Practically every golfing region boasts a women’s professional tour. America’s LPGA Tour has been on the go since 1950, the Japanese and Korean circuits since the late 1960s and ’70s, respectively, and the Ladies European Tour since 1978. The LET celebrated its 45th anniversary last year, and its founding members met up earlier this month at England’s Thorpeness Golf Club, where Christine Langford, a former LET chairman and three-time winner on the tour, is the golf director.
It is because Langford is so proud of the LET that she was peeved to learn that two fathers of LPGA Tour players are busy pressing for the various women’s circuits to merge – with particular reference to the LPGA and the LET – and establish a world tour akin to the WTA Tour in tennis.
And because President Trump was asked to help sort out the mess between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, the dads in question – Albane Valenzuela’s father, Alberto, and Alexa Pano’s father, Rick – have written to the Trump Organization to suggest that he might want to be involved in negotiating the arrangements they have in mind.
This might sound a bit far-fetched, but the correspondents, who shared the content of their script with Beth Ann Nichols of Golfweek, seemed to suggest that such a move might be good for his CV.
Langford says that the LET had good reason not to jump at the chance to join forces with the LPGA when the question arose a year or so ago. As much as anything else, it was because the LET had been making encouraging steps of its own. For example, they now have six Saudi-sponsored events (including the $4.5 million PIF Saudi Ladies International and four Aramco Series events with purses of $2 million each), enough to have all the other tours pricking up their ears.
People have their own views on the pros and cons of Saudi money and there’s no getting away from Langford’s comment, “Professional golf has been overtaken by greed.” However, like many another, she accepts that the Saudis are nowadays showing more respect towards the women’s professionals than was the case in pre-COVID days, and that their tournaments have developed as a classy addition to the LET circuit.
“A world tour,” said Langford, “sounds sensible enough and of course the latest generation like the sound of getting closer to matching the prize funds of the men. Why wouldn’t they? It’s just that they need to start asking themselves what matters. Is it an endless sum of money or is it the ‘more normal life’ afforded by a tour on which they are seldom too far from home?”
Langford went on to tell GGP that when she saw Emma Raducanu, the 2021 US Open tennis champion, in tears last week because of a stalking incident, it served as a stark reminder of the lonely life led by so many of our top sporting globetrotters.
When the Italian tennis-playing hierarchy learned of the International Tennis Federation’s plans for a world tour with three lesser world tours below, they wasted no time in doing what was best for them. They jumped in with the offer of hosting a mixed bag of events by way of allowing would-be Italian stars to improve on their own doorstep. From world No 1 Jannik Sinner downwards, that’s what has been happening, and to good effect.
The LET golfers were doing much the same in the earlier days of their tour. Annika Sörenstam, Charley Hull and Georgia Hall were among those who polished their games on the LET before switching to the LPGA. What is more, Iain Stoddart, who has Bob McIntyre in his Bounce management stable and has recently signed on Lorna McClymont, the Scot who chose Stirling University ahead of an American college, thinks that Sörenstam and Co. got it right.
“Of course,” he said, “the women professionals are out there to make a good living and they want to get to the top of the pyramid. Which is as it should be. The thing is that they don’t have to leave home to see if they are good enough.”
All of which brought Langford to the very valid point that the extent to which golfing teenagers are heading off to American colleges and staying on to play on LPGA feeder tours or the LPGA Tour itself has resulted in women’s golf in the UK being on the wane.
Last year, when she asked some of her lady members at Thorpeness to name the 12 players on the European Solheim Cup side, they mostly failed a test they would have been able to complete with flying colours not too many years earlier. They knew Charley Hull and Georgia Hall, but too many of the rest had been out of sight and mind for too long.
Going back to the women’s world tour warning, Langford thinks that the LET could have done without making the mistakes they made early on. Here, she cited what was an annual event at Caldy Golf Club on the Wirral Peninsula.
If Langford’s members were having trouble identifying the European Solheim Cup crew, much the same applied to spectators at the ’24 Curtis Cup, which was won by Great Britain and Ireland at Sunningdale. Since seven of the eight were – or still are – at American universities and had been competing rather more over there than they had at home, people spent the three days querying who was who.
Going back to the women’s world tour warning, Langford thinks that the LET could have done without making the mistakes they made early on. Here, she cited what was an annual event at Caldy Golf Club on the Wirral Peninsula. “We should have stuck with the various sponsors who were involved that week and grown with them. That way, we would have still more of a home-based circuit today.”
She went on to mention the Korean and Japanese Tours. The Koreans divide themselves between America and home, but she said of Japan, where she played on occasion, that their golfers had mostly clung to their own circuit. “They don’t make as much money in Japan as the players on the LPGA, but does that matter?”
(Last year’s No 1 ranked player in Japan, Rio Takeda, won the equivalent of $1.8 million but would have considerably less in the way of travel expenses.)
“They’re already making more than enough,” continued Langford. “They love what they do, and they’re better placed to settle down in their homeland when the time comes.”
It’s no longer cool to say such a thing, but there cannot be too many world-travelling sportswomen for whom that does not become a consideration at some point.