strokes to The Facts of Life, from Benson to Newhart, from Doctor Who to The Greatest American Hero, from Airplane! to Ghostbusters, from The Muppet Show to The Tracey Ullman Show, from Tom and Jerry to Rocky and Bullwinkle (in reruns, duh) to Calvin and Hobbes to Mork and Mindy, from any DC comic Ambush Bug appeared in (even though I was almost exclusively a Marvel fan) to the animated version of The Tick. Sure, I hated the Smurfs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but otherwise I was pretty easy to please. And I was a fan of The Simpsons before The Simpsons was The Simpsons, man! (It goes without saying from the title of this blog what my favorite was, though!)
All of which is to say that when I go to grad school in the early 1990s I was perfectly primed to understand and appreciate what many still misunderstand and denigrate even today as a French theoretical import: postmodernism. As someone who saw The Simpsons parody of the end of The Graduate long before I ever saw The Graduate, who loved it when Beavis and Butt-head were watching a Johnny Cash video and decided it was gangsta rap, and who came of age in a hip hop culture rife with allusion and remixing and pastiche, I didn't have to think twice about Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of "incredulity toward metanarratives" as a core characteristic of postmodernism.
So it's all too easy and obvious now for me to look back at Blazing Saddles and see it as yet another exemplar of American postmodernism. It's certainly not an original point to make, as a quick google search will show you (I recommend posts by Mark Bourne and Mike Sutton on this aspect of the movie). But what is originality, anyway? Just another stinkin' metanarrative--right, JFL? Perhaps it's slightly more original to claim that Mel Brooks and Monty Python were engaged in a transatlantic comedic one-ups-man-ship that was perfectly postmodern. In the same way that Brooks and his co-writers, including Richard Pryor, were playing with myths of the American west and poking fun at founding narratives of the modern United States, Monty Python was taking on English legends of the Holy Grail and western icons of Christianity--and at roughly the same time. Check me on this. And, as you watch Blazing Saddles tonight, consider some of the debates over postmodernism that occupied so many western intellectuals in the last third of the 20th century: is postmodernism all sound and fury, signifying nothing? is it, in the final analysis, the laugh track of late capitalism? are its politics of race and gender and sexuality and [fill in the blank] reactionary, liberatory, laughable, nostalgic, or what? is postmodernism a thing of the past, and if so, how do we react to it today (and what comes after that post-?) if not, if we are still living in and with postmodernism, what does Blazing Saddles compare to in contemporary and recent culture?
There's so much more to be said--about what light Blazing Saddles may shed on black-Jewish relations in the late civil rights era, for instance--but I think it ought to wait until after the movie. Don't you?
[Note to my non-regular readers who are coming here after watching Blazing Saddles (or missing it): Hope you enjoy this post and are curious enough after reading it to browse around for other posts here that you may find interesting!]
I was four years old when Blazing Saddles was first released in American theaters and until Shannon McRae--the director of American Studies at SUNY Fredonia and organizer of the program's film series "Myths of the American West"--took seriously my half-joking suggestion to include it in the series and invited me to introduce it, I had never seen it in its entirety until this month. In a semester when I'm teaching American Identities, Introduction to African American Literature and Culture, and Critical Reading, I'm particularly pleased to take Shannon up on her kind offer, and offer a few comments as a new viewer of a movie that's been well-known (even to me) for decades, comments that will hopefully be as useful to students in my classes this semester as everyone else who braved the rains to make it out here tonight.
Growing up, I put Blazing Saddles in the mental category of comedies too raw for me to watch, a remarkably capacious category that in the '70s and too far into the '80s included everything from Monty Python to Mad magazine to Saturday Night Live to just about every famous stand-up comedian of the time. If this reference helps people place where I was at, probably Benny Hill was the rawest thing I got access to before graduate school. Yes, I grew up in a small town in central NY and failed to take advantage of 2nd grade in Palo Alto and 7th grade in Chapel Hill. Nevertheless, I was obsessed with everything comical and comics-al. In high school I started a cartoon series called The Gray Area that, despite its being far too derivative of The Far Side, was seen, nay loved, by regular readers of the Pennysaver and other fine local publications for far too many weeks. Me, I loved everything from Gilligan's Island to Scooby Doo, from Diff'rent Strokes to The Facts of Life, from Benson to Newhart, from Doctor Who to The Greatest American Hero, from Airplane! to Ghostbusters, from The Muppet Show to The Tracey Ullman Show, from Tom and Jerry to Rocky and Bullwinkle (in reruns, duh) to Calvin and Hobbes to Mork and Mindy, from any DC comic Ambush Bug appeared in (even though I was almost exclusively a Marvel fan) to the animated version of The Tick. Sure, I hated the Smurfs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but otherwise I was pretty easy to please. And I was a fan of The Simpsons before The Simpsons was The Simpsons, man! (It goes without saying from the title of this blog what my favorite was, though!)
All of which is to say that when I go to grad school in the early 1990s I was perfectly primed to understand and appreciate what many still misunderstand and denigrate even today as a French theoretical import: postmodernism. As someone who saw The Simpsons parody of the end of The Graduate long before I ever saw The Graduate, who loved it when Beavis and Butt-head were watching a Johnny Cash video and decided it was gangsta rap, and who came of age in a hip hop culture rife with allusion and remixing and pastiche, I didn't have to think twice about Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of "incredulity toward metanarratives" as a core characteristic of postmodernism.
So it's all too easy and obvious now for me to look back at Blazing Saddles and see it as yet another exemplar of American postmodernism. It's certainly not an original point to make, as a quick google search will show you (I recommend posts by Mark Bourne and Mike Sutton on this aspect of the movie). But what is originality, anyway? Just another stinkin' metanarrative--right, JFL? Perhaps it's slightly more original to claim that Mel Brooks and Monty Python were engaged in a transatlantic comedic one-ups-man-ship that was perfectly postmodern. In the same way that Brooks and his co-writers, including Richard Pryor, were playing with myths of the American west and poking fun at founding narratives of the modern United States, Monty Python was taking on English legends of the Holy Grail and western icons of Christianity--and at roughly the same time. Check me on this. And, as you watch Blazing Saddles tonight, consider some of the debates over postmodernism that occupied so many western intellectuals in the last third of the 20th century: is postmodernism all sound and fury, signifying nothing? is it, in the final analysis, the laugh track of late capitalism? are its politics of race and gender and sexuality and [fill in the blank] reactionary, liberatory, laughable, nostalgic, or what? is postmodernism a thing of the past, and if so, how do we react to it today (and what comes after that post-?) if not, if we are still living in and with postmodernism, what does Blazing Saddles compare to in contemporary and recent culture?
There's so much more to be said--about what light Blazing Saddles may shed on black-Jewish relations in the late civil rights era, for instance--but I think it ought to wait until after the movie. Don't you?
Monday, January 2, 2012
Lady Gaga on New Year's Eve Kohaku Uta Gassen
Just like Annika Sorenstam and Paula Creamer before her, Lady Gaga delivered a great performance in a big event in Japan: the New Year's Eve countdown/musical extravaganza on NHK known as Kohaku Uta Gassen.
Somebody uploaded the closing montage from the 62nd annual show, along with the final judgment of who won the competition between the Red (girls') and White (boys') team. It gives you some sense of the range and kinds of J-pop, enka, and other forms of music popular in Japan in 2011:
You probably noticed Lady Gaga in the montage, but here's her full performance of "Born This Way":
And "You and I":
I don't know if her performances counted toward the Red team's total, but maybe she helped pushed them over the top for the 1st time since 2004. Somehow I doubt groups like AKB48 needed the help, though:
Heck, I think they outnumbered the guys all by themselves!
Somebody uploaded the closing montage from the 62nd annual show, along with the final judgment of who won the competition between the Red (girls') and White (boys') team. It gives you some sense of the range and kinds of J-pop, enka, and other forms of music popular in Japan in 2011:
You probably noticed Lady Gaga in the montage, but here's her full performance of "Born This Way":
And "You and I":
I don't know if her performances counted toward the Red team's total, but maybe she helped pushed them over the top for the 1st time since 2004. Somehow I doubt groups like AKB48 needed the help, though:
Heck, I think they outnumbered the guys all by themselves!
Friday, August 5, 2011
On the Conservation of Matter and Greed
Just checking in with a little eco-commentary from my favorite philosopher scamps.
Friday, September 3, 2010
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!
Monday, March 8, 2010
Good Asian American, Bad Asian; or, What Do Responses to the LPGA Reveal about Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in America Today?
Consider for a moment the following thought experiment: what if Michelle Wie had been the player to kick off the LPGA season with back-to-back wins for the 1st time in 44 years, instead of Ai Miyazato? Wouldn't we have been treated to breathless speculation on Golf Channel (including on-line streaming video from Golf Central) on her odds of doing it, expanded tv coverage of the HSBC two weekends ago, endless arguments over the significance of her feat, and top billing for her on every sports highlight show, sports page, and sports site for a couple of days, at least, all as a prelude to the media rush to Okinawa to follow her every move in this past week's attempt to make the JLPGA opener her 3rd worldwide win in a row?
