Bonus Weekend Content - Departure Day Edition

So, I was feeling some guilt over leaving you hanging early next week, then a couple of follow-ups to Thursday items appeared, so here's a bonus post for your delectation.  We shan't go long....

Breaking The Bank - With the resignation of LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan announced last week, one anticipates that dirt will appear.  This Beth Ann Nichols piece was linked on Thursday, but I left this section on the cutting room floor:

Promise of growth not being achieved

It’s not that the LPGA is struggling to stay afloat – which has been the case in the past – it’s that the tour’s not experiencing the transformational growth Marcoux Samaan preached.

The departure of Cognizant, a Fortune 100 company that was bullish on the LPGA from the start – signaled a red flag. The hope was that Cognizant’s leadership would sing the LPGA’s praises to other blue-chip companies and lead to organic growth.

Instead, they’re out after title-sponsoring four editions of the event, leaving the tour scrambling to back its own Founders Cup as the LPGA celebrates 75 years.

In addition, stops that have been on tour for decades in Portland and Toledo have been on life support now for several seasons. For reference, the inaugural Portland Ladies Classic dates back to 1972. The Toledo stop began in 1984.

As the LPGA looks to add to the number of events it owns and operates, it has become increasingly clear that the tour lacks the resources needed to make what it currently runs – such as the Solheim Cup and Founders Cup – a success. The tour has invested heavily in boosting its staff in recent years.

Sponsors are gonna come and go, and the ladies will struggle here, but obviously an event that has been aggressively promoted hasn't panned out.  But that last bit didn't make much of an impression on me at the time, but now comes a Beth Ann follow-up:

LPGA to lose $2 million in 2024 after adding staff, attempting to increase exposure

Exposure?  Say, can I put you nice ladies into a PIP program?  I mean, look at all it's done for the men's game...

The grade of an LPGA commissioner is largely attached to one thing: the schedule.

How many tournaments are being staged and how big are the purses?

But there’s another bottom line that’s important and less public, and that’s the tour’s operating

budget. Multiple sources have confirmed to Golfweek that the tour is slated to lose around $2 million this year. LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan said two weeks ago in her annual address that the tour’s total staff had increased by 35 percent in recent years.

The commissioner, who announced on Monday that she’s stepping down on Jan. 9, invested heavily on increasing exposure for the tour but, so far, has come up short in the return. The former Princeton athletic director said she was “building the infrastructure in order to build our global fan base.”

That the tour could lose money at a time of unprecedented growth in women’s sports – especially during a lucrative Solheim Cup year – set off alarm bells for some.

I'm a bit skeptical of this women's sports boom, but that's not the only aspect of this that suffers from a concentration issue.  But even the process by which these staffer could drive revenues eludes me, as those TV contracts are locked in and gates receipts are likely the property of the local organizers.

LPGA Player Director Ashleigh Buhai wasn’t too concerned about the loss, however, saying “you’ve got to spend money to make money.”

“Everybody who comes into a lead position is going to try to do things their own way to make their own mark,” said Buhai, “and sometimes you pull it off, and sometimes you don’t.”

Given the starry headlines of 2024 – with the dynamic one-two punch of Nelly Korda’s seven-win season and Lydia Ko’s fairy-tale run into the LPGA Hall of Fame – some players were surprised to see a schedule come out that showed little growth. Official money for 2025, thus far, is up $3.6 million from last season.

“We’re moving in the right direction all the time, but the schedule is very much major heavy,” Ireland’s Leona Maguire said two weeks ago at the CME Group Tour Championship.

“The purses in the majors do disguise some things, I feel like, and the gap between us and the men seems to be growing rather than us catching up. … There couldn’t possibly have been any better golf played. I’ll just say that.”

The corollary to Buhai's Rule is that sometimes you're better off just burning the money, because at least you get some heat....

That concentration reference above was specifically about the increase in purses, which are largely a result of the USGA and R&A subsidizing the two Opens.  

I've long called this the Tour That Can't Shoot Straight, but it's worth revisiting that Solheim Cup transportation issue, of which we can say that unforced errors don't get much more unforced.  It demonstrates contempt for your paying customers and quite obviously over-shadowed their premiere event, but it happened in the context of a major staff increase, and yet folks go our of their way to assert that, of course, this wasn't Mollie's fault.  Well, then whose faulty would it be?  Especially given this:

When there weren’t enough buses on Friday morning to transport fans at the Solheim Cup, resulting in wait times of more than two hours, the tour’s communication with the public and media was virtually non-existent for most of the day. It wasn’t until late Friday evening that the tour publicly addressed the issue with a plan (that was quickly deleted and replaced with a scaled-down statement). The commissioner didn’t take questions until the following morning.

