WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- From an accounting standpoint, the math wasn't as horrific as it might have been. Mostly, they escaped with a flesh wound.
Three fewer tournaments, a slight decrease in the average weekly purses, plus the rearranging of a few events on the 2009 schedule. Mostly, the news with regard to next season's LPGA schedule was greeted with gasps of welcome relief.
The first ripple in the broadening economic tsunami reached shore Wednesday at the ADT Championship, the season-ending LPGA stop staged a couple of miles from the Atlantic coast.
The heavy stuff, however, could be roiling and rolling in soon enough.
LPGA commissioner Carolyn Bivens, in her earlier occupations, recalls enduring at least one stock-market slump, a calamitous dot.com collapse and a brutal savings-and-loan debacle. Yet riding shotgun over a second-row sports league in this climate requires a seatbelt, Dramamine and a seriously chipper disposition.
"Nothing has been more challenging than what we've been through," she said.
She ain't seen nothing yet, perhaps. It'll make for an interesting context check in 12 months, because if the PGA Tour has concerns going forward as it relates to the crucial corporate climate and flagging economy, then the LPGA's future is far less stable.
It was only apropos, then, that Bivens limped into her annual end-of-the-year media confab Wednesday on crutches, having recently had foot surgery. Everybody involved in sports is limping around financially these days, hoping outright amputation isn't next. Remaining upright might be a tough task in itself.
According to a report this week in Sports Business Journal, only five of the 24 LPGA events set to be staged in the U.S. and Canada have contracts with sponsors extending beyond the 2009 season. Obviously, it's a bad time to be dipping a financial ladle into the dry corporate well, especially since women's golf has always been an interesting entity.
By interesting, we mostly mean unique. It's considered the most successful and long-lived professional women's organization ever conceived, dating to 1950. But from another standpoint, it's forever being compared to the male version. In its sixth decade or not, the LPGA remains, in effect, a niche sport within a niche sport. As for the men, Romeo is already bleeding financially, and Juliet is facing an increasingly uncertain and messy fate.
Bivens explained that said the reason that so many tournaments have the same expiration date is simple -- she wanted the renewal terms to be negotiated after a new TV deal was established. That way, both the buyer and seller would have a better idea of whether the terms were advantageous or not.
Trouble is, it ain't a seller's market anymore, no TV deal is in place and the clock is running.
Networks took a bath on golf in 2008. Men's ratings had been slowly declining even before Tiger Woods took a knee at midseason. Networks were forced to provide what are called "make-good" ads during the fall FedEx Cup, because viewing totals were not what had originally been promised to advertisers. So, trying to convince ESPN or the Golf Channel to fork over rights-fee money sounds like an increasingly tough sell.
