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No reason to kick the tour
AUSTIN, Texas -- Last Thursday the headline in USA Today read, "Women's soccer roars past LPGA." By high noon that same day, the players of the LPGA wanted to roar in the ear of the article's author. In her weekly column (an online version can be found here), Christine Brennan decided to compare the fledgling, two-week-old WUSA soccer league with the women's professional golf tour, which has been around for more than half a century. Brennan tried to make a case that the LPGA has a recognition problem, while the WUSA is on the rise with heroes who little girls know on a first-name basis. She believes that despite the recent success of the likes of Karrie Webb and Annika Sorenstam, nobody watches the LPGA Tour and nobody knows who the players are.
The LPGA begs to differ. While the tour may not get lengthy highlight treatment on SportsCenter or earn front-page coverage in major newspapers, its players think interest in the women's game is at all-time high. Meg Mallon says that comparing women's professional soccer to golf isn't fair -- for either sport. "To say that nobody cares about women's golf is far from the truth," Mallon said. "We have a great following and our tour keeps getting bigger and better, drawing more and more attention." What really made the hair on Mallon's and other players' necks stand up was that Brennan decided to pit the WUSA against the LPGA. She tried to portray the entities as enemies, which isn't the case. In fact, Mallon and Beth Daniel, who are close friends with single-named soccer stars Mia (Hamm) and Brandi (Chastain), attended the opening WUSA game in Washington, D.C., and personally delivered a good luck letter from LPGA commissioner Ty Votaw. "We can't afford to be divided," said Mallon, who attempted a penalty kick at halftime of the game. "There aren't enough women's sports leagues to have rivals. The men have 20 sports to chose from while women only have four professional leagues. And they all need to stick together." What made Brennan's pseudo-ambush even more puzzling is that, during her career, she has been a huge champion for women's sports. Lorie Kane recently saw Brennan interviewed on Bob Costas' HBO show, preaching that female athletes shouldn't expose their bodies to push a product. Kane initially was impressed with Brennan, but after having read last week's article she lost that respect. "I was like, This couldn't be the same woman that I saw on that program," Kane said. "One minute she is saying that women shouldn't be posing half-clad and then she is bashing the oldest women's sports organization around. I thought she was on our team, but I guess not." In her USA Today piece, Brennan noted that ESPN made two unfavorable programming decisions while Sorenstam was rewriting the history books. During Sorenstam's record-setting round of 59 at the Standard Register Ping, the network opted to show a quarterfinal tennis match rather than staying with Sorenstam's round; a month later, while Sorenstam was winning her fourth straight tournament at the Office Depot, the Worldwide Leader in Sports missed the event's final-round playoff in favor of horse-racing coverage. "Unfortunately we don't have any control of what ESPN decides to do," said Rosie Jones. "We would have loved for them to stay on the air, but it was their decision to show tennis and not Annika shooting 59." One of the reasons Brennan was so gung ho about the future of the WUSA was because the league's TV audience was the same as that of the LPGA. Actually, that fact is a little misleading. The first two weeks of soccer did receive a 0.4 Nielsen rating -- the same as the LPGA average over the first quarter of 2001. But Brennan might have mentioned that during the final round of the Standard Register Ping, Sorenstam and the LPGA earned a 0.6 rating (pretty impressive considering the event was up against the opening weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament). Also, it should be noted that last year the LPGA averaged a 0.6, representing about 600,000 homes, for the season. Let's see if the WUSA maintains its 0.4 or if takes an XFL-type plunge. Brennan tried to make the point that low-salaried soccer players are doing everything in their power to promote their league -- hinting that the rich, spoiled brats of the LPGA aren't doing likewise. "[Soccer players] must work harder than most pro female athletes, including LPGA stars, many of whom are multimillionaires living a very happy if basically anonymous life," Brennan wrote. "And so they grab cell phones and begin talking to a radio station without knowing what station it is. They are available to any reporter at almost any time. And after every game, they take their Sharpies and march to the stands to sign autographs, hundreds of autographs." Hey, Christine, did you get hit in the head with an errant corner kick? The women of the LPGA invented fan-friendly promotions. The players treat the galleries like family. "We are in touch with our fans," Mallon said. "Just like [WUSA players] we will sign autographs until our hands fall off and do interviews until we are hoarse. The soccer players do a great job of doing this, too, but we have always done these things and always will." At the beginning of her column -- which LPGA president Gail Graham enlarged and posted in the locker room at last week's Kathy Ireland Championship -- Brennan goes through a hypothetical skit about a man on the street who doesn't know who Sorenstam is. Well, until last week, had you asked almost any player on the driving range of an LPGA event, none would have known who Brennan was, either. But Kane has a solution to that problem. "I think Christine Brennan needs to come and play in an LPGA pro-am," Kane said. "Then she will know what we are all about." Tom Hanson, a regular contributor to Sports Illustrated's Golf Plus section,
is a longtime caddie on the LPGA Tour. Click here
to send him a question or comment.
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