What started out as a bus shortage turned into a crisis of leadership.

No, Beth Ann, that's not how any of this works.  It was always a crisis of leadership, it's just that we may not have known it until; they forgot to arrange for buses....  This is consistent with what we see in the larger world, where no one has any residual interest in their day jobs.  So, you look pretty incompetent when you staff up but are left with no one to do the blocking and tackling.  Then Mollie consults her Crisis Management 101 textbook, but she apparently reads at a remedial level, and didn't get to that chapter on taking ownership until it was too late to be credible.  So, yeah, she wasn't up to the job.

A Rebuttal - Ripped from the headlines:

Trans golfer Hailey Davidson furiously hits back at LPGA after bombshell ban

 Hell hath no fury like a biological male scorned...

I have far more sympathy for her than may be apparent from my writing, but that's the essence of the day, that we should govern ourselves based upon people's feelings....  It sounds promising, until you contemplate whose emotions will govern.

First some background on Hailey:

The 31-year-old had hoped to break into the top ranks of women's professional golf, trying to earn status on the tour over the past year.

She had competed in qualifying for the US Women's Open before playing in Q-School this fall where she earned status on the Epson Tour - the feeder circuit for the LPGA Tour.

The 31-year-old missed qualifying for the US Women's Open this year by one shot and came up short in LPGA Q-school.

Davidson last competed as a male golfer in 2015, after which, she began hormone therapy treatments and underwent gender reassignment surgery in 2021.

The first point I want to make is the Orwellian language employed, something the left could give master classes in.  We used to call this condition gender dysphoria, which was commonly considered a debilitating psychological condition.  As I heard from a commentator somewhere, when something needs to be normalized that means it's not, checking notes, normal.  Hold that thought as we let Hailey speak:

'Can't say I didn't see this coming. Banned from the Epson and LPGA,' Davidson wrote in an Instagram Stories post. 'All the silence and people wanting to stay 'neutral' thanks for absolutely nothing. This happened because of all your silence.

'What a great birthday present for 2024. Having the greatest achievement I've earned in my life taken from me,' she added.

We can all appreciate how devastating this must be, and we can and should feel profound sympathy for her.  That said, how do we feel about that first 'graph?  If you distill liberalism as practiced to its constituent parts, this is what you find, the inability or refusal to even acknowledge alternatives views of the world.  There's lots of people that think differently on this issue, Hailey, as you might have noticed, and you might want to consult a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing on this...

But then Hailey has to add this:

'And somehow people are surprised the suicide rate for transgender people is around 50%. Situations just like this are part of the reason.'

I'm sorry, Hailey, but are you saying that we have to allow you to beat up on women or you'll off yourself?  The first question I asked myself was, is that 50% number real?  Admittedly, asking myself wasn't very productive, so asked Google:

A new study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law finds that 81% of transgender adults in the U.S. have thought about suicide, 42% of transgender adults have attempted it, and 56% have engaged in non-suicidal self-injury over their lifetimes.

That's one data point and it's all self-reported, so I'm guessing that Hailey's number is a bit high, but I'll concede it's not crazy high.   the problem is that Hailey doesn't seem to understand that she's making my point above, which is that this population suffers from a debilitating psychological trauma.  And, Hailey, your reaction is exactly what we'd expect, and the emotional blackmail you will find to be counterproductive.  If you don't believe me on that last point, you might want to give Kamala a call...

At the risk of repeating myself, Hailey is calling out all those who stay "neutral" in this debate, the telling them they'll be responsible for the outcome of her life.  Does she actually believe that will win her adherents?  because she's actually ensuring the opposite.  She's too emotionally involved to understand that most us will respect (not understand, which is far harder) and support her decision as an adult to live the life she wants to live, by that I mean she can live it as a woman.  But that doesn't come with an entitlement to play women's professional sports, and they just won't accept that they can't compel us to require.

Because Hailey ignores several huge elephants over in that corner, first women such as this:

The tour's change came after months of pressure from female professionals who wrote to the LPGA, pleading it to take action.

And the decision was championed by players on Wednesday with retired LPGA star Amy Olson telling Dailymail.com that she was 'thrilled.'

'I think that the new policy goes a long way to protecting fairness in women's sports and making sure that women will continue to have the opportunities going forward that women have fought for for a number of years,' she added.

'It took a lot of courage by these organizations, but they did the right thing.'

Star?  No, but the retired bit I think is telling, because she can't be accused of protecting her own feed lot.

