Eamon Lynch
| Golfweek
There were no shocks in which storylines dominated coverage of the LPGA Tour in recent days, nor in the fact that none of those attention-grabbers involved actual LPGA Tour players. On Wednesday, Caitlin Clark was the epicenter of The Annika (Driven by Gainbridge at Pelican, to give the event its complete, clumsy corporate moniker), where she played alongside Nelly Korda in the pro-am. On Thursday and Friday, it was Kai Trump, making her tournament debut as a special invitee. Meanwhile, a quality leaderboard took shape for the business end of things at the weekend, when the aforementioned will have left town.
It was unsurprising that Trump struggled. She’s ranked the 461st best junior in the U.S., has never played a USGA event, showed poor form in the few AJGA starts she’s made in 2025, and was competing for the first time under considerable public scrutiny. Her opening round of 83 was 13-over-par and worst in the field by four strokes, but nevertheless had some folks beclown themselves by hailing it a great accomplishment because she didn’t shoot 93. Against that sycophantic standard, her commendable 75 on Friday is destined to be breathlessly recounted as one of the finest scores of the season.
It was equally unsurprising that Trump’s mere presence was the most hotly debated topic of the tournament.
The argument that Trump justified a special invitation because of her sizable social media following and the attention she generates is not without merit. The counter position is that not all attention is positive, as plenty of commentators wondered if it all seemed a tad desperate to welcome a teen with no hope of making the cut while members struggle for starts and status in the final weeks of the season. (The equipoise to those members is obvious: play better.)
One can argue that the owners of tournament venues have no business handing out exemptions — that’s where Trump got hers — but it’s a thorny issue on every professional tour when you litigate the leeway given those who write checks or open doors.
We might discuss the credibility hit as the LPGA Tour resorts to stunts in the closing stretch of the season, but then you’d be arguing that the extra eyeballs don’t matter, which is shaky ground to stake out for those who want to see women’s sports promoted.
About the only thing beyond debate was the cringe-worthiness of the 18-year-old’s press conference, in which one fatuous questioner ended his risible inquiries with, “Love your grandpa!”
Amid all the noise, this week reinforced a sentiment that seems unshakeable when it comes to the LPGA: that the only acceptable coverage is advocacy, that golf fans and media must shake their pompoms and conduct the applause because anything less somehow equates to diminishing the women’s game. A professional sports organization isn’t entitled to a free pass from scrutiny or criticism because it’s a women’s league, because its resources are strained, because it requires guerrilla marketing to get noticed in a crowded market, because it has a noble history, or because it is run by well-intentioned people. That’s context, but it’s not cover.
That attitude is evident in the reaction (or lack thereof) to the LPGA’s recent announcement of a partnership with Golf Saudi, a state agency. Thanks to the actions of other organizations — notably the Women’s Tennis Association, which just staged its season finale in Riyadh — such deals barely register a ripple now. Everyone knows that the LPGA runs on financial fumes, that regular purses — while at a record high — are a pittance compared to the men’s, that all but the biggest stars scrap to make a living. But it still ought to be worth noting when an organization built on elevating women goes into business with a government that, as a matter of policy and practice, does the exact opposite. The LPGA is demonstrating how effectively sportswashing works: the guys got theirs, so why shouldn’t the girls? And that’s not solely on the C-suite, because no voices were raised in opposition from the locker room.
Ask any informed executive in the golf industry and they’ll tell you the LPGA Tour is a challenged product, and offer a multitude of reasons why. A disjointed schedule resulting from years of chasing any available revenue hither and yon around the globe; staffing resources that are inadequate and stretched too thin; organizational competence that often falls short; a lack of vision at the top; too few players willing to sell the product with the passion of their predecessors; broadcast windows that don’t fairly showcase events, a reliable chicken-and-egg argument that hinges on the belief that there’s an enormous viewership waiting if TV times were improved.
That all of those theories hold at least a grain of truth speaks to the scale of the task facing its new commissioner, Craig Kessler.
Which is probably why Kessler doesn’t seem particularly focused on the weekly theatrics of a Caitlin Clark or a Kai Trump, but on making moves that suggest a longer-term strategy. He just hired the aptly-named Monica Fee as the LPGA’s new Chief Sales and Partnerships Officer. Her last gig was at LIV. He also announced Sean Bratches as a new board member. He’s a highly-regarded executive with stints at ESPN, F1 and, um, LIV (he departed when Greg Norman’s tone-deaf bloviating became too embarrassing for any self-respecting professional to sit next to). If the Saudis decide to drop more loose change on women’s golf, Kessler wants to be positioned to catch it, but it’s also an acknowledgment that if the LPGA wants sounder commercial footing, it probably lies overseas.
The Tour’s recent five-week swing through Asia evidenced an on-the-ground engagement by fans that dwarfs most weeks in the U.S. The pursuit of that atmosphere explains why Kessler is also moving the season’s first major, the Chevron Championship, 40 miles from the sparsely attended Club at Carlton Woods to Memorial Park, a more accessible Houston muni, where he can draft off a PGA Tour event staged there a few weeks prior. He should consider trying to move it another 7,000 or so miles, to Asia, where fanatical support for women’s golf represents a bedrock to build on. There’s more value in contesting a major championship there than in the saturated American market, or in some nondescript French alpine village.
What we saw this week on the LPGA Tour was opportunism, which has its place. But Kessler knows it is not a strategy for growth.
