"I don't think anyone is going to challenge it now," says Kang of the new requirement, "but if someone gets caught in this will they challenge it? Is [this rule] a net positive or a negative for the image of the LPGA? That remains to be seen. There is no way to get around this policy generally but there will be some, especially civil libertarians, who will see it as really un-American."
Certainly, there have been times when a good story has been lost because of a player's inability to communicate it and the media's unwillingness to struggle past the language barrier. Ji-Yai Shin, who won the Ricoh Women's British Open this year, lost her mother in a car crash when she was 15 and slept for a year on a cot in the hospital room of her brother and sister as they recovered from their injuries in the crash.
Shin's story was not so much lost in translation as it was minimized because of the effort needed to tell that saga. Where the blame resides -- with the media, with the player or with the tour -- is a complicated question. And while legislating the solution to that problem is a bold step by the LPGA, the full implication of its emphasis-on-English policy -- both positive and negative -- will only be understood over time. And the evaluation of of that policy will certainly be told in many different tongues.
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