Q and A: LPGA commissioner Mike Whan talks about challenges of 2020, bright future for women's golf

Mike Whan began his tenure as LPGA commissioner 10 years ago. At the time Whan came on board, the LPGA was, in the words of 10-time tour winner Paula Creamer, “pretty much at rock bottom.”

The number of events had been shrinking. Prize money was down. Interest was minimal.

In 2020, the LPGA unveiled its biggest schedule with the richest purses in its history. Social media has helped make players more visible. TV exposure is greater, and the tour has increased its global footprint exponentially.

The first decade of Whan’s tenure was an undisputed success. His second decade opened with the LPGA — and every other sport — dealing with the effects of the covid-19 pandemic.

In a video chat Monday, Whan discussed the pandemic and other LPGA topics with the Tribune-Review. Following are excerpts from that interview:

Is this pandemic the most difficult challenge you have faced during your tenure as commissioner?

“Not just my tenure at the LPGA, but the most difficult business challenge I have faced in my career. I’m 55, so I have spent a little time in business.

“It was probably two years ago, I remember saying to our board at a board meeting, ‘Back in 2009 when you hired me, it was in the middle of a pretty significant U.S. recession, and that recession really hampered the LPGA because people pulled back on hospitality and sports spending. Now if you jump forward to 2019, we have title sponsors from all over the world. We have title sponsors from different parts of the world that are sponsors here in America and vice versa.’ … I said, ‘We’re never going to be insulated from recession, but right now we can sort of handle recessions in different parts of the world because we’re so diverse in our portfolio.’

“I probably should have been struck by lightning as soon as I made that comment because now when you jump into 2020, nobody envisioned a globalrecession.

“It’s been really frustrating. We have been on a pretty good run, especially the past four to five years. We just announced our biggest schedule, our biggest TV revenues, most purses in LPGA history and were really excited about getting started. … To watch it kind of go away in four months … it’s like anything else you care about, are passionate about and worked hard on. It’s hard to watch.

“We’ll get through it. It’s just been a really challenging time.”

When this is all over and things return to normal, do you feel like the LPGA will come out of it in good shape?

“I am not going to deliver the best 2020 schedule I can possibly deliver. I’m going to deliver the best ’21 and ’22 (schedule) and figure out how to work with my partners through ’20.

“I’ve got a lot of tournaments that, contractually, should play an event in 2020. But either their business can’t do it or where they want to play is a bad covid spot, the health ministries in that area don’t want to do it, the government doesn’t want to do it (or) the country leaders don’t want us to do it.

“So rather than flex my legal muscle and say, ‘This is what we’re going to do in 2020,’ I’m working with each sponsor and saying, ‘If this doesn’t work with you … let’s just take ’20 off the map. Let’s extend your contract by a year.’ … So I can tell you sitting here, my 2021 schedule will not only be a great schedule, it will be bigger than the 2020 schedule I announced at the beginning of 2020.

“I think when you work with somebody through a crisis like this, you don’t force people to do what they are legally supposed to do. You say, ‘Hey, let’s figure out how this can work best for your business.’

“I have been really floored with sponsors who have stepped up with bigger purses, longer term agreements, helped us financially in 2020 even if we’re not playing their event. I think by keeping my eye on the long term and realizing that 2020 is not going to be great — I already have said to my players, ‘No matter how much or how little opportunity I give you in 2020, you’re not going to like it. It’s not going to be the 2020 we set out to get.’ — I am not going to try to impress you with the greatest 2020 and risk ’21 and ’22.”

Where does the LPGA stand in terms of its safety protocols for its return to play next month?

“We’re pretty done with all of the testing protocols, return to play. It has consumed our life for the last 90 days. I would say 90% of my life has been built around how to safely return to play. The good news, if there is any good news in covid, is over those 90 days, testing has become more available, better testing has become available. … We haven’t sent (the plan) out to every tournament. We sent it out to the first four or five tournaments because I really think testing will become both easier and less expensive and faster as the summer goes on.”

What about having fans at your events?

“It’s going to be one tournament at a time. We will have fans in Northwest Ohio when we start with the Marathon Classic. We will not have fans in Scotland when we play the Aberdeen Ladies Scottish and the AIG. We likely will have fans at (the) Walmart (Northwest Arkansas Championship) at Rogers, Ark. After that, it’s too far out to sort of know. It wouldn’t surprise me if you would see some events with fans and pro-ams and some events without, really dependent on where we are locally and what are the gathering restrictions in each of those markets.

