This Week at TravelGolf.com: July 26, 2005

Blog-o-sphere cranks aside, don't
count out the surging LPGA Tour

Golf blogger Jennifer Mario has been preaching the merits of the LPGA lately, while Chris Baldwin and the notorious Rebel Blogger have been pounding their drums, all but chucking the LPGA out with the trash. Both bloggers toss around the term "minor league" as a way of emphasizing the women's position vis-a-vis the men's tour. They're not alone.

As the skeptics' line goes, players on the LPGA Tour are inferior to the guys on the PGA Tour. My question to them: So what!?

No one - not outgoing LPGA Commissioner Ty Votaw, not incoming Commissioner Carolyn Bivens, not teenage amateur phenom Michelle Wie - has ever made the case that the LPGA is a better tour or that players on the LPGA are the best in the world. Why should they!? It's a different entity entirely. There are more relevant questions to ask. And when you honestly consider the answers, you'll realize that as a marketable commodity the LPGA is sitting quite pretty.

This year the LPGA has seen massive increases in attendance and TV viewership. Some 60,000 fans came out to see the Kraft Nabisco Championship, while 97,500 walked the fairways at the McDonald's LPGA Championship Presented by Coca-Cola, a 30-percent increase from 2004. In a world were a 3-percent downturn is enough to prompt a CEO to swing a mighty ax and move thousands of jobs from America to China, find me a business where a 30-percent uptick is no big deal! More than 130,000 fans attended this year's U.S. Women's Open, a record for a women's event. TV viewership shows similarly remarkable increases, as does traffic at the LPGA's Web site.

So does the LPGA ever have a chance of eclipsing the PGA Tour in terms of popularity? Not in Wie's lifetime - probably not in her first grandchild's lifetime either. That doesn't mean much, though.

Is college football "inferior" to the NFL? Obviously. After all, only a scant few college stars have what it takes to make an NFL roster. Yet no one's counting out college football when it comes to selling tickets and attracting TV viewers. Same goes for NCAA hoops vs. the NBA.

And take tennis - think any top 50 female player could compete against a top male player? No way (and don't even think about bringing up that goofy PR stunt Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs pulled back with Tiger wore diapers and Tim McDonald wore bellbottoms and mudchop sideburns). Yet women's tennis remains a solid business - a niche player perhaps but a lucrative one for athletes, broadcasters, sponsors, manufacturers, venues, publications and on and on. If women's pro tennis weren't a viable enterprise it would wither and die - plenty of inferior women's sports leagues have.

Which brings us back to the LPGA. Here we are, some 55 years since it was founded, and clearly the tour's going strong. Despite one of the scariest promo photos I've ever seen, Bivens can't fail. Her job is to sell the greatest female golfer ever, plus a gaggle of talented upstarts like Cristie Kerr, Paula Creamer, Lorena Ochoa, Morgan Pressel and Wie. If all that stands in her way are a few cranks in the blog-o-sphere (and even a few in the "mainstream" press) who like to sit back and take shots, I wouldn't count out Bivens - or the LPGA - any time soon.

As always, TravelGolf.com welcomes your comments.

Arizona's worst and most beloved
track: Coronado G.C. is both

There's graffiti, weeds, broken concrete and smashed bottles. No, this isn't some inner-city course, it's in ritzy Scottsdale, Ariz. Welcome to Coronado Golf Course, an ugly duckling that runs through a highway and charges $12 a round. While it may be the worst course in Arizona, "people love this place," says local golfer George Phillips. When there was talk of razing it, "you would have thought they were trying to tear down the Sistine Chapel."

Full story | Where (and where not) to golf in Arizona

Fowler's Mill G.C. in Chesterland
not your Dyed-in-the-wool track

The service at Fowler's Mill in Chesterland, Ohio makes you remember how golf was meant to be played. From the bag drop, to the starter, to the servers in the clubhouse, the staff is a well-oiled machine. But stellar customer care is merely a bonus here. Most people come to play a course that was created by the world's most famous golf architect, Pete Dye, and has more than 80 bunkers and enough water to make aquaphobes break out in sweats.

Full story | GolfOhio.com Reader: Golf at Sugarcreek in Lima still lousy

Robert Trent Jones
short course measures up at
northern N.J.'s Minerals Golf Club

Executive courses get a bad rap but every once in a while you run into one like Minerals Golf Club, a 4,610-yarder designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. and tucked away in what qualifies as wilderness in Northern New Jersey. While no one is suggesting the celebrity architect obsessed over this track. But he did enough to keep it interesting for more seasoned golfers playing with novices or kids, or those just looking for a quickie round.

Full story | Interested in being a TravelGolf.com Reader Reviewer?