Between a Rock and a Sand Trap

When the Ladies Professional Golf Association announced in August that it would suspend players unable to speak passable English by the end of 2009, the reaction from op-ed pages, athletes, and fans was overwhelmingly one of perplexity and outrage. “What if you have a person who genuinely struggles with learning a new language [or has] a learning disability?” questioned three-time PGA championship winner Padraig Harrington. “You don’t have to speak English to play golf,” said U.S. Open winner and Spanish speaker Angel Cabrera.

In fact, almost nobody was happy with the rule—not the large South Korean contingent who claimed they were being discriminated against because of their frequent wins; not the number one women’s golfer in the world, a Mexican who despite speaking fluent English called the rule “a little drastic”; not the numerous socially conscious citizens across the country who blogged about the rule’s unfairness for foreign players and questioned why the rule only applied to female golfers. Their perplexity is understandable. As reported by the press, the rule seems wrong on a fundamental moral level, an example of cultural imperialism through the imposition of our own lingual standards on others.

There’s a problem with all of this high-handed indignation, however: Though it may be right, it’s beside the point. It’s fair to assume that a future of Western golf hegemony was not on LPGA commissioner Carolyn Bivens’ mind when she was developing the English-only regulation. The unfortunate fact is that the LPGA—like all professional sports—is a business.

And a major way LPGA athletes make money is through pro-am tournaments. A player is teamed up to play a game with a corporate partner, the goal being that after a couple of putts, funny anecdotes, and friendly slaps on the back, sponsors will be buttered up enough to donate. The system requires mutual understanding on both sides. Unfortunately, a nice, shy Korean-speaker with an interpreter isn’t the ideal candidate for this kind of buddy-buddy fundraising. Nor will she rack up viewers in interviews on the major television networks, another large source of sponsorship. From a strictly business perspective, the English-only rule makes a lot of sense.

Relying on sources like pro-am tournaments as a source of funds so heavily that they determine tour policy may seem like selling out, but the devil has been at the door for women’s sports for a long time. Female professional athletes traditionally have fewer fans and far less media coverage than their male counterparts; according to the Women’s Sports Foundation, women-only sports articles account for only 3.5 percent of all sports stories, and 94 percent of local television news sports coverage goes to men. The last thing the LPGA wants is to end up like the short-lived Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA), a female alternative to the popular men’s Major League Soccer. Despite attracting the brightest talents in the sport, from Brandi Chastain to Mia Hamm, WUSA suspended action after only three seasons due to lack of funds. The LPGA is far from that danger, but a gender disparity certainly applies in golf as well. The top women’s player in 2007 earned $2,381,048; the top male player earned $6,473,694.

The English-only rule has had an unintended consequence. Though it was designed to raise money for the sport, media backlash has actually ended up alienating sponsors. This, combined with threatened legal action, was enough to pressure Bivens into rescinding the rule last week. She was quoted as saying that, “after hearing the concerns, we believe there are other ways to achieve our shared objective of supporting and enhancing the business opportunities for every tour player.”

This single-minded focus on business, however, is precisely the problem. It is what led to the English-only rule, and there is no guarantee it won’t result in equally reprehensible policies in the future. There’s no doubt that the rule was misguided. But its source was neither xenophobia toward Asian players, nor a Western superiority complex, as commentators have claimed. It was desperation. The challenge for the LPGA now is to make sure that the green on the course doesn’t play second fiddle to the green in the bank.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House.