Stina Stenberg Puts A Sexist Loudmouth In His Place

In the recently released August edition of Golf Digest magazine columnist Stina Stenberg takes on this question in hilariously brutal fashion:

Q: My buddy says he could beat most LPGA Tour players on a course that's longer than 7,000 yards. He's a 4-handicapper, and he drives the ball more than 300 yards. I say he's full of it. Do you agree?

Here's the best part: Stina's answer. Not only is it direct, but is as subtle as a sledgehammer to someone who clearly deserves it. In the spirit of Fair Usage, I won't repeat her entire answer, but here's enough for you to get her point:

"Your friend is clearly delusional. As a 4-handicapper, he'd get so badly beaten by any of the LPGA's 152 players (even those with non-exempt status) that he'd have a tough time getting back up. Although the LPGA Tour pros play from shorter yardages than PGA Tour players so, they're not exactly teeing it up from the reds. [...] If your friend is willing to make a large wager, I'm sure he wouldn't have any trouble finding out how good LPGA Tour players are from 7,000 yards."

Indeed. Stina Stenberg tells it like it is, and serves the truth with no gravy in this case. A four-handicapper, no matter how far he drives the ball off the tee, would be in a world of hurt against one of the world's top women players.

For one thing, golf is more than getting off the tee, and his advantage would not be as great as he thinks, which Stenberg points out well in her full answer. A typical LPGA player probably drives the ball not only further than a typical club champion, she also can control her ball and put it in position. Saying that a pro is longer and better off the tee would be no stretch of the truth. In short, it would be the simple truth.

Any 4-handicapper should know that short game, putting and scoring ability matter as much or more than being Bam Bam on the teebox, and that at least half of a round's shots are played from 100 yards or closer -- where nearly any amateur in the world would be at an incredible disadvantage to a Tour pro -- any Tour pro, whether or not they are a man or a woman.

"Drive for show, putt for dough." Major advantage: LPGA player.

Case closed.

The question, however, points out a larger issue that really should be addressed. This guy thinks he wouldn't lose, mainly because he's a guy and an LPGA player is, well, a woman. That's just a crock of steaming bull manure and is darned near silly.

Me, I've lost to women in tournaments and even in Nassaus. Straight up. I'm no 4-handiapper yet, but I'm good enough to hold my own in competition, but I am also realistic enough to know that there are plenty of women who are simply better golfers than I can ever hope to be. And the best of the best? They would beat me ten of ten times, no matter how well I played on a given day.

The part that makes me different is that I would never think twice about it, and never have when a woman's beaten me out on the course. There's no shame in losing to someone who's better, no matter who it is. It's the 21st century, right?

Clearly this fellow is thinking with his smaller brain. And it isn't as smart as he thinks it is.

Whither Now, LPGA? Opportunity Missed, For No Good Reason

This weekend the women's circuit had a classic duel no one could see, while the men and the old men occupied the golf spectra.

After my morning round yesterday and a quick beer-nap (one beer and a 30 minute siesta) I flipped around looking for the LPGA. It was nowhere to be seen, not on Golf Channel, none of the major networks, not even on We or Oxygen or any of the Fox and ESPN family of networks. To be completely forthright, I wanted to see if the Wie One had managed to right her ship on Sunday, but I was also curious to see how Lorena Ochoa and Suzann Petterson would handle the remaining holes in their tournament. Anyhow, it was what I went looking for first.

There was a mildly interesting playoff in Champions Tour, then a fairly decent war of attrition on the PGA Tour's New Orleans stop, but the best golf of the day was in Mexico and it was a knockdown, drag-out battle between Lorena Ochoa and Suzann Petterson in the final round of the Corona Classic.

Or so I hear.

Even finding a decent story about this tournament on the Internet was hard to do. In fact, I found endless repititions of this:

Defending champion Lorena Ochoa shot an 8-under 65 to take a 1-stroke lead over South Korea's Na Yeon Choi yesterday in the LPGA Tour's Corona Classic.