So why not for Miyazato? She's at least as big a global star in women's golf as Wie, plus she already has 18 wins on major tours to her credit. After her HSBC win, she moved up to #3 in the world, only .01 points behind Ji-Yai Shin and within striking range of Lorena Ochoa. Plus, she was competing against Shin, Momoko Ueda, Sakura Yokomine, and other top 50 players in the JLPGA's debut this week, so even though she had trouble getting the ball in the hole and finished T7, behind Sun Ju Ahn, Shinobu Moromizato, and Chie Arimura, she's likely to make up even more ground on Ochoa when the new Rolex Rankings are released today. I'm certainly not the only one to have predicted this level of success. Of those participating in the 2010 LPGA Prognostication Derby, Ron Sirak anticipated the worst finish for her (10th), I of course foresaw the best (1st), while there was a 4th, 2 5ths, a 7th, and a 9th from everyone in between. While two wins in a row from her is a hotter start than even I expected, it shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone that Miyazato has joined the LPGA's elite. So why is she being concern-trolled for being unable to win in North America thus far in her career? Why are Hound Dog and Jason Sobel the only golf writers or bloggers I know of toreally take her devote a paragraph or more in the last week or two to her 3 LPGA wins in the last 8 months? seriously? [Update (3/9/10, 5:12 am): Little rewrite there to acknowledge that of course the usual suspects are taking her accomplishments seriously! Bill Jempty wrote, "Miyazato has come out blazing. Can she challenge for #1? I think so." Tim Maitland, who predicted her 2009 breakthrough, has been following her closely ever since. But why so few outside the usual suspects? And why so many mistakes in what they produced?] And how in the world did Hunter Mahan getting his 2nd career win get pitched as a bigger story anywhere in the world than what Miyazato accomplished two Sundays ago in Singapore?
Yes, I said "anywhere"--even in the U.S. Of course in Japan Miyazato is neck-and-neck with Ryo Ishikawa, Daisuke Takahashi, and Mao Asada, among others, for most popular athlete in the country. Where does she stand in the U.S.? Let's see: every major golf site relied on wire reports of her HSBC victory and in the week after it there was a grand total of three hastily-put-together career overviews (by Sal Johnson of Golf Observer and Beth Ann Baldry of Golfweek--scroll down in my Ai-sama victory post to updates 34 and 35 for my assessment of them--as well as a halfway decent one by Larry Bohannan). Even an online golf magazine you might expect better of, Global Golf Post, had Miyazato sharing a page with Laura Davies (good company, but Davies was playing in the minor leagues that week, even if she did get worldwide win #73), in the back half of this week's issue--behind a nice full-page profile of Shin by Lewine Mair. Seems like there's a "no woman allowed in the 1st 10 pages" rule at Global Golf Post.
This despite the fact that the LPGA's tournament previews, notes, and interviews have gotten sharper in the Mike Whan era, that there's been a concerted effort to take advantage of opportunities in Asia and to promote Asian stars, and that even the golf industry seems to be waking up, as evidenced by Titleist's new LPGA ad that was getting serious air time during the HSBC (but has not yet made it onto teh youtubes). So why is the U.S. golfy media so far behind the curve, particularly when it comes to coverage of the new generations on tour? Why do we see more profiles of and promotion of the LPGA's Asian-American stars like Michelle Wie, Christina Kim, Vicky Hurst, and Jane Park--and even of Futures Tour prospects like Tiffany Joh and Hannah Yun--than of Asian stars like Miyazato, Shin, Ya Ni Tseng, In-Kyung Kim, Na Yeon Choi, Eun-Hee Ji, and Momoko Ueda? Consider the golfy media's relatively equal embrace of both Asian-Americans like Anthony Kim, Tadd Fujikawa, and Rickie Fowler and of Asians like Ryo Ishikawa and Danny Lee. As I asked over at Citizen of Somewhere Else yesterday on a very different topic last week, "what's going on?" Is it that hard to talk to English-speaking caddies or agents? To hire translators for interviews with players or to get background from Asian reporters? To read reporting from Asia in translation?
I don't think this is an individual failing, a breakdown in journalistic integrity, or the natural outcome of nationalism or impersonal market forces. It's not often that I get to cite books by academics here, but Colleen Lye's 2005 study America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 is remarkably relevant to any analysis of what responses to the LPGA reveal about race, ethnicity, gender, and class in America today. Even though Lye focuses on a very different time period than our own, she shows how relevant anxieties from even progressive and liberal leaders and writers from then are to us now. Consider the following passage:
Lye's focus on the "initial textual presence of Asiatic racial form as an economic trope" (11) and argument that late-19th- and early-20th-century Americans displaced their anxieties over capitalism and globalization onto Asians of their own imagining is entirely relevant to our own time, when the LPGA has been featured more in the business section than the sports section, when Americans and Europeans on tour are individualized and "the Koreans" are generally treated en masse and as a mass, and when the presence of Asians on the LPGA is sensationalized either as nightmare or dream. Lye again:
The Bivens regime spent too much time worrying about the former, while the Whan regime is working to make the latter a reality. Here's a suggestion: helping American media and fans get to know Asian players as individuals is only part of the solution. (A big part, to be sure, as the closest the lazy American media has come up with anything interesting thus for for Miyazato is that she's a "rock star" in Japan who at first "lost her confidence" on coming to America.) Encouraging American fans and media to embrace globalization is also only part of the solution. (Although highlighting more cross-continent friendships among the players as well as the economic benefits to the tour and its sponsors of exposure in Asia, as well as in Europe and America, wouldn't be a bad idea.) The task is much larger than that: defusing American anxieties that capitalism may be passing them by and that Americans can no longer succeed against global competition and trying to interrupt the historical short-circuit that makes American images of Asia and Asians a symbol for economic transformation. They already realize this can't be done simply by massively promoting American stars (and thus adding to the media and fan pressure on them).
One small start might be pairing Americans of Asian descent with their lesser-known counterparts who were born in Asia--and this could extend more generally between Asian and non-Asian players. The Lorena Ochoa-Ai Miyazato connection has already been established; Suzann Pettersen and Ya Ni Tseng could become a regular pairing, as could Cristie Kerr and Song-Hee Kim, Angela Stanford and Sun Young Yoo, Michelle Wie and Ji-Yai Shin, Paula Creamer (when she's healthy) and In-Kyung Kim, Karrie Webb and Amy Yang, Vicky Hurst and Momoko Ueda, Christina Kim and Jee Young Lee, Jane Park and Na Yeon Choi, Morgan Pressel and Eun-Hee Ji, Mina Harigae and Mika Miyazato, and so on. The point is to put players who combine in interesting ways together on a fairly regular basis, either by game, level of accomplishment or promise, or personality/style. Having tv commentators, golf journalists, and everyday fans on the course and in front of their tv sets getting used to seeing Asians and non-Asians showcasing their games and interacting without the world coming to an end could add up to one giant leap for America.
[Update 1 (3/9/10, 5:21 am): The new Titleist commercial is up on LPGA.com--oh, wait, wrong one....]
[Update 2 (5:33 am): This is not the one I saw during the HSBC--a lot more Asians on that one!
Anyone know where I can find the one aired during the Asian swing?]
[Update 3 (3/10/10, 3:00 am): Here's Stephanie Wei on Momoko Ueda--it's the latest installment in her Know Your Asians feature.]
So why not for Miyazato? She's at least as big a global star in women's golf as Wie, plus she already has 18 wins on major tours to her credit. After her HSBC win, she moved up to #3 in the world, only .01 points behind Ji-Yai Shin and within striking range of Lorena Ochoa. Plus, she was competing against Shin, Momoko Ueda, Sakura Yokomine, and other top 50 players in the JLPGA's debut this week, so even though she had trouble getting the ball in the hole and finished T7, behind Sun Ju Ahn, Shinobu Moromizato, and Chie Arimura, she's likely to make up even more ground on Ochoa when the new Rolex Rankings are released today. I'm certainly not the only one to have predicted this level of success. Of those participating in the 2010 LPGA Prognostication Derby, Ron Sirak anticipated the worst finish for her (10th), I of course foresaw the best (1st), while there was a 4th, 2 5ths, a 7th, and a 9th from everyone in between. While two wins in a row from her is a hotter start than even I expected, it shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone that Miyazato has joined the LPGA's elite. So why is she being concern-trolled for being unable to win in North America thus far in her career? Why are Hound Dog and Jason Sobel the only golf writers or bloggers I know of to
Yes, I said "anywhere"--even in the U.S. Of course in Japan Miyazato is neck-and-neck with Ryo Ishikawa, Daisuke Takahashi, and Mao Asada, among others, for most popular athlete in the country. Where does she stand in the U.S.? Let's see: every major golf site relied on wire reports of her HSBC victory and in the week after it there was a grand total of three hastily-put-together career overviews (by Sal Johnson of Golf Observer and Beth Ann Baldry of Golfweek--scroll down in my Ai-sama victory post to updates 34 and 35 for my assessment of them--as well as a halfway decent one by Larry Bohannan). Even an online golf magazine you might expect better of, Global Golf Post, had Miyazato sharing a page with Laura Davies (good company, but Davies was playing in the minor leagues that week, even if she did get worldwide win #73), in the back half of this week's issue--behind a nice full-page profile of Shin by Lewine Mair. Seems like there's a "no woman allowed in the 1st 10 pages" rule at Global Golf Post.
This despite the fact that the LPGA's tournament previews, notes, and interviews have gotten sharper in the Mike Whan era, that there's been a concerted effort to take advantage of opportunities in Asia and to promote Asian stars, and that even the golf industry seems to be waking up, as evidenced by Titleist's new LPGA ad that was getting serious air time during the HSBC (but has not yet made it onto teh youtubes). So why is the U.S. golfy media so far behind the curve, particularly when it comes to coverage of the new generations on tour? Why do we see more profiles of and promotion of the LPGA's Asian-American stars like Michelle Wie, Christina Kim, Vicky Hurst, and Jane Park--and even of Futures Tour prospects like Tiffany Joh and Hannah Yun--than of Asian stars like Miyazato, Shin, Ya Ni Tseng, In-Kyung Kim, Na Yeon Choi, Eun-Hee Ji, and Momoko Ueda? Consider the golfy media's relatively equal embrace of both Asian-Americans like Anthony Kim, Tadd Fujikawa, and Rickie Fowler and of Asians like Ryo Ishikawa and Danny Lee. As I asked over at Citizen of Somewhere Else yesterday on a very different topic last week, "what's going on?" Is it that hard to talk to English-speaking caddies or agents? To hire translators for interviews with players or to get background from Asian reporters? To read reporting from Asia in translation?
