Cup Runneth Over for LPGA Tour in ’98

The optimism rings loud and clear in Jim Ritts’ voice.

Despite a sometimes bumpy but rather successful 1997, the LPGA Tour commissioner has some very good reasons to anticipate an even stronger showing this year.

This is, after all, a Solheim Cup year.

And, perhaps more importantly, it is not a Ryder Cup year.

Tigermania and the 1997 Ryder Cup media blitz quelled some of the momentum that the LPGA picked up in 1996 behind star players such as Annika Sorenstam of Sweden and Karrie Webb of Australia.

But with the top female golfers from Europe and the U.S. jockeying for spots on the 12-member Solheim Cup teams that will compete against each other in the biennial competition Sept. 18-20 at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio, Ritts hopes some of the spotlight will shift back to his tour and vault it to new heights.

“Our motto this year is to focus on the road to the Solheim Cup,” Ritts said. “Clearly the product that the LPGA Tour offers has never been better. There has never been a time where the depth of talent was as deep or there has been as many recognizable stars on tour. We hope that the Solheim Cup will help draw attention to those facets of the tour.”

Despite the decreased coverage and a few setbacks last year--four sponsors defected and negative publicity surfaced when a national magazine ran an article about lesbianism on the tour--the LPGA Tour continued to grow in 1997.

Four tournaments were added, bringing the total to 43, and the prize money increased $4.1 million to $30.2 million. In the last seven years, prize money on the tour has doubled.

This year, Ritts says, will be the best in history.

Though the number of tournaments has decreased to 42, the purses are up to $32.5 million. A record seven tournaments have purses of more than $1 million including, for the first time, all four major championships: the Nabisco Dinah Shore, the du Maurier Classic, the U.S. Open and the LPGA Championship.

Another plus is that 34 of the 42 events will receive some sort of television coverage.

“The right kinds of things are happening,” Ritts said. “We’ve brought in new sponsors to replace the ones who left and we’ve made enormous strides in the amount of exposure we’re getting. All this bodes well for the long-term growth.”

The recent growth is already being felt throughout the golf world. The National Golf Foundation reports that the number of women golfers has increased from 5.2 million to 5.7 million in the last year.

Girls’ golf has become so popular that the Southern Section--governing body for high school sports in the greater Los Angeles region except for L.A. City schools--overwhelmingly passed a motion to sanction girls golf as a competitive offering.

Previously, girls had to compete against boys if they wanted to play at the high school level.

“I look back, when I played, I had only boys to play with,” said Terry-Jo Myers, defending champion of the Los Angeles Women’s Championship. “I was just a nerd to play this game of golf. Now it’s the cool thing to do.”

Anne Lee, a junior at Notre Dame High in Sherman Oaks who is ranked 28th in the Titleist-Golfweek girls national amateur rankings, said the LPGA Tour has been an inspiration for her since she attended the defunct Inamori Classic in Poway in 1992.

“I didn’t even know the LPGA was big until then,” Lee said. ‘I always thought women golfers didn’t have enough power to play professionally. I realized then that there were many opportunities in golf. [Making the LPGA Tour] has become a main goal for me.”

There are, however, still some areas of the tour that need improvement.

Twice in the last three years there has been controversy about lesbianism on the tour--in 1995 when television commentator Ben Wright was fired for comments about the subject and again last year when a magazine story about the Nabisco Dinah Shore tournament paid more attention to the number of gay women present than to the competition on the fairways.

Ritts has deftly handled these problems by continuing to focus on on-course achievements and pointing out that these days nobody really cares about sexual preferences of the famous. The tour escaped virtually unscathed.

But there is one area where many feel the LPGA is still in the stone age: money.

Though the purses are at an all-time high for the LPGA, they pale in comparison to those of the male counterparts on the PGA Tour. The men will play 45 tournaments for $95.8 million this year, an average purse of $1.36 million more than the LPGA tournaments.

None of the men’s purses are smaller than $1 million.

Webb in 1996 and Sorenstam in 1997 are the only LPGA players to earn more than $1 million in a season. Since 1988, the PGA Tour has has at least one million-dollar winner every year except 1991. There were 15 PGA players earning more than $1 million in 1998.

“Obviously, money’s not everything,” said Helen Alfredsson, who won $90,000 in the Office Depot tournament in West Palm Beach, Fla, the LPGA’s last event, the same week Jesper Parnevik won $450,000 for winning the PGA Tour’s Phoenix Open.

“But we also feel that money is a form of respect and recognition. You see the guys winning so much more money than we do. We do the same thing, have the same expenses. It’s not that I’m jealous of the guys, but it’s a matter of respect.”

b While Ritts acknowledges the discrepancies in the purses, he refuses to enter into what he feels is an unwinnable competition with the PGA Tour for prize money.

“I don’t want to get caught up in that comparison,” Ritts said. “I look at our growth versus ourselves. We don’t have the $100 million TV contracts like they do. Our tour is growing, that’s what I look at. Will it grow to be as big as the PGA Tour? No it will never be.”

Ritts’ main concern for this year is to keep increasing the exposure of the LPGA Tour and make sure it comes to a head at the Solheim Cup in September.

“When the Ryder Cup was played at Muirfield in 1987, it was a breakthrough for that event,” Ritts said. “The media attention around the Cup went into a frenzy that year. We’re hoping for the same sort of reaction for the Solheim Cup this year.”