On April 25, 2023, Golf Channel published an article by Patricia Duffy entitled, “The Case (and calls) for an improved partnership between the PGA Tour and LPGA” in which Ms. Duffy states that disparities exist between the PGA Tour and LPGA Tour at a growing rate despite putting out a product that isn’t “that different.”  “What the women are missing,” writes Duffy, “is increased support from corporate sponsors, fans and their male counterparts.”  

Duffy maintains that closing the disparity gap between the men’s and women’s tours is necessary to “grow the game” across all genders.  These disparities include tournament purse size, tournament benefits afforded to the players (consistent player only locker rooms, consistent use of loaner vehicles and meal/travel assistance) and visible support from male counterparts who don’t make enough “cameo appearances” at LPGA or provide the LPGA players “shoutouts on social media” like NBA players do for their WNBA counterparts.

Duffy’s premise is flawed. Likewise, her suggestion that providing better benefits to current LPGA Tour players will “grow the game” confusingly conflates two very separate and distinct challenges facing the LPGA Tour, namely “tour player experience” and “the LPGA Tour fan experience” as a mechanism for “growing the game.”

The success of the LPGA Tour does not lag the PGA Tour because of the lack of support from the PGA.  It lags the PGA Tour because the LPGA produces a different product than the PGA and has never seen the advent of a star that transcends the game of golf like Tiger Woods. Until it does, the LPGA will always lag the PGA in sponsorships, purse sizes and as an instrument of influence in the golf world, regardless of whether the PGA Tour supports their female counterparts or not.

Women’s tennis, in contrast, garners its own commercial success and often achieves higher television rating that the men because it cultivates stars who transcend the game like Serina Williams. To date, the LPGA Tour has not. Yes, Jessica and Nelly Korda, Inbee Park, Lydia Ko, Brook Henderson and Ariya Jutanangarn, to name a few, are phenomenal at their craft and world class athletes who statistically putt circles around their male counterparts. But ask anyone outside the sport who these women are and you will get blank stares. Serina Williams or Tiger Woods on the other hand are household names different because their absolute dominance put them on television, drove people, attention and sponsors to their respective sports and instrumentally changed the level of performance demanded of their competitors to this day.

Indeed, the advent of Tiger Woods and his dominance as an athlete preceded bigger pay days, sponsorships and player perks on the PGA Tour. Not the reverse. That dominance is now the bar of the PGA Tour product that drives the PGA Tour’s commercial success, leading to discussions about whether the athlete has become too dominant for even the longest and most challenging venues. Those discussions are not happening on the LPGA Tour because the LPGA Tour has not produced a player like Serena Williams or Tiger Woods who is so dominant in their game and so transcendent of their sport that commercial success inherently follows. Until they do the expectation will always be moderate growth which cannot be cured, long-term, by support and/or endorsements from the PGA Tour.

There simply is no empirical data to suggest that more people will be attracted to LPGA Tour events if their male counterparts on the PGA Tour make cameo appearances at LPGA events nor is there data to suggest that the same would “grow the game” or increase LPGA sponsorships. To the contrary, historical efforts to produce joint events between the tours, have not garnered lasting success for the LPGA Tour and has left LPGA Tour players with the same concerns about travel assistance, loaner cars and locker rooms. Attempts by LPGA Tour members to make a 36-hole cut on the men’s tour or combined events like the forty-year JC Penny Classic combined event, while perhaps entertaining in the moment, have not cured the LPGA Tour ills complained of by Ms. Duffy, nor will the Grant Thornton combined event scheduled for this December increase LGPA Tour sponsorships or television traffic to LPGA Tour events. Even further, the event will do little to “grow the game” by attracting aspiring young women to the sport of golf as Ms. Duffy suggests.

Too often the noble aspiration “growing the game” among more diverse socio-economic population has become the moral high ground that both tours nauseatingly use when what they are really talking about growing the game’s revenue, tournament purse size and/or player experience.  When Tiger Woods arrived on scene and began tearing up course and tournament records with dominant and magician-like performances, aspiring kids (and adults for that matter) were not interested in how Tiger arrived at the course or what his locker looked like. Tiger Woods transcendence of the sport, drove record numbers of kids to pick up their own clubs and play their own rounds. Getting clubs in the hands of kids and getting them onto the course where they can chase that feeling of flushing an iron to three feet from the pin “grows the game.”

Accordingly, if “growing the game” is truly the goal, the focus and attention should lie on creation of opportunity for young players to get a club in their hand like the current $18 million initiative between the USGA and the Los Angeles Golf Club to renovate an inner-city golf course or the overarching initiative of programs like the “First Tee.” If the goal, however, is actually closing the gap between PGA Tour and LPGA Tour purse size, which is something quite different, the LPGA Tour needs to look introspectively, rather than to the men’s tour for a long-term solution that includes cultivating star players who dominate their sport.

There is an appetite for a Serena Williams type figure in the world of women’s golf. But currently, although the LPGA Tour includes some incredible athletes playing incredible golf, there is way too much parity among its “stars,” none of whom are dominant and none of whom transcend the game to a level that stimulates interest or guarantees commercial success.  Perhaps this is why a larger television audience tuned into the August National Women’s Amateur than the LPGA Championship– because they know the LPGA Tour’s “Tiger Woods” has not yet arrived.