I don't think this is an individual failing, a breakdown in journalistic integrity, or the natural outcome of nationalism or impersonal market forces. It's not often that I get to cite books by academics here, but Colleen Lye's 2005 study America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 is remarkably relevant to any analysis of what responses to the LPGA reveal about race, ethnicity, gender, and class in America today. Even though Lye focuses on a very different time period than our own, she shows how relevant anxieties from even progressive and liberal leaders and writers from then are to us now. Consider the following passage:
Through observations of shifts in naturalism's representation of Asiatic figures to exemplify the promise and the peril of free market expansion, my study seeks to reveal one systematic way in which the critical potential for revealing the damages wrought by globalization in the American context has been short-circuited....
The remedy and exacerbation posed by America's Asia to the crisis of the closing of the frontier entwined the emergence of Asiatic racial form with the intensification of commodity relations and capital's global expansion. The legal designation of Asian immigrants as "aliens ineligible to citizenship" reflected the freighting of Asiatic racial form with an abiding tension between U.S. national interests and capital's transnational movement, between the exceptionalist dream of the identity of nation and capital logic and the nightmare of their nonidentity. (8, 9)
Lye's focus on the "initial textual presence of Asiatic racial form as an economic trope" (11) and argument that late-19th- and early-20th-century Americans displaced their anxieties over capitalism and globalization onto Asians of their own imagining is entirely relevant to our own time, when the LPGA has been featured more in the business section than the sports section, when Americans and Europeans on tour are individualized and "the Koreans" are generally treated en masse and as a mass, and when the presence of Asians on the LPGA is sensationalized either as nightmare or dream. Lye again:
To the extent that American universality depends upon the possibility of assimilation, there is always the danger of finding aliens in our midst, or the wholesale possibility of American takeover by aliens....
In a fifty-year period, a vision of California as a post-frontier about to be engulfed by coolie hordes and Oriental despotism is succeeded by visions of a Pacific Rim utopia, where the local and the global could be made happily coextensive. (8, 11)
The Bivens regime spent too much time worrying about the former, while the Whan regime is working to make the latter a reality. Here's a suggestion: helping American media and fans get to know Asian players as individuals is only part of the solution. (A big part, to be sure, as the closest the lazy American media has come up with anything interesting thus for for Miyazato is that she's a "rock star" in Japan who at first "lost her confidence" on coming to America.) Encouraging American fans and media to embrace globalization is also only part of the solution. (Although highlighting more cross-continent friendships among the players as well as the economic benefits to the tour and its sponsors of exposure in Asia, as well as in Europe and America, wouldn't be a bad idea.) The task is much larger than that: defusing American anxieties that capitalism may be passing them by and that Americans can no longer succeed against global competition and trying to interrupt the historical short-circuit that makes American images of Asia and Asians a symbol for economic transformation. They already realize this can't be done simply by massively promoting American stars (and thus adding to the media and fan pressure on them).
One small start might be pairing Americans of Asian descent with their lesser-known counterparts who were born in Asia--and this could extend more generally between Asian and non-Asian players. The Lorena Ochoa-Ai Miyazato connection has already been established; Suzann Pettersen and Ya Ni Tseng could become a regular pairing, as could Cristie Kerr and Song-Hee Kim, Angela Stanford and Sun Young Yoo, Michelle Wie and Ji-Yai Shin, Paula Creamer (when she's healthy) and In-Kyung Kim, Karrie Webb and Amy Yang, Vicky Hurst and Momoko Ueda, Christina Kim and Jee Young Lee, Jane Park and Na Yeon Choi, Morgan Pressel and Eun-Hee Ji, Mina Harigae and Mika Miyazato, and so on. The point is to put players who combine in interesting ways together on a fairly regular basis, either by game, level of accomplishment or promise, or personality/style. Having tv commentators, golf journalists, and everyday fans on the course and in front of their tv sets getting used to seeing Asians and non-Asians showcasing their games and interacting without the world coming to an end could add up to one giant leap for America.
[Update 1 (3/9/10, 5:21 am): The new Titleist commercial is up on LPGA.com--oh, wait, wrong one....]
[Update 2 (5:33 am): This is not the one I saw during the HSBC--a lot more Asians on that one!
Anyone know where I can find the one aired during the Asian swing?]
[Update 3 (3/10/10, 3:00 am): Here's Stephanie Wei on Momoko Ueda--it's the latest installment in her Know Your Asians feature.]
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Paging Shane Bacon
I usually reserve this kind of title for established golf journalists who write a boneheaded column, but Shane Bacon really brought teh stupid yesterday over at Golf Fanhouse, so he can join Ron Sirak, Steve Elling, Gary Van Sickle, and Jason Sobel in the Mostly Harmless hall of shame.
Psssst, Shane, the LPGA Season Isn't Over! When your 1st 3 words--"It's golf's offseason"--are wrong, wrong, and wrong, maybe it's time to rethink the premise of your piece. Let's put aside the face that the PGA Tour's season is not yet over and that the WGC-HSBC Champions tournament this week is the Biggest. Tournament. In. Asia. Ever. If missing Tiger vs. Phil isn't bad enough, Bacon doesn't even bother to take a look at the schedule of the tour he's purportedly analyzing. The LPGA season is in full pennant race mode, with defending champion Ji-Yai Shin facing off against Ai Miyazato, who's hoping that a 2-week rest and home-country advantage in this week's Mizuno Classic will help her overtake Shin in the races for money list and scoring titles, not to mention a little something called Player of the Year. After that, the other 2 top contenders for these titles, Lorena Ochoa and Cristie Kerr, get home-country advantage in turn in the last 2 events of the season. This is the kind of photo finish the guys wish they could manage. Imagine if Tiger, Phil, Sergio, and Padraig were this close with 3 events to go....
Hey, Buddy, the LPGA Has Plenty of Marketable Stars! Bacon is hung up on the idea of a female Tiger:
That Wie girl he talks about as if her season were over? She's playing in Lorena's tournament next week and is eligible to play in Houston the week after. That 1st win everyone's been waiting for could still happen this season.
How about the player who beat her in the Rookie of the Year race? Ji-Yai Shin may end up being the biggest thing to hit the LPGA since Nancy Lopez. She almost single-handedly turned the KLPGA from a dozen-event mini-tour to the 3rd-best women's tour on the planet as she racked up a couple of dozen wins in a few short seasons there. Only in America could she be dismissed as one of a slew of nameless, faceless "tournament-winning golfers with no appeal." Yeah, I know Shane ranks Shin with Angela Stanford as players known to "serious golf fans" only, but that's certainly not true of her fan base in Korea. Nor is it true of In-Kyung Kim, Na Yeon Choi, Eun-Hee Ji, or Song-Hee Kim.
Same goes for Ai Miyazato, Sakura Yokomine, and Shinobu Moromizato, the 3 Japanese players from the Rolex Top 20, of which Shane claims, "Fans are familiar with about 20 percent of that list, and have no clue about the other players." Maybe that's true of American fans, but let's try the google test he uses on Michelle Wie and Suzann Pettersen on the Japanese trio. If you search "Ai Miyazato" in English and Japanese, she ends up with just shy of a million hits. Yokomine? Over 650K. Moromizato? Around 400K. And that doesn't come close to capturing the attention that Japanese TV lavishes on Ai-sama, Momoko Ueda, Shiho Oyama, and Mika Miyazato on the LPGA or Yokomine, Moromizato, Miho Koga, Chie Arimura, and the rest of the Japanese and Korean superstars on the JLPGA.
So, yeah, the LPGA is definitely a niche sport in the U.S. But it has mass appeal in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan (where Ya Ni Tseng is from). Top Americans like Paula Creamer, Cristie Kerr, Angela Stanford, and Michelle Wie aren't going away any time soon. If Natalie Gulbis and Jane Park can get their backs healed up, they could join those ranks as soon as next season. Sure, Americans love winners, and although Kerr and Creamer have won a lot, they're no Tiger and Phil. But Americans also like underdogs. Christina Kim, Brittany Lang, and Kristy McPherson have already stepped it up on a global stage in the Solheim Cup. If Michael Whan is as smart as I've heard he is, he'll find a way to globalize it. International team match play is a great way to showcase the best women golfers in the world and help American fans connect Asian names and faces.
But, there's no need to wait for that to happen. Every week on the LPGA global superstars, national heroes, and up-and-coming youngsters are battling it out. Maybe 1 "marquee player" will emerge from this cauldron of competition and connect with the "generic viewer." Maybe not. But shooting for the lowest common denominator in the U.S. is a no-win proposition for the LPGA. The tour's issue is not just marketing: it's about finding new ways to reach out to people who aren't yet fans, to share the great stories on tour, to let the players' personalities shine through on the course and via social media--and, above all, to find ways to keep enticing the best female players on the planet to make the LPGA their tour of choice.
[Update 1 (5:41 pm): Brent Kelley reports that not only will Michelle Wie play the last 2 LPGA events, she'll also play in the LET's season-ending Dubai event. Ryan Ballengee explains why American guys will catch up with American gals when it comes to playing abroad. And he focuses on the LPGA's POY race.]
