Princeton’s Mollie Marcoux Samaan Named New LPGA Commissioner

Mollie Marcoux Samaan Photo: Dave Kotinsky, Getty Images

Juli Inkster summed up the new LPGA commissioner pretty well. “She’s a jock,” the Hall of Famer said when asked to describe how and why Mollie Marcoux Samaan will fit in as the ninth commissioner of the LPGA, a job she accepted late on Monday night.

Inkster is not wrong. Marcoux Samaan was a two-sport athlete at Princeton where she played ice hockey and soccer and graduated with a degree in history in 1991. A four-year All-Ivy League hockey player, Marcoux Samaan also played golf from an early age, learning the game along with her brother at a course in her hometown of Ithaca, New York, where junior summer memberships were $45. “My parents thought that was the best babysitter they could imagine so they dropped me off early and I played all day,” she said. Her senior thesis at Princeton was entitled “The Social Construction of Sport and Gender: A History of Women's Golf from 1895 to...