The 27 year-old Mexican had a bogey-free round with eight birdies on the Tres Marias course.

Okee dokee. Sounds very nice. Thing is the stories streaming out on Twitter and on the LPGA Facebook page were describing a classic...perhaps the best tournament golf played since last year's men's US Open. And here in America, well, we were in the dark.

Question: if a golf tournament happens, but isn't shown on TV, did it really ever happen at all?

In terms of gaining the attention of the average American sports fan -- the one that advertisers spend billions to reach -- the answer is no. It never did happen. So the Corona Classic goes in the books and for all intents and purposes down the drain unseen and unknown in the largest sporting market the LPGA competes in.

It didn't have to be that way and the solution is so obvious, I cannot fathom why the LPGA brain trust hasn't put it in place by now.

If anyone in the golf press has so little to do that they read these pages, please ask Carolyn Bivens a question for me:

"Has the LPGA ever considered using Internet live streaming tournament coverage?"

Honestly, to me, it seems like a no-brainer. If the LPGA isn't on TV, then they should televise it themselves on the Internet. Surely it was on TV...somewhere. Mexico, surely. Korea probably. The LPGA could have used the video feeds of either of those networks and used a two-person announcing team to describe things in English.

This isn't rocket science. ESPN has been doing it for some time with ESPN360, and there's justin.tv, the renegade feed collection of out-of-market events. In golf, the Masters recently streamed coverage of portions of that tournament through their site.

In my house, I could have actually seen the tournament on my television had there been an Internet feed. Without going all geek on you, the XBOX-360 is as much a media center as a game console, and it meshes in very well with Windows, and both are connected to the Internet. A couple of clicks and I am watching the 'Net on the home theatre. (That's the future of TV, by the way. Like the traditional telephone, traditional broadcast/cable TV will be obsoleted soon, and if it doesn't happen beforehand, Internet2 will finish the job.)

Twitter and Facebook are nice, but actually being able to see a good dual between two great golfers yesterday afternoon would have been even better. At the end of the day, Twitter is an advanced version of the telegraph sending telegrams widely to anyone interested, and Facebook is essentially the equivilent of a whiteboard on the door of a student's college dorm room. Neither compare to the immediacy of TV when it comes to sporting events and both were poor substitutes for a video stream, at the very least.

If the LPGA is going to survive, it is going to have to be creative and nimble, and use every single tool it can grab. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, blogs, and all of the in vogue social social media, but also using the tools that interface the Internet and the old guard of media. Streaming broadcasts is the most obvious, and the most glaringly absent one in the LPGA toolbox. If I can watch the Carolina Hurricanes hockey club play a regular season game while I am in Paraguay, and have two unique sources for the video feed, then the LPGA should be able to create a single stream source for its tournaments.

The LPGA Was Wrong Not To Suspend Play In Yesterday's Kraft-Nabisco

A strong desert wind tore through the Kraft-Nabisco Championship yesterday, changing the balance of the competition and moving a new set of leaders to the top of the board in the competition. Kristy McPherson and Christina Kim teed off well before the wind started howling in the Coachella Valley, and both moved into the lead at 6-under 138 at the halfway point of the first LPGA major of 2009. Both played earlier on Friday when winds were relatively calmer, giving the two good scoring opportunities that were not to be found later the same day.

In the afternoon games, winds picked up to a steady 25-30 miles per hour with strong gusts that made Lorena Ochoa lose their balance, sent a palm frond into Angela Stanford's ankle and infuriated Ji Young Oh by blowing her ball some 30 feet off the 18th green and into a lake, leading to a one-stroke penalty.

After the incident, a frustrated Oh complained to an official that the course was unfair and unplayable, and was told to play on.

I believe that Ji Young was correct and that play went on far longer than it should.

You could say, on the other hand, that everyone plays the same golf course, but that's not necessarily so. Winds pick up or die down through the course of a given day and it really had gotten to the point where it was an unplayable condition. That's how today's leaders came to the top of the leaderboard, and when a golfer has a ball land well on the green only to watch it blown into a hazard, that's beyond the rub of the green, that's simply an unplayable condition.