[Update 2 (11/5/09, 5:38 am): Nice interview with Natalie Gulbis from the Armchair Golfer. She explains why she skipped Korea last week and is sitting out the Asian swing and gives guarded answers on the state of her back.]
[Update 3 (11/14/09, 11:10 am): To give Shane credit, he's done some good writing on his experiences looping for Erica Blasberg earlier this season. And he'll get another chance to caddie for her and write about it in Houston next week!]
Psssst, Shane, the LPGA Season Isn't Over! When your 1st 3 words--"It's golf's offseason"--are wrong, wrong, and wrong, maybe it's time to rethink the premise of your piece. Let's put aside the face that the PGA Tour's season is not yet over and that the WGC-HSBC Champions tournament this week is the Biggest. Tournament. In. Asia. Ever. If missing Tiger vs. Phil isn't bad enough, Bacon doesn't even bother to take a look at the schedule of the tour he's purportedly analyzing. The LPGA season is in full pennant race mode, with defending champion Ji-Yai Shin facing off against Ai Miyazato, who's hoping that a 2-week rest and home-country advantage in this week's Mizuno Classic will help her overtake Shin in the races for money list and scoring titles, not to mention a little something called Player of the Year. After that, the other 2 top contenders for these titles, Lorena Ochoa and Cristie Kerr, get home-country advantage in turn in the last 2 events of the season. This is the kind of photo finish the guys wish they could manage. Imagine if Tiger, Phil, Sergio, and Padraig were this close with 3 events to go....
Hey, Buddy, the LPGA Has Plenty of Marketable Stars! Bacon is hung up on the idea of a female Tiger:
Plain and simple ... the superstars on the golf course aren't the same superstars that companies are turning to. It's confusing the fan base. It's making it strange to see no-name golfers hold the trophy. The LPGA is in need of a marketable superstar.
That Wie girl he talks about as if her season were over? She's playing in Lorena's tournament next week and is eligible to play in Houston the week after. That 1st win everyone's been waiting for could still happen this season.
How about the player who beat her in the Rookie of the Year race? Ji-Yai Shin may end up being the biggest thing to hit the LPGA since Nancy Lopez. She almost single-handedly turned the KLPGA from a dozen-event mini-tour to the 3rd-best women's tour on the planet as she racked up a couple of dozen wins in a few short seasons there. Only in America could she be dismissed as one of a slew of nameless, faceless "tournament-winning golfers with no appeal." Yeah, I know Shane ranks Shin with Angela Stanford as players known to "serious golf fans" only, but that's certainly not true of her fan base in Korea. Nor is it true of In-Kyung Kim, Na Yeon Choi, Eun-Hee Ji, or Song-Hee Kim.
Same goes for Ai Miyazato, Sakura Yokomine, and Shinobu Moromizato, the 3 Japanese players from the Rolex Top 20, of which Shane claims, "Fans are familiar with about 20 percent of that list, and have no clue about the other players." Maybe that's true of American fans, but let's try the google test he uses on Michelle Wie and Suzann Pettersen on the Japanese trio. If you search "Ai Miyazato" in English and Japanese, she ends up with just shy of a million hits. Yokomine? Over 650K. Moromizato? Around 400K. And that doesn't come close to capturing the attention that Japanese TV lavishes on Ai-sama, Momoko Ueda, Shiho Oyama, and Mika Miyazato on the LPGA or Yokomine, Moromizato, Miho Koga, Chie Arimura, and the rest of the Japanese and Korean superstars on the JLPGA.
So, yeah, the LPGA is definitely a niche sport in the U.S. But it has mass appeal in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan (where Ya Ni Tseng is from). Top Americans like Paula Creamer, Cristie Kerr, Angela Stanford, and Michelle Wie aren't going away any time soon. If Natalie Gulbis and Jane Park can get their backs healed up, they could join those ranks as soon as next season. Sure, Americans love winners, and although Kerr and Creamer have won a lot, they're no Tiger and Phil. But Americans also like underdogs. Christina Kim, Brittany Lang, and Kristy McPherson have already stepped it up on a global stage in the Solheim Cup. If Michael Whan is as smart as I've heard he is, he'll find a way to globalize it. International team match play is a great way to showcase the best women golfers in the world and help American fans connect Asian names and faces.
But, there's no need to wait for that to happen. Every week on the LPGA global superstars, national heroes, and up-and-coming youngsters are battling it out. Maybe 1 "marquee player" will emerge from this cauldron of competition and connect with the "generic viewer." Maybe not. But shooting for the lowest common denominator in the U.S. is a no-win proposition for the LPGA. The tour's issue is not just marketing: it's about finding new ways to reach out to people who aren't yet fans, to share the great stories on tour, to let the players' personalities shine through on the course and via social media--and, above all, to find ways to keep enticing the best female players on the planet to make the LPGA their tour of choice.
[Update 1 (5:41 pm): Brent Kelley reports that not only will Michelle Wie play the last 2 LPGA events, she'll also play in the LET's season-ending Dubai event. Ryan Ballengee explains why American guys will catch up with American gals when it comes to playing abroad. And he focuses on the LPGA's POY race.]
[Update 2 (11/5/09, 5:38 am): Nice interview with Natalie Gulbis from the Armchair Golfer. She explains why she skipped Korea last week and is sitting out the Asian swing and gives guarded answers on the state of her back.]
[Update 3 (11/14/09, 11:10 am): To give Shane credit, he's done some good writing on his experiences looping for Erica Blasberg earlier this season. And he'll get another chance to caddie for her and write about it in Houston next week!]
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
J-Pop Culture Update: Moe Madness!
Here's the anime du jour at the Constructivist household. It's called Kimi Ni Todoke and the Full Metal Archivist calls it "the Bible of moe." What's moe? Mao Asada would like to know. (Hint: Mao Asada is moe and so is her reaction to the question posed to her at the end of the video.) For more details, check out the hottest new anime in Japan and around the world at AnimeKuro. What's striking about "Reaching You" is how a subculture into fetishing the purity and innocence of young girls has gone mainstream via the manga and anime. And what's striking about the Discovery Channel International Made in J-Pop Culture documentary is the subtitles posted on it in Japanese on youtube:
Japanese pop culture is fascinated by how American (and other) pop culture is fascinated with Japanese pop culture. Check out the channel of the samuraitoshi3 to see what I mean.
Me, I'll go back to Karen Tei Yamashita's Circle K Diaries (2001).... Somehow I find the Discovery Channel's borrowing tropes from its nature documentaries less interesting than early Yamashita writing about the permutations and mutations of Brazilian, Japanese, and American identities.
Japanese pop culture is fascinated by how American (and other) pop culture is fascinated with Japanese pop culture. Check out the channel of the samuraitoshi3 to see what I mean.
Me, I'll go back to Karen Tei Yamashita's Circle K Diaries (2001).... Somehow I find the Discovery Channel's borrowing tropes from its nature documentaries less interesting than early Yamashita writing about the permutations and mutations of Brazilian, Japanese, and American identities.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
HIMEKA Watch: YouTube Edition
If you aren't yet a fan of French Canadian anime songstress HIMEKA (Catherine St-Onge), you will be after checking out the following clips from youtube!
Here's her victory performance at the Animax Anison Grand Prix contest, with English subtitles of the judges' reactions and the award presentation:
Here's how she got there in the 1st and 2nd rounds:
The Full Metal Archivist was blown away by her singing, her gestures, even her breathing techniques, but how did authentic Japanese otaku react to her performance?
No subtitles necessary, eh?
Here's her song for the opening of Valkryia Chronicles:
Bonus points for true otaku wannabees--check out the differences in her style of singing the same song in this promotional video:
Now HIMEKA's getting the full-on Jero treatment, from TBS:
From a morning news program:
We think this was the same show Jero appeared on last year:
Let's check out with her debut single, a cover of "Sayonara Solitaire":
What a voice!
Here's her victory performance at the Animax Anison Grand Prix contest, with English subtitles of the judges' reactions and the award presentation:
Here's how she got there in the 1st and 2nd rounds:
The Full Metal Archivist was blown away by her singing, her gestures, even her breathing techniques, but how did authentic Japanese otaku react to her performance?
No subtitles necessary, eh?
Here's her song for the opening of Valkryia Chronicles:
Bonus points for true otaku wannabees--check out the differences in her style of singing the same song in this promotional video:
Now HIMEKA's getting the full-on Jero treatment, from TBS:
From a morning news program:
We think this was the same show Jero appeared on last year:
Let's check out with her debut single, a cover of "Sayonara Solitaire":
What a voice!
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Speaking of Golf in Asia...
Tim Maitland is one of the best golf writers out there. He was probably the only one of the pros writing on golf to call Ai Miyazato's breakthrough early this season (check out his profile of and interview with her from the HSBC Women's Champions event at Women Sport Report). Well, he also writes on the men's game. Here's one of his recent pieces on the HSBC Champions event becoming part of the WGC circuit.
History Awaits for Asia
Tim Maitland
"For sure it is going to be an historic moment! The first WGC tournament, the HSBC Champions in China, speaks that golf is big in Asia and the world recognizes that and that’s why it’s coming to China. Golf is growing really fast in China, plus the course, with the atmosphere from the crowds that come out to watch the tournament is growing and is going to get bigger and bigger in years to come." --Jeev Milkha Singh
Take any of Asia’s leading golfers, from Jeev Milkha Singh to China’s Zhang Lianwei and Liang Wenchong, Korea’s "K. J." Choi Kyung-Ju and the Thai duo Thongchai Jaidee and Prayad Marksaeng, and you will find a man who, in his own way, has had to navigate a rough and unchartered route to the upper echelons of the world game.
