Sweeping generalizations about female golfers piss me off, but I’m used to them.
John Huggan, who usually writes such thoughtful and interesting golf articles, put up a rare sensational piece in which he says coach David Whelan is “making great strides towards closing what is perhaps the biggest gender gap in golf.” Baloney. David Whelan is making sweeping generalizations about female golfers to get himself some attention and John Huggan gave him the vehicle.
First of all, that gender gap to which he is referring is the short game – everything from 100 yards and in. I think we all know that’s not the biggest gender gap in golf. That would be the long game. Okay, you caught me. Some sweeping generalizations are true.
Second, if we’re talking about a real gender gap in golf, that includes the millions of golfers who don’t play professionally. Not just the elite on tour. From my experience playing with amateur women and men, short games are created equal. Interest, focus, training and experience all factor into whether a person plays well inside 100 yards. Not gender.
Whelan’s whole spiel is about training women (he seems to prefer the term “girls”) on the short game. If they pay more attention to that part of the game, they’ll get better at it. Wow, maybe he read a book! But to get himself noticed, he thought it would be a good idea to say that not only are women worse at the short game than men, but that it’s because they are women. Maybe he is a good technical coach but his social and communication skills are primitive. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t want her in his camp (the David Leadbetter Golf Academy in Florida).
Huggan points out a more reasonable explanation: “Another factor in the relatively poor short games on the LPGA Tour is the level of facilities typically available to the players.” And he supports it with Whelan’s own observations:
“When I started working with Paula, she was a 15-year-old amateur who was getting invites to events where there were no chipping greens or pitching areas. Even at the Nabisco event, which is a major, there is still no chipping green.”
But it goes downhill from there:
“So bad technique around the greens is the biggest thing holding the girls back. That and a constant reassurance that they have to hit balls all day. A lot of them feel that, if they don’t hit a lot of balls, then they don’t deserve to play well.”
So you see, their girly lack of self confidence and perhaps the pressure of the REAL gender gap is causing them to spend too much time on their long games, thus creating the short game gender gap. Silly girls! So let’s undermine them some more and give them a new way to feel inferior, because we wouldn’t want to hold them back. Too bad the only support for his assertion is a stat related to putting, not chipping or pitching:
“Look at the stats. A 29 putts per round average barely gets you into the top 100 on the PGA Tour; on the LPGA Tour, that number has you in the top 30.”
And isn’t it funny there is no mention of the difference in the putting greens on the courses the men and women play. And too bad the good point is buried in the middle of the article surrounded by all the other crap:
“You have to be more ‘softly softly’ with girls, and they need more encouragement. They seem to lack self-confidence. So that needs to be instilled in them early. They are competitive, though. They hate to get beat. Which is a good thing.
There’s that “girls need more encouragement” statement again. At least he gets one thing right: self-confidence does need to be instilled in them early. Then they need to stay away from him so it doesn’t get talked out of them.
“Still, it’s a lot easier to work with the guys than the girls. You can work with more men than women. For example, the men aren’t as bothered about me watching them play. The girls like me to watch. They are convinced that there is something happening out there that isn’t on the range.”
Then go back to working with the guys. The girls like you to watch? Are you sure you’re focusing on their short games and not their short skirts? Do you have pillow-fight drills in your sessions just to hammer home what girls are really good for? For a guy who used to play professionally, you sure don’t seem to remember that there is a difference between working on the range and playing in an event or even just a casual round. It’s called the mental game. Maybe they want you to identify what their weaknesses are when they’re under pressure so they can work on those. The men probably figure that you’ll be watching anyway since they’re on TV. At least I assume you’re talking about the pros when you mention “men” and the kids from the academy when you mention the “girls.” Oh wait, you were just talking about the pros, right? Well, many of those “girls” get about as much TV coverage as the kids do anyway. Plus they know you’ll be watching that other channel with the REAL golf.
The short game is important – revolutionary! Gee, your instruction methods focus on the short game. How unique. Wow, you work with some big names like Paula Creamer, Catriona Matthew, Aree and Naree Song and Rachel Hetherington. Too bad you had to act like such a caveman while getting the word out.
Huggan makes a reasonable observation about the golfers he has watched lately and that the women’s short games weren’t as good as the men’s. I can accept that. He sees what he sees. But to broaden it into a sport-wide gender gap by giving it the sensational title “Why women can’t match men even with the putter” and support the idea with one coach’s idiotic ramblings that basically amount to “because they’re girls”? I’m inspired. I’m going to go hold up the fast lane as I put mascara on while I drive to the golf course to play really slowly and ignore the rules and etiquette.
