In the end, it was Caitlin Clark who indirectly helped bring about the end of Mollie Marcoux Samaan’s time as commissioner of the LPGA.
Clark was the 2024 “it girl,” the face of the dramatic rise in interest in women’s sports that unfolded this year. Fresh off a tremendous college basketball career, Clark picked up the WNBA, put it on her back and brought unprecedented interest in and coverage of the 27-year-old league.
Before Clark, the WNBA was a backwater sport, with poor attendance, low TV ratings and lackluster support from corporate America. But after Clark was drafted out of Iowa, and especially after a badly needed break around the time of the Summer Olympics, everything about the WNBA changed.
It wasn’t just Clark, and it wasn’t just the WNBA. The National Women’s Soccer League seemed to have come of age in 2024, with captivating storylines and rising fan interest. It earned a four-year TV deal with CBS, while adding ESPN, Prime Video, and Scripps Sports to its portfolio of television partners. U.S. television exposure remains problematic for the LPGA.
When compared with the 74-year-old LPGA, the WNBA and the NWSL made women’s professional golf seem downright dowdy. This despite what the LPGA characterized as record fan engagement. The LPGA just could not break into the 2024 women’s sports zeitgeist. The unspoken national theme was that women’s sports were hot, but the LPGA was not.
Further evidence was provided, ironically, on the very day that Samaan’s departure was announced. On December 2, Sports Business Journal, the publication of record for the sports industry, saluted “women’s power players” in recognition of the 2024 explosion of interest in women’s sports. The WNBA and the NWSL were represented, but the LPGA was not.
This, even though Nelly Korda, a truly athletic American star, went on a tear, winning five tournaments in a row during a seven-victory season and breaking out as the generational talent everyone close to the LPGA imagined and hoped she would become. Plus, Lydia Ko recorded a remarkable summer in which the New Zealander won the Olympic gold medal, earned entry into the LPGA Hall of Fame and won the AIG Women’s Open in just a three-week period. None of it could break through the Clark/NWSL conversation.
Samaan got quite a bit done during her run. Purses grew 90 percent in 3½ years, to the point where the top 100 players averaged more than $1 million in on-course earnings in 2024, up from $570,000 in 2021. During the same period, the median earnings for this group of players increased from $420,000 to $808,000. Samaan obtained stipends for domestic travel and missed cuts for her players, upgraded the on-course physical and mental care, and secured health insurance for the players beginning in 2025.
Were there missteps along the way? To be sure. For whatever unexplained reason, the long-rumored merger with the Ladies European Tour was canceled at the last minute. The fans’ shuttle-bus situation at the Solheim Cup was a very public fiasco, one that certain parts of the LPGA community writ large seemed unwilling or unable to get over. There was sponsor turnover, especially a key one in Cognizant, which remains a partner of the PGA Tour. Sponsor grumbling can cause players to become concerned, and those concerns usually reach the board of directors.
It was always going to be hard to follow Mike Whan as LPGA commissioner, especially for someone who came from academia rather than golf.
She knew nobody in the golf industry when she started, no one from whom to learn the nuances and subtleties of the business and the game. The job is awfully demanding, the learning curve was steep, and the travel wears just about anybody out. Against this backdrop, Samaan advanced the organization significantly.
The LPGA needs to use this moment to vacate its headquarters in Daytona Beach, Florida and move to … anywhere. Even if it’s just 55 miles southwest to Orlando, that would be better than remote and unexciting Daytona Beach. It’s difficult to recruit enough talented people when the headquarters is in the middle of nowhere.
Would the newly formed PGA Tour Enterprises look at investing in, or perhaps acquiring, the LPGA? It has $1.5 billion in cash burning a hole in its pocket, and there are an awful lot of synergies that could come as part of a relationship. The LPGA has been very transparent about the need for outside capital, so perhaps a conversation or two is in order soon.
It must be said that Samaan cared deeply about the tour, its players, and its place in women’s sports in America. She gave it everything she had. Hers was a term of great consequence at the LPGA.