Finally, not before time, the world game is coming to them.
As Yang Yong-Eun’s historic PGA Championship win in August proved, Asia is ready for world-class golf. And this November it arrives in Asia with the first World Golf Championships tournament, a tier of events that bring the crème de la crème together, standing just below the Majors in order of importance on the global golf calendar. WGC status for the HSBC Champions takes not just that event, but tournament golf in Asia, to a whole new level. It recognizes the ever-increasing quality of Asia’s events, courses and the inexorable rise in popularity of the sport. It is also a tip of the hat to the work the great pathfinder-professionals have done in establishing the region’s reputation by earning their places and proving competitive in the Majors and WGC events through the years.
"It is a recognition for them and the way that golf is growing. The players coming out of Asia, the world recognizes them now and gives them due credit and that’s why the WGC event has gone to Asia," said the 37-year-old Singh, the highest ranked Indian in the world and the first from his country to ever earn a European Tour card.
"Having a World Golf Championship in Asia speaks and says that golf is a global sport in today’s day and age and with so many golfers there’s a recognition for Asian golfers and for the Asian golfers to rub shoulders with the world’s best players and to get an opportunity to play with the best and try to prove themselves against the best. Having an event of that stature is fantastic. Golf is one of the fastest growing sports in Asia right now and when an event like this comes to Asia it’s a boost for Asian players and golf in Asia."
More specifically, for the one Asian to have claimed the HSBC Champions title, WGC status is, in retrospect, recognition of the scale of his feat. Yang Yong-Eun may have had four Japan Tour wins to his name by the time he claimed the 2006 title ahead of the world number one Tiger Woods, as well as former U.S. Open champions Retief Goosen and Michael Campbell, but to the global game he was a relative unknown at the time. Now that he has become the first Asian to win a Major, his previous feats will all be seen with a new perspective, but even before then Yang knew that WGC status would change the way his '06 win is viewed.
"It was good to know that such a prestigious tournament was being elevated to WGC status. It proves that the tournament I won was a top, top class tournament," said the 37-year-old Jeju islander, nicknamed "son of the wind" by the Korean media.
"For me personally, even if the tournament stayed in its original form it would have been fine with me because it was big anyway and I loved playing in it every year. The fact that it has been elevated to World Golf Championship status makes it harder for players to get in, but I welcome the challenge. It’s definitely one of my small goals every year to play myself into the HSBC Champions and I want to congratulate HSBC and the tournament organizers for being able to take the tournament to WGC status."
As well as the recognition that WGC status affords Asia, it also creates a greater opportunity for the stars that qualify to show their true ability. As Thongchai Jaidee points out, even though Sheshan International Golf Club is an American-style course, there’s far less adapting needed there for the Asian players compared to when they play in the United States.
"We’ve got a better chance for an Asian to win the tournament if we’re in Asia. It’s difficult to play well in America. It’s a good chance for Asians to show how good we really are. Some guys have played well [in the States], but you have to stay one or two years before you’re OK. You can’t just come for one month or two months," said the 39-year-old Thai veteran who, despite only turning professional at the age of 30 holds the record with 12 victories on the Asian Tour.
"In America the greens are fast, and they’re quite firm and the rough can be quite thick. It’s very different. I still have to learn a lot about how to control the speed on the greens. I’ve played a lot in Europe, but in Europe the greens are not as fast. The grass in China is almost the same as in America. The greens in China are faster. It’s good to promote golf in Asia and in China. All the big names will play there. It’s good for the tournament and good for golf in Asia," added Jaidee, who will turn 40 during this year’s HSBC Champions tournament.
There are other benefits too for players from the Asia-Pacific region. As Australia’s 2007 US Open Champion Geoff Ogilvy points out, the WGC-HSBC Champions will be a rare opportunity for fans, friends and family to watch him play alongside the world’s best without losing sleep.
"I grew up in that time zone and it’s horrible for watching golf in Europe or the US. It’s nighttime all the time. It’s really late at night to watch the European Tour and it’s really, really early in the morning to watch the US Tour. So to have everyone on your time zone is pretty sweet and that’s a big viewership," said the 32-year-old, who, after Tiger’s 16 wins, is the most prolific winner of WGC titles with three victories, including this year’s WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship.
"I understand more than 90 per cent of Chinese have a TV and there are 1.4 billion people. More people can watch this tournament than can watch the Players Championship or any other big tournament in the US. It’s hard to comprehend for us but it’s true, because of the numbers in that time zone. The exposure for golf is pretty cool and it’s cool for China that they’re going to get to see players like Tiger and Phil and Sergio and Retief and all these people on a regular basis. That can only help golf as a sport in China."
It’s not just the chance to be seen on the small screen that appeals. As Jeev points out, for players who can spend as much as 30 or 40 weeks each year on the road, it’s a chance to connect face-to-face with fans.
"They have an opportunity to fly down and watch the tournament and they can see the world’s best players play with us, enjoy the atmosphere and see how big golf is getting in Asia. I know a lot of people in India are going to fly in to watch this championship because the world’s top players are going to be there and they can see the up close instead of watching them on television. They can also see the way everybody conducts themselves and see the way they train on the driving range and make the most out of it," explained the Indian star.
For others the experience is far closer to the heart. In February of this year teenage sensation Danny Lee claimed the Johnnie Walker Classic in Perth, Australia to became the youngest ever winner at 18 years and 213 days on the European Tour (beating the previous record of 18 years and 290 days set by Dale Hayes at the 1971 Spanish Open). The price of developing such precocious talent for the Korean-born New Zealander is that he hasn’t seen his Seoul-based grandparents since he was 13. In Shanghai this November he’ll see them for the first time in half a decade.
"My granddad and grandma are going to come and watch me. I haven’t seen either of them for five years. I’ve been so busy playing tournaments nearly every week. I can’t wait to see their faces!" exclaimed Lee.
"My grandparents are really important to me. I was always really close to my Grandpa and Grandma. I stayed with them a lot when I was a kid. They gave me so many presents and so many surprises when I was a kid. I talked to them in July and they told me they’re very proud of me and so happy to be my grandparents and they said they were happy that I’m enjoying my life."
The weeks and months of separation are also a trial for some of the veterans. 2009 has been particularly tough for Thongchai, who admits to suffering from the periods of separation away from his family since his second son was born at the beginning of the year. For one week at least Thongchai’s children can join him in Shanghai.
"My family they want to go together. It’s very important. If I can travel together with my family it makes me very happy. We can enjoy it together," he explains.
"I miss my family. I am outside the country for four or five weeks and then only have one or two weeks off to see my family. It’s not enough. My second child is only a few months old and my other son is seven years old. I know I have to work and I have to work hard, but I call with Skype every day."
It’s not just the Asian players who will benefit from the exposure the WGC-HSBC Champions will give them. Ogilvy insists staging one of the world’s top tournaments in the Asian region will make some of Asia’s top corporations realize the potential of marketing themselves through golf’s superstars.
"It’s only a matter of time before some of these big guys get some corporate associations with Chinese companies who want to get exposure worldwide and that’s a market that could be quite scary [big] for some of these guys," said the Aussie.
"Golf is big enough to thrive globally and this is a big step in that direction for sure!"
History Awaits for Asia
Tim Maitland
"For sure it is going to be an historic moment! The first WGC tournament, the HSBC Champions in China, speaks that golf is big in Asia and the world recognizes that and that’s why it’s coming to China. Golf is growing really fast in China, plus the course, with the atmosphere from the crowds that come out to watch the tournament is growing and is going to get bigger and bigger in years to come." --Jeev Milkha Singh
Take any of Asia’s leading golfers, from Jeev Milkha Singh to China’s Zhang Lianwei and Liang Wenchong, Korea’s "K. J." Choi Kyung-Ju and the Thai duo Thongchai Jaidee and Prayad Marksaeng, and you will find a man who, in his own way, has had to navigate a rough and unchartered route to the upper echelons of the world game.
Finally, not before time, the world game is coming to them.
As Yang Yong-Eun’s historic PGA Championship win in August proved, Asia is ready for world-class golf. And this November it arrives in Asia with the first World Golf Championships tournament, a tier of events that bring the crème de la crème together, standing just below the Majors in order of importance on the global golf calendar. WGC status for the HSBC Champions takes not just that event, but tournament golf in Asia, to a whole new level. It recognizes the ever-increasing quality of Asia’s events, courses and the inexorable rise in popularity of the sport. It is also a tip of the hat to the work the great pathfinder-professionals have done in establishing the region’s reputation by earning their places and proving competitive in the Majors and WGC events through the years.
"It is a recognition for them and the way that golf is growing. The players coming out of Asia, the world recognizes them now and gives them due credit and that’s why the WGC event has gone to Asia," said the 37-year-old Singh, the highest ranked Indian in the world and the first from his country to ever earn a European Tour card.
"Having a World Golf Championship in Asia speaks and says that golf is a global sport in today’s day and age and with so many golfers there’s a recognition for Asian golfers and for the Asian golfers to rub shoulders with the world’s best players and to get an opportunity to play with the best and try to prove themselves against the best. Having an event of that stature is fantastic. Golf is one of the fastest growing sports in Asia right now and when an event like this comes to Asia it’s a boost for Asian players and golf in Asia."
More specifically, for the one Asian to have claimed the HSBC Champions title, WGC status is, in retrospect, recognition of the scale of his feat. Yang Yong-Eun may have had four Japan Tour wins to his name by the time he claimed the 2006 title ahead of the world number one Tiger Woods, as well as former U.S. Open champions Retief Goosen and Michael Campbell, but to the global game he was a relative unknown at the time. Now that he has become the first Asian to win a Major, his previous feats will all be seen with a new perspective, but even before then Yang knew that WGC status would change the way his '06 win is viewed.
