The Golf Channel’s Brian Hewitt weighs in on the LPGA’s new english language internment camp language requirement, and gets down to the nitty gritty of it all: the big wigs ponying up the big bucks at the pro ams weren’t getting their asses kissed enough by the polite, petite Asian girls.
I have watched LPGA Pro-Ams and seen the stereotype: Four cigar-chomping, middle-aged American men saying hello to a 22-year-old South Korean woman who bows at the introduction on the first tee. There are smiles but very few words exchanged over the next five and a half hours after which the men scratch their heads and wonder why their foursome paid $10,000 for little or no conversation.
My retort? What these Cutter & Buck wearing execs don’t seem to get is that if they took just two seconds to observe how these women play the game, their swings, their tempo, the way they manage their ball, etc., they would get an infinitely greater ROI (return on “investment”) than if said player spent the five six hours telling jokes and inside stories, gabbing, and generally pretending like she really wanted to be there and that these guys were genuinely interesting people and moreover a hoot to be around.
The bottom line? Very few professional golfers actually enjoy the pro-ams, even the few who are good at them and seem like they are having a good time. To think that even a rudimentary command of english will turn the “offenders” in this case into glib, quasi-comedian entertainers, all for the benefit of sponsors, is absolutely absurd.