Later, in a press conference, Doug Brecht, the LPGA's VP of Rules and Competition, said "we were looking for was an exorbitant amount of movement of balls on the green due to wind situations. We did have some. At last count, it was somewhere between five and 10 balls that actually had some movement that was definitely attributable to the wind."

"[F]rom what I saw, the 18th green, which again was giving us the most difficulty, remained in a playable condition throughout the day," he added.

Ji Young Oh would no doubt disagree. Perhaps Brecht missed her misfortune. Or perhaps he simply overlooked it. "In our opinion, the golf course played very, very difficult, very tough, but it was still playable. That's why we made the decision never to suspend play today," Brecht said.

When asked about the wind creating danger to spectators, fans and ostensibly players, Brecht said "We had an occasional limb blow out of a tree. We didn't see a large amount of palm fronds or anything like that. We had no reports of that. And we were stationed, three officials on the front (nine) and three officials on the back (nine), spread out over the entire golf course. If that would have happened, that definitely would have weighed in our decision and would have actually changed our decision."

Apparently, Brecht and his team missed the palm frond that flew from a tree and into Angela Stanford's ankle.

In my opinion, the LPGA blew it here. The tournament is being covered by ESPN, giving the struggling Tour much-needed exposure, but this is not the sort of coverage that they need. These are the best women players in the world, and they are masterful golfers. Unfortunately, by choosing to continue playing yesterday, the LPGA let them look worse than Sunday hackers, because no one -- not even the best -- can golf in conditions like that.

The Ladies At The Kraft-Nabisco Might Need Radar Detectors On The Greens

If you're a typical golfer, you've no doubt seen some fast greens in your time. In fact, some courses may even have a reputation for them. Faster greens put more pressure on your game because they reduce the margin for error, magnify breaks and can make things tougher all around for even the shortest of putts. Once those challenges get inside your head, look out...after all, too much thinking is a golfer's worst enemy. In championship golf, not having every bit of confidence over putts can make the difference between winning and losing, or even playing on the weekend. And that's what the LPGA players will be seeing this weekend at the Kraft-Nabisco championship that tees off today:

"The greens were rolling about 12 on the stimpmeter early in the week (a measure of how far a ball rolls out a notch in a stick on a flat surface) and someone even tossed out the possibility of the greens reaching 13 by the end of the week."

How fast is a twelve? As a recreational golfer, it's unlikely you've ever had to play greens that glassy. Here's a chart from the Turf Management school at Michigan State University to give you an idea of what a typical non-pro sees on their home course:

Speeds for Regular Membership Play (measured by Stimpmeter)
8'6" Fast
7'6" Medium-Fast
6'6" Medium
5'6" Medium-Slow
4'6" Slow

Speeds for Tournament Play
10'6" Fast
9'6" Medium-Fast
8'6" Medium
7'6" Medium-Slow
6'6" Slow

The main reason a superintendent doesn't keep greens at your club that quick are simple: many climates won't support it long-term in the summer. On top of that achieving fast greens on a daily basis requires more maintenance. Due to labor, material and equipment costs that makes it prohibitively expensive, and if anything is missed, or things go wrong the grass on the greens will die very quickly. Again, from Michigan State, here's a look into what is necessary:

Fast greens must be mowed more frequently. They must be verticut more frequently. They must be topdressed more frequently. Fertilization must be on a light and frequent basis. Watering must be done more carefully. Lower mowing heights needed to achieve fast greens also place the turfgrass plant under more stress. A reduced rooting depth can be expected under lower mowing heights. The shorter roots require more frequent irrigation and syringing during the summer to sustain the turfgrass plant. Shorter roots also reduce the grass plant's ability to recover from insect and disease attack. An increase in insecticide and fungicide use may be needed.