Next post.
How the FedEx do these Playoff points work???
Okay, I haven’t paid that much attention to the FedEx Cup from the start so I’m a little behind, but I can’t be the only one!
I remember hearing or reading that when the FedEx Cup Playoffs began the points would reset. Silly me, I thought that meant to ZERO. Isn’t that a reset? I also remember that there are eliminations in each playoff tournament and only the top however many will advance to the next round. So, when I found out Tiger was skipping the first event, I thought he was essentially shrugging off forfeiting his chance at the FedEx Cup since he wouldn’t earn any points and would be eliminated. It turns out that after the completion of the first event, Tiger is fourth in the standings. How the fedex did that happen?
I just had to look it up, didn’t I?
Until now, I hadn’t taken any time to look any of this up but I always read a lot of golf news and opinions and what I’ve seen on the points system is so bogged down and confusing I tend to just skim over it. I just took a look at the “About the FedEx Cup” page on PGATOUR.com and literally shook my head and made that bleuhhbuhluhbuhluh noise. Of course, the reset wasn’t to zero, but players were seeded based on their performance during the “regular season” and reset with a different point total than what they had. Of course. Why play all season just make it to the playoffs? There has to be seeding. Without it, the top players would have to play in all the playoff events to avoid elimination and I’m sure they didn’t want that.
*Side thought* I wonder – if my Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim win enough games in September, can they skip the Division Series and go straight to the League Championship Series? Ah, the leisure of being a baseball fan: the most difficult thing to figure out is the magic number and home-field advantage. *End side thought*
Still, they got me – I couldn’t resist clicking on the “Fan Guide” link to find out if there was a simple way for me to understand it all. There isn’t.
Watch and learn?
I spent most of my golf watching time this weekend on the Safeway Classic and the US Amateur, but I managed to TiVo my way through some of the Barclays on Sunday to try to get an idea about how the whole FedEx Cup playoff thing was working. They had a lot of graphics with projections like “if he makes this par putt, he’ll be at 102nd in the rankings… if he misses it but makes the bogey putt, he’ll be at 116th”… and on and on. Maybe that kind of stuff will get more exciting the further into the playoffs we get, but for now? Yawn. Double yawn for having to rely on behind-the-scenes statisticians figure it out and the production team to air it.
As the field narrows and if the points gap gets wider, it might be easier to predict parts of it ourselves. Something like “For Vijay to have a fedexing chance at winning the cup, he must win at the BMW and the top three guys need to finish at 5th or lower.” It’s easy to get excited about playoffs when they’re easily understood: if team A wins a game here and team B wins a game there, they will face each other in the championship; if Team C gets a touchdown and a safety and Team D scores two field goals, I win the pool. Hey, maybe we need a FedEx Cup pool!
Predictions aside, there’s also the trouble of possibly having two winners at the final – the winner of the tournament (hooray!) and the winner of the Cup, who finishes 10th in the event but has more points than anyone else (polite golf clap).
I want to get excited about the FedEx Cup. I really do! But even the prize is confusing. I’m not a financial analyst and if I won $10 million in the lottery, I would need someone else to manage it for me. I’m one of the dumb-dumbs in the “if I made less money I’d take home more” tax bracket. I don’t understand tax shelters for multi-millionaires or how the FedEx Cup $10M annuity could entice Tiger Woods when he can make that in cash for an appearance fee. Frankly, I really don’t think I want it explained to me, either. Though I usually enjoy rooting for Tiger – or at least don’t mind when he wins -I think I’d rather just root for some obscure player to win the Cup, which might just be possible the way this thing works. Plus, that coincides nicely with the one thing that truly is exciting about this system, at least for those obscure players: Finish in that top 30 in FedEx Cup points and earn exemption for the next season. That’s gotta be less stressful than Q-School!
“The PGA TOUR Playoffs for the FedEx Cup will change the way you watch golf and produce a true PGA Tour champion.” That’s their tag line. Will I glaze over and start to drool as I watch golf? Will the true PGA Tour champion be the best golfer on Tour?
The most exciting thing about the FedEx Cup playoffs for me right now is whether or not the FedEx Cup playoffs will get exciting. If not, at least I’ll have a new swear word. Stop. I. Can’t. Stand. The. Giddiness.
Next post.