"If it’s so hard to find accessible pin placements on these two tracks, then why bring amateurs here?"

Randell Mell reports from the Stanford International where an excessively difficult setup mixed with a pro-am format to create 6 hour rounds Friday.

"Just silly tough," Sorenstam said.

It wasn’t a bad day for Sorenstam, whose 2-under-par 68 on the Miller course left her just one shot off the lead, but she felt for all the amateurs struggling in high winds and on undulating greens with tough pin placements.

"It was way too tough," Sorenstam said. "Some of the pins, it’s U.S. Open. These guys are intimidated. They want to help out. It’s long, it’s tough, it was just way too difficult. They’re tucked behind bunkers, they’re tucked in the back."

Sorenstam and her amateur partner, Stanford Financial advisor Russ O’Brien, played a 5-hour and 50-minute round teamed with Natalie Gulbis and her partner, IMG Chairman Ted Forstmann. That was about the average round on both courses. The average early rounds with threesomes on the LPGA Tour is about 4 hours and 40 minutes, according to LPGA Tour officials.

Great to see Ted Forstmann supporting the LPGA Tour.

"It would be fun if it was a little more friendly for them, so they can enjoy it," Sorenstam said of the amateurs. "You can see they’re dragging in the end because they’re focusing so hard and want to help."

LPGA Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer Chris Higgs said the pro-am setup is a work in progress. It’s the first LPGA pro-am within tournament competition in seven years.

"We have to make sure the course setup is worthy of a championship round of golf in an LPGA tournament," Higgs said. "And at the same time, you have amateurs playing as well, so there’s a balance you have to reach."

The tees, pin placements and overall course setup must remain the same today on both courses so everyone plays the same setup, but Higgs said the tournament staff will reassess for future consideration.

"It’s a necessary evolution of a format like this," Higgs said.

Beth Ann Baldry catalogs the slow play issues in more detail, sharing Young Kim's slow play related knickname and the disaster of a difficult par-3 second hole on one course. It's enough of a design flaw to have a par-3 so early in the round, and then to stretch it out and tuck the pin takes real talent!

Let’s start with the par-3 second hole on the Miller Course. Weighing in at 210 yards, it ranks as one of the longest par 3s LPGA pros will face all year. Add the element of amateur players into the equation and it’s no wonder players were waiting 45 minutes to an hour on the tee. (I’d tell you the hole’s scoring average for the week, but the tour didn’t keep stats on the Miller Course.)

Sounds like they're reading from the Tom Meeks School of Course Setup manual...

LPGA COO Chris Higgs convened the media Friday afternoon to revisit a conversation on course setup that took place the day before. He stuck by all of his comments from Thursday, adding that six-hour rounds were “normal” for this type of format. He also said tucked pins on these undulating greens were sometimes easier for players to get to than those sitting in the middle of these rather severe greens.

If it’s so hard to find accessible pin placements on these two tracks, then why bring amateurs here?

Should Ochoa Tee It Up With The Men?

Steve Elling reports that Lorena Ochoa has twice turned down sponsor's invites to the PGA Tour's Mayakoba Golf Classic, staged in her native Mexico. And while it's not the Colonial in terms of exposure, it's hard to fathom a negative in this should she accept what sounds like an open invitation to play anytime.

Moving up a league seems downright logical, since tedium could set in at any moment -- if not for her, then her growing fan base. She's has won her five LPGA starts this year by an average of 7.6 strokes, including a pair by 11. Yeah, a touchdown, field goal and two-point conversion amount to a pretty big deficit in golf.

When Annika Sorenstam played against the boys at Colonial in 2003, it created a three-tiered public-relations boon for her career, the event and the LPGA. Ochoa last year supplanted Sorenstam as No. 1 in the women's rankings, and though the notion of females competing against men has since been relegated to the stuff of desperate publicity stunts (see: Michelle Wie), Ochoa's presence in a field can be justified on a competitive level.

Lorena Does Something Tiger Will Never Do: Wins For Fourth Straight Week...

...unless of course he decides to play all four playoff events this year. 

Which reminds me, I've got to go check the FedEx Cup standings.

But first, Ochoa's five of six this year and just won each of the last four weeks, taking the Ginn Open. That's insane. 

Larry Dorman reports that she is finally taking a few weeks off. 

"Ochoa visited the Mission Hills grounds crew Monday to thank them for their hard work and help them make scrambled eggs."

