"After hearing the concerns, we believe there are other ways to achieve our shared objective of supporting and enhancing the business opportunities to every Tour player," the LPGA said in its statement, adding that it will have "a revised approach" by the end of the year.
This is a road the LPGA went down at the beginning of the 2006 season when it imposed more restrictive credential language on the media without consulting any of the impacted organizations, resulting in a media boycott at the Fields Open. Whether it is related or not, Fields did not renew its contract with the LPGA when it expired after this year's tournament.
That decision, like the attempt to impose a language requirement on players, failed to look down the road in an attempt to identify and avoid the potential potholes. Clearly, the LPGA did not learn from the credential flap. Perhaps backing off from its ill thought out language policy will be a humiliating experience of enough magnitude that, before making future decisions, "valuable feedback" will be sought before policy is established rather than after it is imposed.
This was a black eye that could have been avoided. The LPGA was hit by a sucker punch--and it was the sucker.
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