![\"Future](\"https:\/\/www.golfballs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Future-Alliance-between-the-PGA-and-LPGA.jpg\")
<\/a>Future Alliance between the PGA and LPGA<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cWhat else is there in life,\u201d asked Jim Colbert as an impish smile crossed his face, \u201cbut golf and girls?\u201d The occasion was the first ever Mixed Team Golf Championship on the Blue Monster course at Miami\u2019s Doral Country Club. The format featured a two-person team with an LPGA Tour player and a PGA Tour player each hitting a drive from their respective tees and playing alternate shots the remainder of the hole. The date was December, 1976.<\/p>\n
Forty years later, while Adam Scott<\/a> was cementing his position as the world\u2019s best golfer circa Winter 2016 at that same Doral Country Club, there was golf news about the mingling of the sexes being made again. The LPGA and the PGA issued a joint release<\/a> announcing an alliance between the two tours that \u201cwill include areas such as schedule coordination, joint marketing programs, domestic television representation, digital media, and exploring the potential development of joint events.\u201d What does it mean? Maybe a lot, maybe not.<\/p>\n That Mixed Team Golf Championship in the \u201870s didn\u2019t have a long run, and neither did another off-season event called the Three Tour Challenge that featured pros from the PGA, LPGA and Champions Tour on the same teams. But other than that, the paths of the men\u2019s and women\u2019s professional golf tours have seldom crossed in the 66 years since the LPGA formed in 1950. In 2014, the U.S. Women\u2019s Open was held a week after the Men\u2019s Open at Pinehurst, but the big winner in that deal was the resort. Most of the sporting press packed its bags after the men\u2019s tournament and the Women\u2019s Open scrounged for both spectators and volunteers.<\/p>\n With that in mind, the biggest obvious benefit for the LPGA is increased exposure by hitching its wagon to the television and digital juggernaut of the PGA. For most of its existence the LPGA has survived, and occasionally prospered, with a scant few events on national television. Tour officials have long contended that fans would realize the great fun and golf competition that was going on out on the women\u2019s tour, if only they had the opportunity to see it.<\/p>\n Other world tours have taken the leap lately of developing joint events with men and women, both competing in teams and planning simultaneous tournaments at the same venue. So far these have been on different courses at the same location, but there\u2019s nothing to preclude two limited-field tournaments from playing off different tees on the same course.<\/p>\n It\u2019s less obvious what the PGA would get out of an alliance with the LPGA. The end of its current lucrative television contracts with NBC, CBS and the Golf Channel loom on the horizon, and even though the PGA hype machine has been working overtime to come up with a new narrative to replace Tiger Woods, there\u2019s no sure thing. Witness the recent mania to build a new \u201cBig Three\u201d and how well that has gone. The storyline heading into the Masters looks likely to be more on Scott, Bubba Watson, and a resurgent Phil Mickelson than Jordan Spieth, Jason Day, Rory McIlroy\u2026 and Rickie Fowler if you\u2019re trying to make it the \u201cBig Four.\u201d A more varied golf line-up than the same old 72-holes-but-different-locale format the PGA trots out now, could be energized by a partnership with women\u2019s golf<\/a>.<\/p>\n Or it could be as logical as the PGA seeking to build a wider base among the next generation of fans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWhat else is there in life,\u201d asked Jim Colbert as an impish smile crossed his face, \u201cbut golf and girls?\u201d The occasion was the first ever Mixed Team Golf Championship on the Blue...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1412,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,4,194],"tags":[528,526,527,19],"class_list":["post-1406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-golf","category-news","category-pga-tour-2","tag-lpga","tag-lpga-tour","tag-pga","tag-pga-tour"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1406"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2198,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406\/revisions\/2198"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What Does the LPGA Get Out of such a Deal?<\/h2>\n
What Does the PGA get Out of such a Deal?<\/h2>\n