LPGA Tour Gets a Strange Taste of Reality

The TV semi-star had the biggest gallery of the day. Such a hush fell over the crowd that you could have heard a remote control drop when Danielle Amiee walked from the ninth green to the 10th tee at the LPGA tournament last week in Williamsburg, Va.

On the nearby putting green, even the players stopped in their tracks and watched. Caddies, of course, studied the woman with the short skirt and the golden shock of hair with a great deal of care, probably a lot more than they ever did reading a green. Many of them had placed bets on how many shots over par she’d be at the turn -- Amiee was seven over -- and that had to be a surprise.

Actually, the biggest surprise was that Amiee was playing at all.

Here you are, at a $2.2-million tournament, the Michelob Ultra Open, being staged at one of the top courses of the year, the Kingsmill Resort & Spa, with Annika Sorenstam shooting for a record sixth victory in a row and the crowd following her is completely dwarfed by a player who got her place in the field by winning a reality show on television.

Amiee, 29, a one-time student at Long Beach State whose specialty was dental hygiene, finally found a tournament she could really sink her teeth into.

She was the winner of a show on the Golf Channel called “Big Break III -- Ladies Only,” which was sort of a “Survivor”-type thing, except they kicked people off a golf course instead of an island.

Amiee, from Newport Beach, actually played a few Futures Tour events, got lucky enough to win the TV reality show and then cashed in her fame for a plane ticket for Williamsburg and the pros.

Meanwhile, the pros took stock of Amiee. Sort of. Grace Park didn’t know who she was. Sorenstam smiled. Rosie Jones shrugged.

And, predictably, Amiee missed the cut, her 79-77 better than only two players who turned in scores for two rounds.

But score it a victory for the Golf Channel, which followed Amiee with a camera and had her wired with a microphone so they could tape a show on her exploits.

How the network convinced Anheuser Busch to give a sponsor’s exemption to somebody who won a TV contest was one of the sharpest moves of this or any other, well, ratings period.

Why stop here, though? The next sponsor’s exemption into an LPGA tournament could be won in a raffle. Or how about whoever has the blondest hair. Or anybody who can answer, true or false, if Commissioner Ty Votaw was once an assistant in the Cleveland Cavaliers’ public relations department? (True.)

Nobody is sure if the Golf Channel made Amiee look bad or if the LPGA looked bad or the sponsor looked bad, or whether it doesn’t matter one bit.

The fact is, sponsor’s exemptions are just what they say they are -- totally subjective and bought and paid for. They’re usually designed as an opportunity for young talent, a payback for a favor, something to attract television viewers or a move to pump up the gallery.

Amiee’s sponsor’s exemption -- she gets another one in two weeks to play at the LPGA Corning Classic -- isn’t even the most controversial. That honor belongs to 15-year-old Michelle Wie, who has accepted a sponsor’s exemption to play at the John Deere Classic on the PGA Tour in July.

While Mark Hensby, the defending champion at the John Deere, says Wie shouldn’t take the place of a PGA Tour pro who could use the money, that’s probably debatable, given the parameters of what a sponsor’s exemption is all about.

And any PGA Tour pro who didn’t get in because Wie was given the exemption could have gotten in on his own by playing better.

Following his logic, Hensby and others who feel as he does should have been just as upset last year when Mark McGwire was offered a sponsor’s exemption into the John Deere, although McGwire ultimately turned it down because he didn’t think his game was good enough.

Besides, Mark Rypien, the former Washington Redskin quarterback, played the Kemper Open one year as a sponsor’s exemption. Alas, his golf game didn’t measure up to his passing game and he missed the cut by a margin roughly the length of a football field.

So if you really look at it without prejudice, Amiee didn’t do anything wrong. She won the sponsor’s exemption fair and square and actually played all right at Kingsmill -- she played the second nine in a total of two-over for her two days in the spotlight.

And, after all, there’s nothing like having a player in your tournament who doesn’t respond to “Now on the tee.” But try something like “Lights, camera, action” and stand back to watch the show.