A nice anecdote about Dinah Shore winner (sorry, I can't keep up on the latest tournament name) Lorena Ochoa from Golfweek's Sean Martin:

The people she really had to win for this week were the five mariachis standing behind the 18th green. What would they play if Ochoa slipped up Sunday and let Maria Hjorth or Seon Hwa Lee walk away with the title?

Ochoa visited the Mission Hills grounds crew Monday to thank them for their hard work and help them make scrambled eggs. They promised the mariachis would be there for her Sunday.

“I said, ‘OK, I’m going to wait,’ ” Ochoa said. “But it was a good surprise, and they kept their promise.”

I wonder the last time a PGA Tour player visited the maintenance yard and cooked with them...before a tournament to boot.

Doug Ferguson sums up her remarkable performance and the scene Sunday:

She has won the past two majors by a total of nine shots. Ochoa has won three of four tournaments this year by a combined 23 shots.

And...

Ochoa became the first player since Annika Sorenstam in 2005 to win two straight majors, having captured her first major in the Women's British Open at St. Andrews last summer by four shots. Since winning that first major, she is 8-for-13 on the LPGA Tour.

Tiger Woods also has won eight of his past 13 events, including a major.

All Eyes On Ochoa

Nice to see what looks like a solid media turnout for the LPGA's first major of the year. Naturally, they focus on Lorena Ochoa's bid to win her 8th tournament in her last 12 starts. Lawrence Donegan provides the UK take while Thomas Bonk (here) and Leonard Shapiro (here) offer the American perspective.

Only Doug Ferguson dared to focus on someone else, considering the pressure Paula Creamer is under to win even though she's still only 21. 

Brand Lady Sacks Drug Testing Firm; Execs "Role Play" For Scribblers

I never like to encourage Carolyn Bivens' passion for firing people, but it sounds like this move was more than justified after the fiasco earlier this year.

Sean Martin reports on the change.

Now, would someone who was in the press tent please explain this fiasco.

Here I am checking out transcripts on ASAP thinking it's going to be a boring night of blogging when I see that the LPGA general counsel Jill Pilgrim and new testing outfit VP Chris Guinty role-played how the LPGA drug testing program will work with players (let's hope they didn't pee in cups in front of the scribes).  

I wish I could write stuff like this:

(Role playing. Jill playing LPGA Volunteer Escort, Donna playing LPGA Player, Chris Guinty playing self/Drug-Free Sport Lab Representative).

PLAYER ESCORT: Excuse me, Donna? Hi, I'm Jill Pilgrim. I'm a volunteer that's working here with the tournament and the LPGA, and I have been asked to notify you that you have been selected for drug testing.

And I have this form here that explains the process, and there's a notification form, and what I'd like you to do is look at this form and read this paragraph here that explains the different things that you need to do in the next hour to comply with the drug testing program, and then what's going to happen is that I'm going to stay with you and escort you to the drug testing station when you're ready to go tested.

LPGA PLAYER: Okay, do I have to do this right now or can I do it a little bit later?

PLAYER ESCORT: It says right now you have to 60 minutes from now, and we're going to record the time on the sheet in a moment.

So if you want to go off and do something else, you're welcome to but you have to stay within the tournament site, and just understand I'll be with you wherever you go and I'll be your chaperone until we go to the drug testing station. So if you want to go putt, or is there something you want to go do, do you have to go do media or something?

LPGA PLAYER: Actually do I need to go run over to media for a minute, and after that I would like to hit a couple of putts if I have time.

Okay that's enough bandwidth wasted on that.

Ty, will Ed Moorhouse or Charlie Zink be role playing the PGA Tour's testing approach at The Players?

"Ochoa should have won this major by now."

On the eve of the first women's major of the year, Doug Ferguson compares the remarkably similar starts to 2008 shared by Lorena Ochoa and Tiger Woods, but he also considers Ochoa's struggles at Mission Hills.

Two years ago, she tied an LPGA major record with a 10-under 62 in the opening round and still had a three-shot lead going into Sunday until a meltdown on the back nine. Ochoa recovered with an eagle on the final hole to get into a playoff against Karrie Webb, who won on the first extra hole.

Ochoa was tied for the lead going into the weekend last year and looked poised as ever until she missed the par-3 17th green, whiffed on a wedge, took three putts once she got on the green and took quadruple bogey that effectively knocked her out of the tournament.

Moments like that are what makes winning even harder.