“Even where we do have fans, we really had to pull back on fans that we can have. We’ve had to kind of eliminate all of the meeting places that we typically create that have just become part of who we are. The best angle we can take from a safety perspective is say, ‘Generally speaking, we’re playing on a 6-mile park, and to have 5,000 people on a 6-mile park, you’re just fine to have as much social spacing as you want.’ ”

As you look back on your first decade as LPGA Tour commissioner, what accomplishment are you most proud of?

“For me, I always tell our staff, when my tenure as commissioner is over, no one is going to really talk about the one tournament or the purse increases or the TV growth. They’re really going to ask if women’s golf is better because we were here.

“I think the thing I am most proud of, when I first started, about 80-85% of golf was men, and about 15-20% was women. And more importantly, the future of the game was 80% men and 20% women, meaning junior golf. People would ask me, ‘How do you feel about the future of women’s golf?’ I would think to myself, ‘Unfortunately, I already know the future. They’re already playing. They are just under the age of 18, and it looks exactly like the past. There is no change.’ And if you jump forward to today, 36% of junior golf is women. … The future of this game is going to be so much more female, and that may not show up while I am commissioner. I always tell my friends, ‘If you don’t like women’s golf, get over it because we’re coming, and we’re coming in huge numbers.’

“… No matter where you look in the world, the future of the game is twice as much female as it was just a decade ago.”

As you look at the tour now, who might have the combination of talent and appeal like a Paula Creamer had when she won the U.S. Open at Oakmont in 2010?

“For people who really follow the LPGA, they’ll probably tell you there’s always 20 with the ‘it’ factor. Someone who can win the U.S. Open and reach the top of the world rankings? To be determined. But … I see it on the LPGA with Danielle Kang and Nelly Korda and Jessica Korda and Lexi Thompson. They all sort of have that, in terms of big-name, American star power, super athletes, super camera-ready. I see it happen on the Symetra Tour as well. There’s a brand new player, a rookie on the Symetra Tour this year, Sierra Brooks, who sort of has the same, like Paula, athletic power who probably could have been a good athlete at whatever she played. And really they are coming out of college on a regular basis.

“The cool thing for me and the cool thing for the LPGA is, while there is always this pool of superstar American talent, now there’s that same sort of superstar talent coming out of Korea, Australia, Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan. … When I started 10 years ago, you really didn’t see a lot of women playing golf in Thailand. Today, you see players in the top 20 in the world rankings from Thailand.

“… We’re sort of borderless. If you’re a 9-year-old young girl dreaming of making it big in golf, no matter where you live in the world, now there’s probably someone for you to look up to and go, ‘Well, I can just follow her path.’ And that wasn’t always the case.”

Can you foresee Pittsburgh becoming a stop on the LPGA Tour?

“I sure hope so. … I don’t sit in my office with a map on the wall and circle cities and go, ‘That’s where I want to be.’ As a Cincinnatian, we should be in Cincinnati, because I’d like an excuse to go home every once in a while.

“If you’re a Cincinnatian you like and hate Pittsburgh. You like Pittsburgh because it looks like Cincinnati and feels like Cincinnati. You hate it because we always end our playoffs when we play the Steelers.

“At the LPGA, we are big-time professional athletics, and we’re televised all over the world, but when we come to your town, we actually meet you, live in your homes with you, get to know you. We don’t stay at the Marriott Marquis with police escorts and, ‘Please don’t talk to the athletes.’ We get involved in the community.

“Knowing Pittsburgh the way I do, we would become part of Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh would become part of us. It fits. … Nobody would enjoy that more than me. As a true Midwestern guy, born and raised, Pittsburgh just fits for me.”

If we are sitting here talking about the LPGA 10 years from now, what do you hope we are talking about?

“I think people will recognize the advantages of being a true global sport. Most Americans sort of don’t get that. When you have a bunch of players from another part of the world, most Americans don’t get that. They call it a ‘World’ Series, but it’s really just for American (teams) to play.

“I spend a lot of time with other leaders from other sports, and they all ask the same thing, ‘How do you get 170 countries to buy your TV rights?’ First off you have to be willing to travel the world. We don’t just sell you the TV rights. We come and play an event in those different countries. We created a forum where the best players in the world not only want to come to the LPGA but can, so I think 10 years from now, people will look back and say, ‘All the best sports in the world are truly global.’ People from all over the world watch it. People from all over the world sponsor it, and the world follows the sport. And we’ll be one of the leaders of that. Even in golf, nobody is global like the LPGA is global. I think even men’s tours look to us and how we have led on that front.

“And also … I hope they’ll talk about a sport that truly planted seeds for the future of the game. … Women’s golf has been life-changing in a lot of parts of the country in terms of creating dreams for young girls that didn’t seem feasible.

“All the time I’m standing in a country where a young girl will say to me, ‘This is the first time my dad has ever brought me to a sport, and we’re watching women.’ ”