What A Week It Was

Hjorth twice got to 13 under, first when she made a 10-foot birdie on No. 10. But she double-bogeyed No. 13 after a lost ball because of a hooked drive. She returned to 13 under when she chipped in on No. 16, only to miss a four-foot par putt on the next hole. Tseng's victory capped a comeback in which an opening-round 73 left her T-78. She made the cut by only two strokes at 143, nine strokes behind midway leader Ochoa.

The closest any player from Taiwan had come to winning a major was T.C. Chen in the 1985 U.S. Open at Oakland Hills. He had a four-stroke lead in the final round then unraveled after a double-hit on a chip shot. Tseng saw the shot on TV the week before the McDonald's and marveled because "that's not really a hard shot," she laughed, blaming the double-hit on poor technique. "But don't tell him that," she said, laughing more.

Tseng was not the only winner last week. In taking control of the tour's flagship tournament, Bivens picked up a major of her own. Armed with a three-year contract extension and a lot of marketable talent, Bivens has embarked on a plan she calls Vision 2010, designed to expand the tour globally while maintaining its core of domestic events and getting better television exposure.

Friday at Bulle Rock, it was announced that after next year's tournament, the event will be known as The LPGA Championship—with no title sponsor but presenting sponsors—and will have a $3 million purse, a bump of $1 million from its current payday and second only to the $3.1 million at the U.S. Women's Open. The LPGA Championship joins the ADT Championship and the Solheim Cup as the only tour-owned events. "The LPGA has been surviving for 58 years," Bivens told Golf World. "Now is the time to move into the world of major sports."

Bivens' ambitious plans for the organization include the tour adding the LPGA Championship to events it owns. Photo: David Cannon/Getty Images

Sources familiar with the situation say the LPGA Championship will be moved to August—making it the last of the four majors—preferably to a course in the northeast. One source said a potential sponsor recently visited Carnegie Abbey Club on Narragansett Bay in Portsmouth, R.I. A plan to rotate the tournament among three courses, including Baltusrol GC, was dismissed as unwieldy and inefficient. No money exchanged hands in the deal and Herb Lotman, co-founder of the McDonald's event, will remain as honorary chairman.

"Could the proceeds from the LPGA Championship be the beginning of a real retirement fund?" Bivens asked. "Could it contribute two, three, four, five million dollars a year to the pension fund? The business plan we have for 2010 can take this tour to a new level of financial stability."

The tour gives about $450,000 a year to the pension plan, with players getting as little as $150 a month upon retirement and no more than $800. The PGA Tour's deferred-income plan promises payouts in the tens of millions of dollars to some players. Bivens said the ADT Championship, in the first year of LPGA ownership, "had a high six-figure turnaround" on the tour's investment, raising the prospect the LPGA Championship can make even more money.

Part of the business plan is to have premier season-opening and season-closing events, sources said. Toward that end, the 32-player ADT Championship with its $1 million first prize will be moved to January beginning in 2010. Another tournament will replace it to cap the season in November. The tour hopes to use ownership of the LPGA Championship and the ADT Championship as leverage to sell an eight-to-12 tournament package to a TV network.

"We have to get away from time-buys and move onto rights fees," Bivens said about the current financial reality under which the LPGA tournaments purchase television time and then sell the advertisements. The PGA Tour, on the other hand, receives more than $250 million a year in television money and subsidizes nearly two-thirds of its purses. The LPGA's contracts with ESPN and Golf Channel are up after the 2009 season, another reason next year will be perhaps the most important LPGA season ever.

Beginning next year, there will be two Asia swings, hitting Singapore and Thailand in the spring and China, Japan and Korea in the fall. The tour also has looked at events in Abu Dhabi and India. Currently, the largest revenue stream for the LPGA is Korean television money and the second largest is TV money from Japan.