And if you're the super or the head pro, you can expect your higher handicap golfers to howl about how "unfair" the greens are. For example, on "Home" -- the 17th hole at Eagle Ridge, where I live, the green is a slope from left to right as you face it on the fairway, and Tom Kite and Bob Cupp, our course's designers, saw fit to put a false side along the right edge of the narrow green, with a 20-foot dropoff to a creek below that. Miss it right, you are dead, and in the water. A draw is a necessity, fades or slices are punished severely. I've seen dozens of golfers hit the green from the fairway only to watch the ball trickle off and roll all the way down into the gully. In fact, it is cheap entertainment to sit on our back deck and watch this happen over and over during golf season. And we've seen some incredible temper tantrums and flying clubs as a result. Can you imagine a green like that cut at tournament speed?

Pictured: Eagle Ridge's 17 Green looking back up the fairway. You can't see the drop off from the right side, but it looms over the top of the green in this picture. I call it "The Valley of Sin." Photo by Charles Boyer.

Michelle Wie Needs To Show Us Something This Week

As it stands now, Michelle Wie's career more closely resembles Ty Tryon's than Tiger Woods.

Tryon, you might recall, was the youngest golfer to ever make it through PGA Q-School at the age of 17. He then joined the Tour, was given million-a-year endorsement deals with Callaway Golf and Target, but he never lived up to his hype as the Next Big Thing. These days, Tryon can be found playing the mini-tours, and he has yet to find his mojo and live up to the expectations he had eight years ago.

Michelle Wie, on the other hand, has never won a 72-hole tournament at any level, anywhere. Her biggest win to date came in 2002 in the Women's Division of the Hawai'i State Open, a three round affair where she won over Cindy Rarick. With all due respect to Ms. Rarick, that's not a win over Lorena Ochoa or Christie Kerr.

Somehow, however, Wie is the Next Great Hope of the LPGA. As Dan Bickley wrote in the Arizona Sun on March 27th, the LPGA's idea of its future seems to hinge on the future of their young but extremely under-accomplished star:

[A]s the 2009 golf season gets rolling, this much remains true: Wie is the tour's best hope for relevancy. And she may be more important to the future of the LPGA than Woods is for the men's game.

"For sure, it is a new beginning," Wie said. "I'm really excited for this summer to come, this spring and summer. I'm just very excited."

Wie is still a spectacle. That hasn't changed, either. Despite her early tee time on Friday, her gallery bulged to around 500 people in the second round of the J Golf Phonoenix LPGA National. She was the only one drawing a serious crowd, and the only one with a Phoenix police officer escorting her group down the fairway.

The simple question is: why? After all, the LPGA has Paula Creamer, Natalie Gulbis, Christie Kerr, an entire contingent of incredibly talented international players such as Jeong Jang, and others. But it's Wie or bust, or so it seems.

Wie was a young phenom, no doubt, but she never has backed up her considerable golf skills with wins where they count the most: the LPGA, the USGA, or even the Futures Tour. And as any fan of Tiger Woods will tell you, the only thing that really counts in tournament golf are wins. And the only thing that make any professional golfer great are wins in major tournaments.

Ask Rory Macelroy, who has won on the European Tour at the tender age of 18. He too is considered a phenomenon, and is Europe's best hope for its next great golfer. Thing is, Rory has hoisted a trophy, and a has a win on the big stage to his name. While his C.V. is far from distinguished at this stage, since Macelroy has yet to prove he can contend and even win a major, he has proven that at least some of the hyperbole that surrounded him as a youngster was on the mark. Wie, on the other hand, has yet to live up to hers -- and questions still remain if she ever will.

As the LPGA's first major of the year prepares to tee off tomorrow, it will be well worth watching Michelle Wie and observing how she plays. If she is to truly fulfill the LPGA's hope of having its own superstar a la Tiger, she will need to not only make the cut but also show that she can compete in the upper echelons of the women's game. If she doesn't, she'll continue to resemble Ty Tryon, pressure will continue to mount upon her, and the LPGA may soon be searching for someone else to raise its profile.

Hopefully for Wie, good things will happen soon, because the window of opportunity won't last forever.

image: Keith Allison, on Flickr