LPGA continues to show corporate mentality with mom and pop product

If the LPGA doesn’t want Barry and Stacy Solomon, then they have no idea who they want.

In a Golf for Beginners blog, the Solomons recount their battle to get media credentials for the upcoming Sybase Classic.

“The LPGA does not acknowledge blogs (or podcast media) as recognizable news outlets working on assignment and on deadline,” they were told by one of the LPGA’s corporate stooges.

Now don’t get me wrong, of the 8.75 trillion bloggers out there these days, there are plenty I wouldn’t recognize, either.

As a reader and strong believer of free speech, however, bloggers have added a new richness to the landscape. In a sport like golf, you get bloggers covering everything from course and equipment reviews to, well, whatever it is I do here sometimes.

Still, it doesn’t take an advanced degree in marketing to be able to tell there are varying levels of bloggers. Geoff Shackleford wrote about this same topic in his blog.

As an extreme hypothetical: Do you think that if Shackleford asked for a media credential to the Sybase Classic he’d get one? He is a blogger, after all. Or perhaps the LPGA would be able to do a couple minutes of research and see that he’s a working journalist and author with a solid audience, also.

Regardless of one’s thoughts on the significance of WorldGolf.com, it takes about a minute of to see that the Solomons are the type of writers that the LPGA should be striving for. This isn’t a “We don’t cater to bloggers” issue. It’s a “We’ve sold out our common sense” issue.

Basically, the LPGA is a mom & pop store that’s dying to be as annoyingly corporate as the PGA Tour is now. And that’s not so easy when your product captures the public’s imagination with the same intensity as did the WUSA.

And it gets even more difficult when the female golfer most embraced by the corporate world – Michelle Wie – is apparently making it her life’s work to make the LPGA purely irrelevant.

As much as those in charge of the LPGA want to think that they’re the NBA, they’re not. Like it or not, women’s golf is a niche sport right now, with the hardcore golf and women’s sports nuts making up its fan base. They need Barry and Stacy and those like them to spread the word.

“The strategic plan and analysis we’ve been doing behind the scenes won’t show up in large measure until 2007,” LPGA Commissioner Carolyn Bivens said in a recent interview with the Virginia Pilot.

We can only hope so, Carolyn, because right now you’re all coming off as clueless. And bloggers and the “real” media aren’t that far off from no longer acknowledging your product as a recognizable sport.

–WKW