"It was good to know that such a prestigious tournament was being elevated to WGC status. It proves that the tournament I won was a top, top class tournament," said the 37-year-old Jeju islander, nicknamed "son of the wind" by the Korean media.
"For me personally, even if the tournament stayed in its original form it would have been fine with me because it was big anyway and I loved playing in it every year. The fact that it has been elevated to World Golf Championship status makes it harder for players to get in, but I welcome the challenge. It’s definitely one of my small goals every year to play myself into the HSBC Champions and I want to congratulate HSBC and the tournament organizers for being able to take the tournament to WGC status."
As well as the recognition that WGC status affords Asia, it also creates a greater opportunity for the stars that qualify to show their true ability. As Thongchai Jaidee points out, even though Sheshan International Golf Club is an American-style course, there’s far less adapting needed there for the Asian players compared to when they play in the United States.
"We’ve got a better chance for an Asian to win the tournament if we’re in Asia. It’s difficult to play well in America. It’s a good chance for Asians to show how good we really are. Some guys have played well [in the States], but you have to stay one or two years before you’re OK. You can’t just come for one month or two months," said the 39-year-old Thai veteran who, despite only turning professional at the age of 30 holds the record with 12 victories on the Asian Tour.
"In America the greens are fast, and they’re quite firm and the rough can be quite thick. It’s very different. I still have to learn a lot about how to control the speed on the greens. I’ve played a lot in Europe, but in Europe the greens are not as fast. The grass in China is almost the same as in America. The greens in China are faster. It’s good to promote golf in Asia and in China. All the big names will play there. It’s good for the tournament and good for golf in Asia," added Jaidee, who will turn 40 during this year’s HSBC Champions tournament.
There are other benefits too for players from the Asia-Pacific region. As Australia’s 2007 US Open Champion Geoff Ogilvy points out, the WGC-HSBC Champions will be a rare opportunity for fans, friends and family to watch him play alongside the world’s best without losing sleep.
"I grew up in that time zone and it’s horrible for watching golf in Europe or the US. It’s nighttime all the time. It’s really late at night to watch the European Tour and it’s really, really early in the morning to watch the US Tour. So to have everyone on your time zone is pretty sweet and that’s a big viewership," said the 32-year-old, who, after Tiger’s 16 wins, is the most prolific winner of WGC titles with three victories, including this year’s WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship.
"I understand more than 90 per cent of Chinese have a TV and there are 1.4 billion people. More people can watch this tournament than can watch the Players Championship or any other big tournament in the US. It’s hard to comprehend for us but it’s true, because of the numbers in that time zone. The exposure for golf is pretty cool and it’s cool for China that they’re going to get to see players like Tiger and Phil and Sergio and Retief and all these people on a regular basis. That can only help golf as a sport in China."
It’s not just the chance to be seen on the small screen that appeals. As Jeev points out, for players who can spend as much as 30 or 40 weeks each year on the road, it’s a chance to connect face-to-face with fans.
"They have an opportunity to fly down and watch the tournament and they can see the world’s best players play with us, enjoy the atmosphere and see how big golf is getting in Asia. I know a lot of people in India are going to fly in to watch this championship because the world’s top players are going to be there and they can see the up close instead of watching them on television. They can also see the way everybody conducts themselves and see the way they train on the driving range and make the most out of it," explained the Indian star.
For others the experience is far closer to the heart. In February of this year teenage sensation Danny Lee claimed the Johnnie Walker Classic in Perth, Australia to became the youngest ever winner at 18 years and 213 days on the European Tour (beating the previous record of 18 years and 290 days set by Dale Hayes at the 1971 Spanish Open). The price of developing such precocious talent for the Korean-born New Zealander is that he hasn’t seen his Seoul-based grandparents since he was 13. In Shanghai this November he’ll see them for the first time in half a decade.
"My granddad and grandma are going to come and watch me. I haven’t seen either of them for five years. I’ve been so busy playing tournaments nearly every week. I can’t wait to see their faces!" exclaimed Lee.
"My grandparents are really important to me. I was always really close to my Grandpa and Grandma. I stayed with them a lot when I was a kid. They gave me so many presents and so many surprises when I was a kid. I talked to them in July and they told me they’re very proud of me and so happy to be my grandparents and they said they were happy that I’m enjoying my life."
The weeks and months of separation are also a trial for some of the veterans. 2009 has been particularly tough for Thongchai, who admits to suffering from the periods of separation away from his family since his second son was born at the beginning of the year. For one week at least Thongchai’s children can join him in Shanghai.
"My family they want to go together. It’s very important. If I can travel together with my family it makes me very happy. We can enjoy it together," he explains.
"I miss my family. I am outside the country for four or five weeks and then only have one or two weeks off to see my family. It’s not enough. My second child is only a few months old and my other son is seven years old. I know I have to work and I have to work hard, but I call with Skype every day."
It’s not just the Asian players who will benefit from the exposure the WGC-HSBC Champions will give them. Ogilvy insists staging one of the world’s top tournaments in the Asian region will make some of Asia’s top corporations realize the potential of marketing themselves through golf’s superstars.
"It’s only a matter of time before some of these big guys get some corporate associations with Chinese companies who want to get exposure worldwide and that’s a market that could be quite scary [big] for some of these guys," said the Aussie.
"Golf is big enough to thrive globally and this is a big step in that direction for sure!"
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
sf@SF Is Back!
Just a little public service announcement for those who come to Mostly Harmless looking for stuff on sf, anime, and other aspects of American and transnational popular culture: I've got students in both my undergraduate classes this semester signing up as co-authors on the sf@SF blog, which is now on "science fiction--and more--at SUNY Fredonia." I've just posted a brief observation on the odd choice of commercials that run during Onegai My Melody on veoh.com and Ouran High School Host Club on youtube.com. We should have several posts per week up from a variety of writers this semester. Check it out when you get a chance!
Mata-ne, Momo-chan: Ueda Going Back to the JLPGA for the Rest of the Season
From Momoko Ueda's post-final round interview at the Canadian Women's Open:
Looks like Momo-chan has decided to take a run at Shinobu Moromizato, Sakura Yokomine, Mi-Jeong Jeon, Chie Arimura, and the rest of the JLPGA's finest the rest of the season. She can end up playing as many as 16 events--and 3 majors--there this year by doing so. And I guess she figured there's no time like the present for improving on her #26 standing on the JLPGA money list. Her runner-up at the CWO moved her to #31 on the LPGA money list, so with the money she's likely to make at the Mizuno Classic, she still has a chance to better last year's winnings ($413.6K) and standing (#45). I'll take a look at her improvement in her key performance stats from last season after the Mizuno.
Now that I think about it, though, I'm really hoping she didn't mean that "last event in the mainland" business literally--or that her translator was being imprecise....
MOMOKO UEDA: (via translator) This is going to be my last event in the mainland, but if there are any other events to play, I'd like to play them.
Looks like Momo-chan has decided to take a run at Shinobu Moromizato, Sakura Yokomine, Mi-Jeong Jeon, Chie Arimura, and the rest of the JLPGA's finest the rest of the season. She can end up playing as many as 16 events--and 3 majors--there this year by doing so. And I guess she figured there's no time like the present for improving on her #26 standing on the JLPGA money list. Her runner-up at the CWO moved her to #31 on the LPGA money list, so with the money she's likely to make at the Mizuno Classic, she still has a chance to better last year's winnings ($413.6K) and standing (#45). I'll take a look at her improvement in her key performance stats from last season after the Mizuno.
Now that I think about it, though, I'm really hoping she didn't mean that "last event in the mainland" business literally--or that her translator was being imprecise....
Monday, August 17, 2009
Incorporating the Solheim Cup into a World Cup or Dismantling it for the Olympics?
In what's become a bienniel tradition, golf writing's heavyweights have weighed in with plans to improve the Solheim Cup, from Gary Van Sickle to Ron Sirak (while Randall Mell positions himself among the traditionalists who like the Europe vs. America face-off, at least going by whom he quotes in the former piece, but also calls for an additional U.S.-South Korea showdown in the latter). So of course I'll take the opportunity to join in once again.
I still favor the model I originally proposed in September 2007, which is conservative in the sense that it preserves the U.S. vs. Europe tradition of the Solheim Cup and the Korea vs. Japan tradition of the Pinx/Kyoraku Cup (the name changes depending on where the Cup is held each year), but innovative in the sense that the timing and format of the latter would have to be modified to mirror the former (right now it's head-to-head stroke play matches over 2 days, usually in December) and that the winners and losers of each individual odd-numbered-year competition would face off in even-numbered years. All it would take to make it happen is an agreement between the 4 major women's tours: the LPGA, LET, JLPGA, and KLPGA. If the JLPGA and KLPGA were to move quickly and change the format if not timing of the Pinx/Kyoraku Cup this year, we could have our first world championship in 2010. I'm sure Lexus and HSBC would love the chance to help organize and support an event that would pit the 48 of the best women golfers in the world against each other in even-numbered years. Qualifying would become an annual affair rather than the 2-season marathon it now is, giving more players a chance to participate and ensuring that each team is composed of the hottest players in its zone. And even though Europe is at a huge disadvantage this year, there are plenty of young European players who have what it takes to make the Solheim Cup interesting again. Anna Nordqvist already made it to this year's team, but by 2011 she should be joined by Sandra Gal, Pernilla Lindberg, Dewi Claire Schreefel, Maria Hernandez, Azahara Munoz, and Carlota Ciganda, who have been proving themselves in global competition for years.
