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Column: LPGA quietly setting a standard for women’s sports

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All anybody appears to speak about is cash on this disruptive 12 months of golf, and the LPGA Tour shouldn’t be unnoticed of the dialog.

Solely that is trigger for celebration, not division.

The expertise pool is as deep because it has been in years. A season that concludes this week on the CME Group Tour Championship already has produced 26 winners in 31 tournaments, 11 of whom gained for the primary time on the LPGA Tour. Winners got here from 14 international locations. People led the way in which for the second straight 12 months with eight titles.

However this week is all about cash, and for good cause.

The winner from the 60-player area at Tiburon Golf Membership in Naples, Florida, will get $2 million, the richest prize ever in ladies’s golf.

That’s greater than the entire prize fund of 15 tournaments on the LPGA Tour schedule, and it’s practically 10 instances as a lot as the very best base wage within the WNBA.

Not less than six gamers are assured of going over $2 million for the 12 months, which is twice as many because the earlier report set in 2019 and 2014. Hye-Jin Choi, an LPGA rookie from South Korea, already has topped $2 million with out successful a event.

The LPGA has by no means had greater than 17 gamers make greater than $1 million in a single season, a report established in 2017. This 12 months, no less than 24 gamers will make seven figures.

All of the extra outstanding is that it comes two years after the LPGA Tour made it via the COVID-19 pandemic — a credit score to former Commissioner Mike Whan for increase the reserves — and has come out stronger than ever.

Commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan on Friday will announce a 2023 schedule that can push the entire prize cash to greater than $100 million for the primary time.

The rise is incremental — the entire purse was a report $93.5 million this 12 months for 32 tournaments — and comes primarily from the most important occasions.

However it’s a benchmark quantity.

“And the very fact the LPGA has performed all of it by itself is much more outstanding,” mentioned Dottie Pepper, who retired from the LPGA Tour with 17 wins and two majors and now works as a CBS golf analyst. Her rookie season was 1988, when the entire prize fund for the 12 months was slightly below $10 million. That’s what the U.S. Ladies’s Open purse was this 12 months.

Pepper nonetheless remembers when the Centel Basic started in 1990 as the primary $1 million purse for an everyday LPGA Tour occasion. “Six digits for a payout obtained your consideration,” she mentioned.

And there have been leaner instances.

“I keep in mind in 1988 we had the Larger Washington Open per week after the U.S. Open, which was in Baltimore,” she mentioned. “On Friday afternoon of the Open, there was a notice within the locker room that the cash was put in escrow as a result of they weren’t positive if the event was going to occur. They couldn’t say if they might have a handbag.”

She headed house. The prize cash went from $300,000 to $225,000, with the winner’s share for Ayako Okamoto at a whopping $33,750.

Nothing ever comes simply for the LPGA, and it’s been that approach for the reason that largest and most profitable ladies’s sports activities league started in 1950. The league has performed it alone, with none exterior assist from the lads’s league.

The late Mickey Wright, who carried ladies’s golf with a sport thought of the best in LPGA historical past, as soon as spoke about gamers successfully working the whole tour, from establishing the programs to administering the foundations.

One of many founders, the late Marilyn Smith, instructed of going to a boxing match with Shirley Spork in a single metropolis, the place they have been to climb into the ring between rounds and converse to the gang.

“Properly, this one fellow was simply pulverizing the opposite fellow, and I obtained woozy due to the blood and every part,” Smith mentioned. “Shirley didn’t get woozy. She obtained proper via the ropes and obtained the microphone and mentioned, ‘Come out and watch the LPGA play within the U.S. Open.’”

Sure, they’ve come a good distance.

The momentum is actual and greatest measured by cash. The majors have company sponsorship that added practically $15 million to the pot this 12 months.

Cognizant obtained concerned in golf as a sponsor on the President Cup and for ladies’s golf, taking up the Founders Cup and doubling the purse to $3 million. CME has been on the forefront of elevating purses because the title sponsor for the season-ending Tour Championship and this 12 months raised the purse to $7 million. Final place will get $40,000.

Nobody has cashed in like Minjee Lee of Australia, who gained the U.S. Ladies’s Open and the Cognizant Founders Cup. Her $3,759,835 is already an LPGA report, with $2 million up for grabs this week.

Lee additionally gained the Aon Threat-Reward Problem, a bonus program for a way gamers fare on par 5s throughout the season, price a further $1 million.

Nonetheless to be decided is whether or not Saudi-funded LIV Golf makes a play. Greg Norman has mentioned the LPGA was on the “forefront of my thoughts.” Marcoux Samaan mentioned her fundamental concern was selling ladies’s golf and there could be plenty of components to think about.

For now, as at all times, the LPGA is doing simply tremendous by itself.

AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports




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