Not only does Hailey elide those who have different opinions, but she also can't engage honestly with the most important of those elephants.  Here's a telling vignette:

Women's golf tour owner reveals harrowing experience with trans golfer that sparked push for new LPGA ban

Forgive some long excerpts, but here's the background: 

Davidson's participation resulted in one of the sport's first bans of a trans athlete earlier in March

and provided evidence that doing so might be met with more praise than backlash.

This happened after venture capitalist Stuart McKinnon purchased and took control of the NXXT Golf Tour in January 2023, when Davidson was already a participant.

"I was advised that Hailey was a transgender, and I asked Hailey for some proof of verification that there's eligibility to play, and I had a partnership with the LPGA, so I'm following their rules, and I was provided with a letter from the USGA (United States Golf Association) and a letter from the LPGA by Hailey stating that Hailey was qualified to play in USGA and LPGA sanctioned events," McKinnon said during an X spaces conversation on Thursday with the Independent Council on Women's Sports.

McKinnon learned that trans athletes were very much permitted to participate in the tour he had just purchased. It was a purchase he had made because he wanted to create more opportunities for women's golfers, he said. However, Davidson became a part of that investment because of the institutional rules protecting trans athletes.

"I'm trying to help these ladies and I didn't want to break the rules with the LPGA because, ultimately, I was afraid," McKinnond said, adding that his specific fear was that of the tour's players missing out on exemptions to qualify for other LPGA events.

I'm old enough to remember way back when we cared about women, but here's what he saw:

McKinnon had to watch Davidson finish first place on the tour this past January, marking Davidson's third first-place finish at the event. The win put Davidson in the race to earn an Epson Tour exemption, which is the developmental tour of the LPGA Tour. The top 10 players of the Epson Tour graduate to the LPGA Tour.

After watching Davidson perform up close on the tour he had purchased, McKinnon had come to the belief that it was not fair.

"Davidson won an event… I wasn't at the event, but I was dialed in, hearing what was going on, and Hailey started to dominate," McKinnon said. "As a father of five daughters, I'm here to protect my daughters and protect females, and I can tell you, like, I'm the type of father, if I was watching my daughter playing soccer and there was a male that was playing against her, and he was 240 lbs, barreling down the field, I would have gone on the field and I would have stopped it.

"It's something that can cause, in certain sports, physical damage to a player. In this case, it's not the case in golf, but we clearly felt there was an advantage for Hailey Davidson."

McKinnon and NXXT banned Davidson from the tour in March. It was a landmark moment for the fight against trans inclusion in women's golf and sparked national controversy. At the time, Davidson was second in the mini tour’s season standings.

McKinnon simply could not stand to watch Davidson and the golfer's overpowering swings on his tour anymore.

Apparently Mr. McKinnon didn't get the memo that he's personally responsible if things don't work out for Hailey....

In my prior blogging of this issue I've tried focus on a more primal, existential issue for folks to sort through.  Most folks will instinctively want to afford the widest range of opportunities for all people, so there's a default position the leans towards inclusion.   But why do we have women's athletics to begin with?  If you answer that question with any candor, you come to an inescapable conclusion, that the inclusion of men will destroy women's sports.  So, Hailey argues for her own inclusion, whereas Amy Olson says that will destroy the opportunities for women.  I'm pretty clear who has the better of the arguments.

I want to revisit an argument I made in the past, one I made hesitatingly.  And really, when have you ever known your humble blogger to hold back on a hot take?  Let me use Hailey's own life story to frame my supposition.

We'll fire up the Wayback machine and go back to 2015, when Davidson is going nowhere as a male professional golfer, while struggling with gender dysphoria.  Here's one hell of a question for the world, did the ability to play elite golf as a woman play any motivational role in her decision to transition?

I was reluctant to make that argument as well, as there's a part of me that couldn't believe anyone so struggling could grasp at that.  But this is where the minimization of the condition is to me so dangerous, because we're talking about people struggling profoundly with their lives.  I think we have to at least acknowledge that it's quite the perverse incentive, and keep an open mind as to whether it plays any kind of role.

Besides the obvious existential threat this poses to women's sports, this is why I'm so adamant that the bans be put in place.  I can't know for a fact that it does motivate male-to-female transitions, but I'm really uncomfortable with the perverse incentive being in place.  And were it a factor in Hailey's transition, that's where I can get behind her anger.  Because sometimes saying "no" is actually more sensitive than saying "maybe".

I've gone quite long on that and it's a difficult, troubling issue.  Enjoy your Sunday and, as I note on Thursday, I'll be back around the middle of the week.  For those that care, there is little snow in Utah and nothing encouraging in the forecast, but my nephew is headed my way next weekend and I have a February adventure (more details as the winter progresses) for which I need to get this old body into ski shape.