By Jason Lim
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On the surface, he turned out to be correct. Jeongeun Lee6 won the U.S. Open. Ironically, there is a 6 appended to her last name to differentiate her from other Lees on the tour. All this led to Haney proclaiming he was just playing the odds when he said a Korean "Lee" would win the tournament.
But as with everything, it's the context that counts. He predicted that a Lee would win after declaring, "I couldn't name you, like, six players on the LPGA Tour." It's pretty clear he was being dismissive of the women's tour and generalizing the whole Korean player contingent into a faceless group of indistinguishable and undistinguished players. Just because he later paid kudos to the successes that the Korean lady golfers have accomplished doesn't absolve him from not respecting these players as individuals.
Even worse, blaming Korean players for being so nondescript as to be forgettable doesn't mean they are actually nondescript; it only means that Haney views them as interchangeable and unremarkable pieces of "others." And it's this "othering" that's really what's offensive about what he said.
This tempest in a teacup with Haney, however, serves to reveal a deeper, underlying issue with LPGA's identity. Dan O'Neill, a longtime golf writer and analyst, published, "…the issue here is strictly business, more specifically American business… the Nielsen TV ratings for the U.S. Women's Open have been tunneling for more than a decade. The show got a one-off boost in 2014, when Michelle Wie won at Pinehurst. Since then, viewership has continued to be less than a third of what it was in '06, when Annika Sorenstam won her third Women's Open and 10th major championship. For all the delightful diversity, and all the ball-striking dynamics, the LPGA is still a business, a product based in a United States that houses 20 of its 33 events. This is not simply about culture, or caliber of play. This is about marketing, attracting sponsors, driving ratings, selling advertising, etc."
In other words, the current makeup of the LPGA tour and the overwhelming success of Asian players in the last decade have hurt the sport's popularity, and consequently the revenues, in the U.S. The reason, O'Neill suggests, is that "The women's game lacks identity. The women's game needs a beacon, a Wie who wins a lot more often, a Lorena Ochoa, an Annika Sorenstam … or a Se Ri Pak."
O'Neill's argument is not without merit, especially if you subscribe to his assumption that LPGA is essentially an entertainment business that needs recognizable and popular stars to succeed. My issue with his argument is that he seems to put the blame squarely on the backs of the players for not being popular enough. The last time I checked, these were golf players who should be judged by how well they do in golf tournaments. Popularity is often a natural outcome of a player's success in competition, but not necessarily an inevitable one.
This is an extension to the more insidious argument that says that women in sports have to sell sex appeal in order to be popular. Jan Stephenson, an Australian golf legend, said in 2010, "The women are not the best players ― the men are. The women are not the best athletes ― the men are. Whether we like it or not, we have to promote sex, because sex sells. I think you have to shock… this is entertainment, and female entertainers have an obligation to look as great as they possibly can."
The double standard is glaring. Funny how I don't hear that male golfers have to be sexy and provocative to be popular athletes. I am not saying that good looks don't help female golfers get noticed. But putting the onus on female golfers to have to look "sexy" in order to help drive more eyeballs to the sport is insulting to their sacrifices and achievements.
There's so much more to what catches the public's eye when it comes to popularity. There is no cut-and-dry formula, but it's all about the power of individual stories that people can relate to. Michelle Wie is still one of the most recognized names in LPGA without having won many tournaments lately. However, she is known because her story happened to break onto the world when she was only 13 and grabbed the people's imagination.
The best a golfer can do is win tournaments against the best competition. Blaming a winning player for being of a certain ethnicity and not sexy enough is the worst kind of stereotyping.
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
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