But even this Solheim-Pinx/Kyoraku-Lexus/HSBC conglomeration still wouldn't include all the best women golfers, so the question of how to make it truly global then arises. Any international team competition that excludes Australia, Canada, Mexico, and Thailand and fails to include Taiwan, China, Colombia, and Brazil is still embarrassingly limited. The difficulty, of course, is how to handle that expansion. If you follow Ron Sirak's route and turn Team USA into Team Americas and Team Europe into Team Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, but keep my idea of 4 teams competing each year rather than his idea of forming an Australasian team and having the losing team in one competition sit out the next one, how would you expand Teams Korea and Japan? One way to do it would be to pit an Asian team anchored by Korea, China, and Thailand against a Pacific team anchored by Japan and Australia. The stumbling block there is that the Chinese government might have a slight problem with Taiwan being on the Pacific team. On top of diluting existing rivalries and traditions, the additional potential for political crisis built into this approach makes it a non-starter in my book.
Another way to do it would be to add a third leg to the competition by creating two new teams that would face off against each other every odd-numbered year: Team Atlantic vs. Team Pacific. The former would most likely include Canadian, Mexican, Columbian, Brazilian, and other players born in the Americas (but not in the United States), Caribbean, or Africa; the latter would consist of Australian, Chinese, Russian, Pacific Islander, and East, Southeast, and South Asian players not born in Korea or Japan. But this would create exactly that transnational hodge-podge my original proposal was trying to avoid, plus it introduces complications in the even-numbered years, where we'd have to create a winners' bracket and a losers' bracket and create some kind of round-robin format in each.
Given that we can't even begin to preserve the Solheim and Pinx/Kyoraku Cups and incorporate them into something global until 2011, 2 more interesting options arise, one modelled after soccer's World Cup and the other changing the very nature of the proposed Olympics golf experience and the existing structure of international team golf.
In the World Cup model, the idea would be to modify FIFA's structure of 6 regional qualifying zones (Africa, Asia, Europe, North/Central America and the Caribbean, Oceania, and South America) and complicated preliminary match set-up--an artifact of soccer's global spread and the relative strength of competition around the world--and make it more appropriate to golf's history and competitive balance. The difficulty here is that very few countries could stand up against the juggernauts of the U.S., Korea, EU, and Japan. Australia yes, Canada and Thailand maybe not, Mexico someday, China even later (but sooner with Taiwan). Breaking up the EU just adds more weaker teams to the mix and cements the advantage of the remaining Big 3. How many nation-based teams could even field 12 world-class players? The existing Women's World Cup of Golf has 2-player teams. What I would suggest is creating 4 regional qualifying zones--the Americas, Europe/Africa, Asia, and Pacific--and allowing any number of 12-player transnational teams to be formed in each zone and compete against each other in an even-numbered year for the chance to knock off the zone's power team (US, EU, Korea, Japan) at the very beginning of the odd-numbered season. That way, everyone in the world would have a chance to participate and play their way to the big stage. The Big 4 would have a chance to defend their status against the best challengers and compete for status against each other after their likely victories. The winter silly season would become less silly and the summer break less boring.
The Olympics model, by contrast, would go the national route, which would mean dismantling rather than building upon the Solheim Cup. The ISOC can keep their boring 60-player, 72-hole event for individual medals--they can even save it for the last 4 days of the Olympics. But they ought to add a 4-team showdown that's the culmination of 3 years of shootouts. 2013: 32 teams start out, seeded by average Rolex Ranking of each team, following the Solheim Cup format in matches taking place all over the world. 2014: the Sweet 16 face off. 2015: the Elite 8 compete for entry into the 2016 Olympics. 2016: the winners of the semifinals play for the gold while the losers play for the bronze at the end of the 1st week of the Games.
Personally, I prefer the World Cup model as I've laid it out here. How about you?
[Update 1 (8/25/09, 7:04 am): Ryan Ballengee comes out in favor of Sirak's 3-way idea. I can't say strongly enough how wrong they are.]
[Update 2 (3:45 pm): Brent Kelley calls for a Solheim Cup clone: Team USA vs. Team Asia in even-numbered years. But why have 24 of the best golfers in the world facing off in team match play when you can have 48? All you need is a complex with 2 courses, 1 for the winners in the previous year and 1 for the losers.]
I still favor the model I originally proposed in September 2007, which is conservative in the sense that it preserves the U.S. vs. Europe tradition of the Solheim Cup and the Korea vs. Japan tradition of the Pinx/Kyoraku Cup (the name changes depending on where the Cup is held each year), but innovative in the sense that the timing and format of the latter would have to be modified to mirror the former (right now it's head-to-head stroke play matches over 2 days, usually in December) and that the winners and losers of each individual odd-numbered-year competition would face off in even-numbered years. All it would take to make it happen is an agreement between the 4 major women's tours: the LPGA, LET, JLPGA, and KLPGA. If the JLPGA and KLPGA were to move quickly and change the format if not timing of the Pinx/Kyoraku Cup this year, we could have our first world championship in 2010. I'm sure Lexus and HSBC would love the chance to help organize and support an event that would pit the 48 of the best women golfers in the world against each other in even-numbered years. Qualifying would become an annual affair rather than the 2-season marathon it now is, giving more players a chance to participate and ensuring that each team is composed of the hottest players in its zone. And even though Europe is at a huge disadvantage this year, there are plenty of young European players who have what it takes to make the Solheim Cup interesting again. Anna Nordqvist already made it to this year's team, but by 2011 she should be joined by Sandra Gal, Pernilla Lindberg, Dewi Claire Schreefel, Maria Hernandez, Azahara Munoz, and Carlota Ciganda, who have been proving themselves in global competition for years.
But even this Solheim-Pinx/Kyoraku-Lexus/HSBC conglomeration still wouldn't include all the best women golfers, so the question of how to make it truly global then arises. Any international team competition that excludes Australia, Canada, Mexico, and Thailand and fails to include Taiwan, China, Colombia, and Brazil is still embarrassingly limited. The difficulty, of course, is how to handle that expansion. If you follow Ron Sirak's route and turn Team USA into Team Americas and Team Europe into Team Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, but keep my idea of 4 teams competing each year rather than his idea of forming an Australasian team and having the losing team in one competition sit out the next one, how would you expand Teams Korea and Japan? One way to do it would be to pit an Asian team anchored by Korea, China, and Thailand against a Pacific team anchored by Japan and Australia. The stumbling block there is that the Chinese government might have a slight problem with Taiwan being on the Pacific team. On top of diluting existing rivalries and traditions, the additional potential for political crisis built into this approach makes it a non-starter in my book.
Another way to do it would be to add a third leg to the competition by creating two new teams that would face off against each other every odd-numbered year: Team Atlantic vs. Team Pacific. The former would most likely include Canadian, Mexican, Columbian, Brazilian, and other players born in the Americas (but not in the United States), Caribbean, or Africa; the latter would consist of Australian, Chinese, Russian, Pacific Islander, and East, Southeast, and South Asian players not born in Korea or Japan. But this would create exactly that transnational hodge-podge my original proposal was trying to avoid, plus it introduces complications in the even-numbered years, where we'd have to create a winners' bracket and a losers' bracket and create some kind of round-robin format in each.
Given that we can't even begin to preserve the Solheim and Pinx/Kyoraku Cups and incorporate them into something global until 2011, 2 more interesting options arise, one modelled after soccer's World Cup and the other changing the very nature of the proposed Olympics golf experience and the existing structure of international team golf.
In the World Cup model, the idea would be to modify FIFA's structure of 6 regional qualifying zones (Africa, Asia, Europe, North/Central America and the Caribbean, Oceania, and South America) and complicated preliminary match set-up--an artifact of soccer's global spread and the relative strength of competition around the world--and make it more appropriate to golf's history and competitive balance. The difficulty here is that very few countries could stand up against the juggernauts of the U.S., Korea, EU, and Japan. Australia yes, Canada and Thailand maybe not, Mexico someday, China even later (but sooner with Taiwan). Breaking up the EU just adds more weaker teams to the mix and cements the advantage of the remaining Big 3. How many nation-based teams could even field 12 world-class players? The existing Women's World Cup of Golf has 2-player teams. What I would suggest is creating 4 regional qualifying zones--the Americas, Europe/Africa, Asia, and Pacific--and allowing any number of 12-player transnational teams to be formed in each zone and compete against each other in an even-numbered year for the chance to knock off the zone's power team (US, EU, Korea, Japan) at the very beginning of the odd-numbered season. That way, everyone in the world would have a chance to participate and play their way to the big stage. The Big 4 would have a chance to defend their status against the best challengers and compete for status against each other after their likely victories. The winter silly season would become less silly and the summer break less boring.
The Olympics model, by contrast, would go the national route, which would mean dismantling rather than building upon the Solheim Cup. The ISOC can keep their boring 60-player, 72-hole event for individual medals--they can even save it for the last 4 days of the Olympics. But they ought to add a 4-team showdown that's the culmination of 3 years of shootouts. 2013: 32 teams start out, seeded by average Rolex Ranking of each team, following the Solheim Cup format in matches taking place all over the world. 2014: the Sweet 16 face off. 2015: the Elite 8 compete for entry into the 2016 Olympics. 2016: the winners of the semifinals play for the gold while the losers play for the bronze at the end of the 1st week of the Games.
Personally, I prefer the World Cup model as I've laid it out here. How about you?
[Update 1 (8/25/09, 7:04 am): Ryan Ballengee comes out in favor of Sirak's 3-way idea. I can't say strongly enough how wrong they are.]
