LPGA: Ladies PolyGlot Association?
Published August 27th, 2008Sports. We’ve all been pretty focused on sports lately, what with the Olympics and all, and especially international sports. We’ve celebrated athletic greatness, peak human conditioning, from all over the world. Does it matter that certain countries dominate in certain ways? Eastern Europe and Central Asia are weightlifting powerhouses. Jamaica puts out extremely talented sprinters, and African nations produce many outstanding distance runners. Australia has swimmers, South America has soccer players - along with Europe. There’s something for everyone at the Olympics, something any country can lay claim to and say “we’re competitive, we’ve got a chance” - and that’s great. In every sport you’re not just seeing awesome athletes, you’re seeing the absolute BEST humans with those skills on earth. A gold medal means “Today, I was #1 out of 6 billion” - and that’s something special.
Some sports are truly international - and we’ll dispense with the Sport vs. Not-Sport argument here. Golf is one. If you look at any of the major tours, they’re made up of people from just about all over the planet. There are some places that do dominate - the US, Australia, South Africa, the UK, South Korea. For some reason, South Korean women are strongly represented on the women’s tour, but the men have a much smaller contingent. But that might all change.
See, it seems the LPGA - for some reason - has decided that their tour has become too international. They’ve decided that your skill and talent at golf isn’t what’s most important to play on tour - it’s how well you speak English. Starting in 2009, all LPGA players will have to pass an oral English competency exam.
This policy is being met with harsh criticism from the golfing community, and rightly so. It’s offensive to me as an American and as a sports fan. I think I understand what the LPGA really wants out of this - players people can identify with. It’s hard to really connect with someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you. The LPGA probably thinks they’re doing foreign players a favor by forcing them to learn English - perhaps this will let them communicate better to the public and win more fans!
Unfortunately it shows a certain level of ignorance about sports fans. Athletes are not respected simply because they can speak your language - they are respected because of the talent they exhibit on the field of play. Tiger Woods is the most famous athlete in the world - and it’s not because he can speak a million languages (I’m not aware of any languages he speaks other than English), it’s because he’s the most dominant player his sport has seen in 30 years. Maybe ever.
Michael Jordan didn’t speak to the world through his voice, he spoke to them through his play. He may be responsible (along with Nike) for turning basketball into the world game it is today. And that’s just it - LPGA golf is a world game not because it’s players speak English, it’s because of the increasing talent level of the tour. To require players to speak English will not help the sport, it will hurt it. It’s a shame the LPGA doesn’t see that.
I’m hoping they rescind this policy under duress and criticism. There’s talent on the tour that deserves to be there - and the talent is not in learning a new language. Anyone who plays golf knows it’s the hardest game in the world - there’s no reason to add unnecessary requirements to entry.
[…] Earlier, I talked about the LPGA policy to suspend players that could not pass an English proficiency exam. Well, it took them about a week, but the LPGA has decided to rethink the policy. I should hope so. They buckled under both criticism from media and players, but it seems that what finally did them in was criticism from sponsors. Not a big surprise that they go where the sponsors say, but at least they took the right stand. For example: One of the tour’s title sponsors, State Farm, already weighed in this week by saying it was “dumbfounded.” “We don’t understand this and we don’t know why they have done it,” State Farm spokesman Kip Diggs told Advertising Age on its Web site. “And we have strongly encouraged them to take another look at this.” […]