The Kraft Nabisco is the only LPGA major that has been played on the same course every year, which makes it similar to the Masters in that respect - and only that respect. Augusta National does not have a Wienermobile next to the practice green.

Geoff Ogilvy spoke recently about why the Masters has such a long list of players who never won a green jacket, and he mentioned the familiarity of the course breeding so much contempt.

"There are demons that don't go away," Ogilvy said. "If you have a few close calls at the U.S. Open, you're always doing it somewhere else. If you have demons at Augusta, which everybody does, guys always remember."

Great as she is, Ochoa's biggest challenge will be to bury those memories.

"I already erased them," she insisted. "I only feel good things about this course, and good vibes and good memories. Of course, you're going to make mistakes and have a few bad holes, like what happened on 17 last year. I struggled on holes 13, 14 and 15. They were holes that I played over par, and I'm going to work on those this year and make sure I play that stretch in a positive way.

"And I think that will really help get a good result on Sunday."

"What sponsor would walk away from a tournament that has produced champions like Annika Sorenstam, Cristie Kerr and Ochoa in the past four years, all the while attracting record crowds?"

In noting the sponsor loss at the seemingly healthy Safeway LPGA event in Phoenix, Bill Huffman says it's time to get "a little bit scared" if you're, say, The Brand Lady.

Four tournaments into the 2008 season and already two of those four events are on the endangered list and need sponsors if they are to return in 2009.

For those keeping track, the Fields Open in Hawaii — the second tournament of the season won by Paula Creamer — reportedly is not only searching for a new title sponsor, it also needs a new course to host the tournament.

Closer to home, the Safeway International announced last week that its title sponsor — America’s third-largest grocery store chain — is bagging it after next week’s tournament at Superstition Mountain Golf and Country Club, which is willing to hang around if a new sponsor can be secured.

The Safeway International had made record-breaking crowds on the LPGA its calling card, much like its big brother, the FBR Open, does on the PGA Tour. Granted, the numbers were dramatically smaller, but 151,000 fans came out last year to watch Lorena Ochoa win the tournament, and that’s about double the average galleries on the LPGA.

What sponsor would walk away from a tournament that has produced champions like Annika Sorenstam, Cristie Kerr and Ochoa in the past four years, all the while attracting record crowds? And what about Superstition Mountain, voted as the “best-conditioned course on the LPGA’’ the past three years by the players?

Speaking of the Safeway, reader Phil noted that the reason for Michelle Wie's latest WD is going to prompt more questions. 

Wie's agent, Jill Smoller of the William Morris Agency, said the Stanford freshman reinjured her left wrist when she accidentally hit a ball that was embedded in thick rough on the driving range at Stanford on March 13. 

Thick rough on the range? 

Safeway Pulls Out of Popular Phoenix LPGA Event

Bill Huffman reports that one of the tour's more popular events is about to lose its sponsor, and includes some interesting numbers in the story.

Maletis said it takes about $5 million “on the average” to run an LPGA event.

“But that also depends a little bit on the level of participation by the sponsor, so we wouldn’t necessarily need a $5 million commitment in order for a sponsor to get involved with our tournament,” he said.

Last year, a record 151,000-plus fans turned out to watch Mexico’s Lorena Ochoa, the No. 1 ranked player in the world, win the Safeway International. The tournament also raised $1 million for charity with an economic impact on the East Valley estimated at over $21 million.

Brand Lady: We Love Asian Women!

Thanks to LPGA Fan for noticing Commissioner Carolyn Bivens's response to concerns that the LPGA Tour has been invaded by Asians. It's good to see her command of the English language still stinks:

"Yes, there is a huge number (of Asian players), but if the LPGA Tour is going to remain home to the best women's golf in the world, the last thing you want to do is put quotas on it," Bivens told reporters during Thursday's opening round of the $2 million HSBC Women's Champions championship in Singapore.

"I am not concerned about Americans getting squeezed out.

"Do you want to have the best tour, do you want to have the most competition, do you want to have the highest level of performance? Or do you want to protect a nationality? We think we are doing both."

Wait, so you are protecting a nationality? Would that be, like, the Oscar party thing?

"I don't think there are any Americans out there today who wouldn't say that Asians have made this tour better and more competitive," she added.

Bivans said the LPGA was working hard to overcome the challenges of limited exposure and media coverage, but she said she was convinced this could be achieved by attracting the world's best to the tour.