[Update 2 (3:45 pm): Brent Kelley calls for a Solheim Cup clone: Team USA vs. Team Asia in even-numbered years. But why have 24 of the best golfers in the world facing off in team match play when you can have 48? All you need is a complex with 2 courses, 1 for the winners in the previous year and 1 for the losers.]
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!]
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Kraft Nabisco Championship Preview/Predictions/Pairings
It's major time on the LPGA this week! With Hound Dog's excellent preview of the Kraft Nabisco Championship joined by a stepped-up local media effort (led by Larry Bohannan) and posts from large-traffic golf blogs (such as Devil Ball Golf and Golf Girl), the attention level on the LPGA is much higher than usual, although less than it would be if the KNC came after rather than before the Masters (for Exhibit A, I give you Steve Elling and Ross Devonport). One thing I'm particularly excited about is that we're finally having an event where the historical stats and tournament history matter, so I don't just have to go by my hot list and guesswork. Here are my picks:
1. Ochoa
2. Tseng
3. Kerr
4. Stanford
5. Pak
6. Park Angela
7. Webb
8. Shin
9. Ji
10. Kim Song-Hee
11. Pettersen
12. Miyazato
Alts: Choi Na Yeon, Lang, Creamer
With a field this awesome--including top amateurs Tiffany Joh, Azahara Munoz, Candace Schepperle, and Alexis Thompson, Jennifer Johnson, JLPGA greats Yuri Fudoh, Akiko Fukushima, Ji Hee Lee, Miho Koga, and Sakura Yokomine, KLPGA stars Ha Neul Kim and Hee Kyung Seo, and even top LETers Gwladys Nocera and Martina Eberl--literally anything can happen. What thickens the plot even more is the way the tournament organizers set up the pairings--with such a limited field, the players are going off in pairs from day 1.
Off the 10th tee at 8:01 am, for instance, Wie and Miyazato should get the slightest bit of media and spectator attention, allowing Ha Neul Kim and Miho Koga to go off the 1st 22 minutes later comparatively incognito. And those aren't even among the prime-time pairings! Where to start with them? How about off the back in the late morning?
Or maybe those going off the front in the early afternoon?
But what about those going off the back opposite them?
Or those going off the front in the late morning:
Wow--amazing stuff! Here's hoping I have time to combine 2007's final-round not-quite-live-blogging and 2008's final-round overview and contextualization in 2009.
[Update 1 (6:28 am): Definitely give the Seoul Sisters.com KNC thread a look-see this week. The gang is going all out and Tim Maitland, whose work at the HSBC I so admired, is giving inside scoops galore!]
[Update 2 (6:52 am): Given how fired up Momoko Ueda is over Japan's huge victory in the World Baseball Classic, I wonder if we'll be seeing something special this week from the Japanese contingent!]
[Update 3 (12:16 pm): Here's Brent Kelley's preview.]
[Update 4 (1:08 pm): Here's Jay Busbee's case for Karrie Webb as KNC contender.]
[Update 5 (4/2/09, 6:02 am): Nice little piece by Sean Martin n 5 things to watch at the KNC.]
[Update 6 (5:16 pm): Here's Bill Jempty's preview.]
[Update 7 (4/3/09, 12:01 am): Whoops, missed Ryan Ballengee's preview.]
1. Ochoa
2. Tseng
3. Kerr
4. Stanford
5. Pak
6. Park Angela
7. Webb
8. Shin
9. Ji
10. Kim Song-Hee
11. Pettersen
12. Miyazato
Alts: Choi Na Yeon, Lang, Creamer
With a field this awesome--including top amateurs Tiffany Joh, Azahara Munoz, Candace Schepperle, and Alexis Thompson, Jennifer Johnson, JLPGA greats Yuri Fudoh, Akiko Fukushima, Ji Hee Lee, Miho Koga, and Sakura Yokomine, KLPGA stars Ha Neul Kim and Hee Kyung Seo, and even top LETers Gwladys Nocera and Martina Eberl--literally anything can happen. What thickens the plot even more is the way the tournament organizers set up the pairings--with such a limited field, the players are going off in pairs from day 1.
Off the 10th tee at 8:01 am, for instance, Wie and Miyazato should get the slightest bit of media and spectator attention, allowing Ha Neul Kim and Miho Koga to go off the 1st 22 minutes later comparatively incognito. And those aren't even among the prime-time pairings! Where to start with them? How about off the back in the late morning?
Start Time: 8:49 AM
Lorena Ochoa
Ji-Yai Shin
Start Time: 8:57 AM
Ya Ni Tseng
Natalie Gulbis
Start Time: 9:05 AM
Angela Stanford
Louise Friberg
Start Time: 9:13 AM
Ji Young Oh
Brittany Lincicome
Start Time: 9:21 AM
Leta Lindley
Seon Hwa Lee
Start Time: 9:29 AM
Brittany Lang
Inbee Park
Or maybe those going off the front in the early afternoon?
Start Time: 12:00 PM
Paula Creamer
Pat Hurst
Start Time: 12:08 PM
Cristie Kerr
Juli Inkster
Start Time: 12:16 PM
Momoko Ueda
Karrie Webb
Start Time: 12:24 PM
Jane Park
Morgan Pressel
Start Time: 12:32 PM
Nicole Castrale
Na Yeon Choi
Start Time: 12:40 PM
Jee Young Lee
Michele Redman
But what about those going off the back opposite them?
Start Time: 12:00 PM
Sun Young Yoo
Rachel Hetherington
Start Time: 12:08 PM
Wendy Ward
Christina Kim
Start Time: 12:16 PM
Young Kim
Candie Kung
Start Time: 12:24 PM
Eun-Hee Ji
Katherine Hull
Start Time: 12:32 PM
Suzann Pettersen
Grace Park
Start Time: 12:40 PM
Helen Alfredsson
Laura Diaz
Or those going off the front in the late morning:
Start Time: 8:49 AM
Song-Hee Kim
Silvia Cavalleri
Start Time: 8:57 AM
Mi Hyun Kim
In-Kyung Kim
Start Time: 9:05 AM
Stacy Prammanasudh
Liselotte Neumann
Start Time: 9:13 AM
Meaghan Francella
Angela Park
Start Time: 9:21 AM
Hee-Won Han
Se Ri Pak
Start Time: 9:29 AM
Carin Koch
Sophie Gustafson
Wow--amazing stuff! Here's hoping I have time to combine 2007's final-round not-quite-live-blogging and 2008's final-round overview and contextualization in 2009.
[Update 1 (6:28 am): Definitely give the Seoul Sisters.com KNC thread a look-see this week. The gang is going all out and Tim Maitland, whose work at the HSBC I so admired, is giving inside scoops galore!]
[Update 2 (6:52 am): Given how fired up Momoko Ueda is over Japan's huge victory in the World Baseball Classic, I wonder if we'll be seeing something special this week from the Japanese contingent!]
[Update 3 (12:16 pm): Here's Brent Kelley's preview.]
[Update 4 (1:08 pm): Here's Jay Busbee's case for Karrie Webb as KNC contender.]
[Update 5 (4/2/09, 6:02 am): Nice little piece by Sean Martin n 5 things to watch at the KNC.]
[Update 6 (5:16 pm): Here's Bill Jempty's preview.]
[Update 7 (4/3/09, 12:01 am): Whoops, missed Ryan Ballengee's preview.]
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Ya Ni Tseng Doing What?
Should this John Strege post be filed under "truth is stranger than fiction" or "too weird to be true"? Look, I can understand being angry at a politician, and I can understand trying to use your celebrity status to influence politics, but threatening to become a citizen of another country just because the current administration won't follow your suggestion that Taiwan ought to host an LPGA event? That sounds pretty extreme to me. Why not first try to find another Taiwanese politician or party that will back you up?
Now that Michelle Wie is reportedly leaving William Morris and joining Tseng with IMG, maybe the two rivals can team up and lobby for their management agency together the next time they're in Taiwan. Or maybe they can really set a new standard and seek citizenship in a corporation rather than a nation.
[Update 1 (11:24 am): Strege just blogged on another story, on Christina Kim's lawsuit against a Korean newspaper, that Tseng should be looking at and thinking about very carefully.]
[Update 2 (11:32 am): Thanks to Bill Jempty for pointing me to this thoughtful and funny post by Brian, which lead me to this one by Kushibo.]
[Update 3 (1:34 pm): Got the link from Shackelford--Wie has signed with IMG. Funny that the Bloomberg piece doesn't mention Tseng as another IMG golfer. Not really! She's not on Tiger's or Annika's level--but then, neither is Wie.]
[Update 4 (3/15/09, 12:14 am): Here's an update on the Tseng story.]
[Update 5 (3/19/09, 10:14 am): Here's the IMG press release on Wie.]
Now that Michelle Wie is reportedly leaving William Morris and joining Tseng with IMG, maybe the two rivals can team up and lobby for their management agency together the next time they're in Taiwan. Or maybe they can really set a new standard and seek citizenship in a corporation rather than a nation.
[Update 1 (11:24 am): Strege just blogged on another story, on Christina Kim's lawsuit against a Korean newspaper, that Tseng should be looking at and thinking about very carefully.]
[Update 2 (11:32 am): Thanks to Bill Jempty for pointing me to this thoughtful and funny post by Brian, which lead me to this one by Kushibo.]
[Update 3 (1:34 pm): Got the link from Shackelford--Wie has signed with IMG. Funny that the Bloomberg piece doesn't mention Tseng as another IMG golfer. Not really! She's not on Tiger's or Annika's level--but then, neither is Wie.]
[Update 4 (3/15/09, 12:14 am): Here's an update on the Tseng story.]
[Update 5 (3/19/09, 10:14 am): Here's the IMG press release on Wie.]
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