A little effort from men could do a lot for year’s final major
HOUSTON — The USGA is promoting a smart socialmedia campaign with the hashtag “Women Worth Watching,” and already some PGA Tour players have weighed in that they’ll be tuning in this week to the U. S. Women’s Open.
It would be more plausible, of course, if any player ever admitted watching golf on TV when he wasn’t at a tournament.
But it’s a start.
And it’s an important conversation.
This was the very topic raised three months ago by Juli Inkster, who won the career Grand Slam while raising two daughters during her Hall of Fame career.
Inkster was doing television work in September at the ANA Inspiration, an LPGA major with rich tradition in the California desert that often gets overlooked because it falls a week before the Masters. It was postponed by the pandemic, and as ( bad) luck would have it, it was held a week before the U. S. Open this year.
“I just wish the guys would talk about our majors the way we do about theirs,” Inkster said that day.
This would be a great opportunity.
The U. S. Women’s Open starts Thursday at Champions Golf Club, which has the history of a U. S. Open and Ryder Cup and the heritage of being founded by Jack Burke Jr. and Jimmy Demaret.
It’s the final major of the year. It long has been regarded as the biggest event in women’s golf. And the PGA Tour is done for the year, except for the unofficial team event in Florida unofficially known as the Shark Shootout.
“It’s a great time for the Open,” Inkster said by phone Tuesday, and then she returned to her original thoughts from September. “If we can get these guys to say, ‘ TheWomen’s Open is on and I’m going to be watching,’ that would be huge.”
Inkster was in her first year as Solheim Cup captain when four PGA Tour caddies, spearheaded by Jim “Bones” Mackay and JohnWood, put together a video for Inkster to show the American squad. It morphed quickly from motivation to selfdeprecation. This was in 2015, and the Americans had one Ryder Cup victory in the past seven tries.
“Michael Greller is sitting there talking strategy and then Wood looks over at Bones and says, ‘ What’s your Ryder Cup record? Not very good. Why are we doing this?’ ” Inkster said. “It was awesome.”
Conversation matters, even on Twitter.
Cal alum Max Homa was among the first to weigh in three weeks ago by retweeting the USGA and adding the major season isn’t done yet. This was Nov. 16, the day after the Masters. U. S. Open champion Bryson DeChambeau, Harris English, Marc Leishman and Jason Day have joined in. So has Gary Player.
It’s not much. It doesn’t need to be.
The PGA Tour and LPGA Tour announced a strategic alliance for areas such as schedule coordination, joint marketing programs, media representation and the possibility of joint tournaments. That was four years ago. The PGA Tour helped negotiate the LPGA’s television rights, and that’s about all anyone has seen from that partnership.
A deal was close on having each tour’s Tournament of Champions on the same course at the same time. That didn’t materialize, and the LPGA now has its own celebrity version in Florida.
For now, just a little interest from the men could go a long way. They know the women’s game. Several men played with women in Junior Ryder Cup competitions ( Jordan Spieth and Lexi Thompson in 2008).
Brittany Lang, the 2016 U. S. Women’s Open champion, has noticed some of the tweets.
“It’s really cool when the guys do that,” she said. “It just brings people in, gives the girls a little bit more respect, I think, because a lot of the time, I don’t think we get it.”