"If we have the most competitive tour in the world, we'll draw the best sponsors, we'll draw the most rabid fans and our media challenges will be lessened," she insisted.

"Performance is the very first standard that we have to uphold."

Wow, not one mention of branding. This is disturbing.

LPGA: Just Kidding!

Turns out that two hour wait to pee in a cup was just a test run, only the players didn't know it (and they aren't too happy!).

Ron Sirak reports.

LPGA Drug Testing Matches Tour's On-Course Pacing

Beth Ann Baldry reports on Golfweek.com that they LPGA testing is off and, about two holes behind for some players.

For Wright, the process of giving a sample with someone in the room was more worrisome than the results. But she got in and out in 35 minutes. For Maria Hjorth, it was only 20 minutes. Natalie Gulbis, however, waited for at least 2 hours before someone was available to administer her test.

“I think they have some kinks they definitely need to work out,” said Gulbis, who noted that more administrators were added as the day went along. “But everything was handled very professionally.”

And...

Kelli Kuehne opened with a 5-under 67 but never made it to the media room to talk about her round. She went in for testing immediately after turning in her scorecard and sat in a holding room for 2 hours, 45 minutes. By the time she’d finished, Kuehne didn’t even feel like practicing.

“I was one of the guinea pigs,” she said. “I’m hoping it’s something they will fine-tune.”

They Penalize Slow Play On The LPGA Tour!

If I wasn't out at Riviera watching PGA Tour pros take their sweet time I would have caught Bill Kwon's excellent summary of Angela Park's expensive two-shot penalty last week at Turtle Bay.

Park was only one stroke behind winner Annika Sorenstam at one time, but a triple-bogey 7 at 10 gave her a final-round 69 — 209 and a tie for fifth with Japan's Momoko Ueda. They finished one shot behind Russy Gulyanamitta, Laura Diaz and Jane Park, who shared second at 208.

So instead of getting $100,458 for being second alone, Park got $40,872.

Let the whining begin...

"I didn't think it was fair at all," said Park, the only one in her threesome to be penalized after being put on the clock at the 10th tee.

"It was kinda really unfair for penalizing me on that one hole when I was playing quick throughout the whole day," she said.

Uh huh... 

"It's especially unfair for the last four, five groups of the day. I've seen many, many occasions last year when the last group was a hole behind, but I respected that because they're trying to play to win. When he (rules official Doug Brecht) came up to me and penalized me, I was like, you know where I am on this leaderboard? You have any idea?

"I have nothing against him, I have nothing mean to say about him. He said he was going by the rules, which I understand, which is his job. But then I told him, if it was Paula (Creamer), if it was Annika, would you have penalized them? He didn't say anything. I was crying my eyes out, I couldn't help it. It was an embarrassing thing to say, but I was almost bawling.

Almost...

"I told him, well, that's for TV isn't it? It would have looked bad for you on TV if you penalized Paula or Annika. He didn't say anything. I was, like, I would have respect (for) you if you would have penalized them, too. Then I would have been OK, that's fine. That's your job. I respect you for that. But he didn't say anything.

"I was, like, you know, that's just not fair. That's how life is and I've just got to move on from it."

Brecht told Park on the 10th tee that she was on the clock. "She violated our pace-of-play policy and was penalized two shots," he said.

As for Park asking if he would do the same to Creamer and Sorenstam in that same situation, Brecht said, "She never asked me that question. If she did, I didn't hear her ask me that question."

Brent Kelly offers this primer on the LPGA's policy and also this comparison with the PGA Tour's policy.

Gulbis Rebranding Commences With Exclusive Images Appearing Intensely Bored At New York Fashion Shows

First we learned she was going to lose the G-strings, then she said it was never her intention to deprive us of those irresistable anklet sock tan lines and then she fired her agent to assure us that such a scare would never happen again.

Yet in this lame-beyond-belief, page-view generating SI/golf.com slideshow, Jeff Zelevanksy follows Natalie Gulbis around New York's fashion scene where we see two sides of her: bored beyond belief and intensely glazed over while seated amongst life-like manneqins and the freaky fashion industry elite.

Oh, and all while fully clothed.

Sure looks to me like the rebranding has begun. Say it ain't so Natalie!

Gulbis Leaves Octagon For IMG; Fans Assured That Famously Exploitative Agency Will Fully Exploit Her Hot Babe Status

Scott Hamilton reports the good news for those who were alarmed by last fall's reported re-branding.