Women leery of taking on Trump
LPGA tour players’ reticence contrasts with other athletes
One after another, the confident, extremely successful women came in for their news media interviews this week at the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open. Multimillionaire athletes all, they exhibit such a fearlessness in their professional lives that you figure you could ask them anything and they wouldn’t flinch.
But bring up their controversial host here this week, President Trump, and everything changes. They become reluctant, if not downright afraid — every single one of them. Their answers are so similar, it’s as if they were planned out in advance. Suffice it to say, they’re just here to talk about golf.
Michelle Wie, 27, the most famous player in the tournament, illustrated the point as well as anyone when she was asked about Trump’s boast that he could sexually assault women and get away with it in the context of his hosting the crown jewel of women’s golf.
“I take my role as a female role model very seriously,” Wie began. Her very next sentence? “This week is about the golf.” It’s their right not to talk about the president, of course, but it comes in such stark contrast to the protests and statements from dozens of their athletic counterparts, including the NBA’s Stephen Curry and LeBron James, the WNBA’s Breanna Stewart and Olympic figure skating medalists Charlie White and Ashley Wagner, among others.
And, frankly, it’s also unlike what happened at the men’s Senior PGA Championship at Trump National outside Washington in May, when John Daly, Rocco Mediate and Fred Funk freely and easily professed their admiration for Trump within several hours of each other.
What’s going on? It’s impossible for LPGA players to say this publicly, but they know they are second-class citizens in what still is an overwhelmingly male-dominated sport. Actually, second class might be putting too positive a spin on it. They really might be third class, following the men’s PGA Tour and the men’s Champions tour — just happy to accept any table scraps the guys leave behind.
When women golfers do open up and speak their mind, there are consequences, and they often aren’t good. Take the case of LPGA veteran Brittany Lincicome, who, when asked two weeks ago by the Chicago Tribune about Trump’s course hosting the Women’s Open, uttered this perfectly reasonable reply:
“Hopefully maybe he doesn’t show up and it won’t be a big debacle and it will be about us and not him.”
Daly saw the comment and couldn’t wait to defend Trump on Twitter.
Naturally, others joined right in, forcing Lincicome off her account this week.
Then there’s the pay disparity between what the men and the women make from the U.S. Golf Association. Last month’s men’s U.S. Open purse was $12 million, with $2.16 million going to the winner, Brooks Koepka. This week, the women are playing for a purse of $5 million, with $900,000 going to the winner.
That’s the largest purse in the history of women’s golf, but it’s not even half of what the men make.
If you’re tempted to say that’s just how it goes in sports, consider this: The U.S. Tennis Association started paying women the same amount of money as men at the 1973 U.S. Open, nearly 44 years ago.
It’s stunning how far behind golf is, although it must be noted that men and women play their major championships together in tennis, at the same time and at the same venue. That’s obviously not the case in golf.
The legendary Billie Jean King led the effort for equal pay in tennis. One wonders what could have been had she then picked up a golf club.