LPGA Tour events attract ever-greater sponsorships
Cognizant, Aon share the wealth between men’s and women’s golf tournaments
The 13 women who founded the LPGA Tour would have reason to be proud this week.
It goes beyond the tournament named in their honor, featuring nine of the top 10 players in the women’s world ranking. It’s not just that it will be played at Mountain Ridge, a Donald Ross design in northern New Jersey where one-third of the rounds are played by women.
The prize money is $3 million, the largest of any regular LPGA event, surpassed only by the five majors and the season-ending CME Group Tour Championship.
The real progress is how the Cognizant Founders Cup found new life.
Cognizant, a multinational technology company with headquarters in Teaneck, New Jersey, wanted to promote its brand and discovered through research that golf and its global appeal would be a perfect fit.
So it invested — in men and women. “We went with the notion of investing in world-class male and female athletes,” said Gaurav Chand, the chief marketing officer of Cognizant. “One reason we locked in on golf was that it does have incredible, viable male and female athletes. Honestly, I get this question a lot. Why the LPGA? Why the Founders Cup?
“What we’re trying to do in the technology space is increase diversity, make it a level playing field for all genders, all races, all religions,” he said. “That essentially is what the (LPGA) founders set out to do.”
It joins a slowly growing list of top companies that are providing equal opportunity, and at times equal pay, in golf sponsorship.
Aon built its brand awareness on the jerseys of Manchester United for a decade. Then its president, Eric Andersen, said the company needed a sponsorship opportunity that would describe what Aon did instead of who it was.
A global professional services firm involved in risk, retirement and health solutions, it created the Aon Risk Reward Challenge. Players who had the lowest average score for the season on a designated par 5 each week — typically a risk-reward hole — earned a $1 million bonus.
That’s $1 million for the PGA Tour and $1 million for the LPGA Tour.
“There’s no difference between the PGA and the LPGA,” Andersen said. “And we wanted to make a strong statement. There’s a lot of dialogue around gender equity in pro sports. This was a great opportunity to put our money where our mouth is.
“The reaction from outside the community was great,” he said. “And I can’t overstate how great it was internally to do. It’s been a real rallying cry for the team, one of those proud moments.”
It brought Carlota Ciganda to tears when the Spaniard became the first LPGA winner of the award in 2019 (Brooks Koepka won on the PGA Tour). The $1 million prize was nearly what she earned the previous season.
“Thank you for putting the same money for men and women,” Ciganda
said that day. “I think I’m the winner, but women’s golf is the winner today, the LPGA is the winner.”
KPMG, a longtime sponsor of Phil Mickelson, signed up former world No. 1 Stacy Lewis and they were part of a commercial on breaking glass ceilings. That was right about the time KPMG became title sponsor of the Women’s PGA Championship, elevating the longtime major with a higher purse (now $4.5 million, double what it was before KPMG got involved) and taking it to courses that previously held men’s majors, such as Hazeltine and Aronimink.
In another major deal, Chevron announced Tuesday it would become the new title sponsor of the LPGA’S first major championship of the year, raising its purse some 60 percent to $5 million.
Across the Atlantic, AIG’S sponsorship of the Women’s British Open has resulted in prize money next year of $6.8 million. And the USGA is expected to announce by the end of the year a presenting sponsor to boost the U.S. Women’s Open purse, which already has the largest payout for the majors.