Game, Not Name, Still the Same

Bear with me. I will start by giving you directions. I’ll tell you later what you are going to see when you get there.

OK, get on Interstate 15. Go north or south, as the case may be, to the Rancho Bernardo Road turnoff. Go east for three miles, staying on course even though the name of the street changes to Espola Road.

Keeping your eye on the left, you’ll know you have arrived at your destination when you see a patch of land that looks like it was imported from the windward side of Oahu. The table out in front is not a roadside stand selling sugar cane, pineapples and macadamia nuts, however.

You will have arrived at StoneRidge Country Club, the site this weekend of a professional golf tournament.

Oh, you say, they’re here three times this year? La Costa and Torrey Pines and now they’re back?

Professional golf is back, but they are not back. They would be the men. They are not back, but who needs them?

This week, the L PGA is making its annual visit to San Diego County. It has, for the last few years, played the back country of North County and managed to come and go without raising much of a stir.

This year’s incarnation is known as the Inamori Classic. It has also been the Red Robin Kyocera Inamori Classic, San Diego Inamori Golf Classic, Kyocera Inamori Golf Classic and, in the beginning, Inamori Classic. This proves a) what goes around comes around and b) men and women alike will adjust their tournament letterhead at the whim of the highest bidder.

In truth, women’s professional golf, while not necessarily in the back country, seems to end up on the back pages and back burners of our sports psyche.

Puzzlingly so.

From a fan’s point of view, that’s not all bad.

As a man walking out onto the course one afternoon this week said: “Hey, it doesn’t look like we’ll need one of those periscopes to see what’s going on.”

That would have been true. The problem, Thursday and Friday at least, was knowing what was going on. You could figure out who was in each threesome if you could read the names on the caddies’ backs, but you had no idea what any of them were doing in terms of scores.

“Where,” one man asked, “is the board with all the scores?”

In the parking lot. Believe it or not.

OK, so this tournament was not being run with quite the sophistication we saw at La Costa and Torrey Pines for the men. However, that has nothing to do with the golfers . . . or the quality of golf.

Consider, for example, that Tom Kite led the PGA Tour in scoring average in 1990 with 70.58 strokes per round. Beth Daniel led the women with an average of 70.54 strokes per round.

Given that the women get a break off the tee in distance, but anyone who has played the game knows that most of the work and strokes come into play at the other end of the fairway. The top women stacked up against the top men all the way down the line in scoring average.

Another thing to ponder is that the women, collectively, are getting better and better. Seven of the top 22 single-season scoring averages for women were recorded in 1990. All but one of the top 30 single-season scoring averages for women have come since 1980. Kite’s 70.58 would have led the PGA only once in the 1980s.

One of the best women golfers of all time is playing at StoneRidge. Her name is Betsy King. She is third all-time in earnings. Her male counterpart, third all-time, is Curtis Strange.

Which one wouldn’t you recognize sitting next to you at a bus stop?

Betsy King has won more money than Fuzzy Zoeller, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf and Arnold Palmer, among many, many others. This is in spite of the fact that women’s purses run about 40% of the men’s.

In terms of wins, which are not influenced by inflation or disparate purse sizes, King has the same number as Johnny Miller, 23, and more than Gary Player, Ray Floyd, Lanny Wadkins, Hale Irwin, Curtis Strange and Tom Kite, among many, many others.

And Betsy King is a kid of 35.

Still, she has been around to see upbeat and downbeat times on the women’s tour. She can, for example, look at this year’s schedule and see that the LPGA has only one tournament in April, leaving a three-week period in the shank of springtime when these athletes will disappear from the landscape.

“I’m just trying to look forward,” she said. “I feel pretty confident about where we’re headed. Things are going to get better.”

Television, to be sure, plays a major role. The men get more exposure and more major network exposure. Sponsors kick in more bucks for the men, hence the larger purses.

“The ratings the men get aren’t high enough to justify the difference between what they get for TV rights and what we get,” King said. “If their ratings were 20 times higher than our’s, maybe they should get 20 times the money. But that’s not the case. It doesn’t make sense.”

The final two rounds at StoneRidge will be on television, if you have the right cable service. A better bet, for a pleasant drive and peaceful stroll, would be to be there in person.

“We play a good brand of golf,” King said. “Better than a lot of people realize.”

See directions above.