Peering across the 16th green at Upper Montclair Country Club to watch Michelle Wie knock in her par putt during the first round of last week's Sybase Classic, a one-man commotion just yards away at the 8th green caught my attention.
"It's in, it's in the hole," a man bellowed as he motioned back toward the tee box to indicate that the ball had dropped for a hole-in-one.
The young lady who struck that tee shot at the 145-yard par-3 8th hole was Ji Young Oh, who would go on the win the tournament and the $300,000 top prize that came with it three days later. But on this day, the opening day of the event, her first competitive career ace had been met with subdued excitement at best by two, maybe three fans while the LPGA's great Hawaiian-born hope was surrounded by a star-gazing gallery as she made a routine par.
This scenario perfectly illustrated the dilemma the LPGA is facing. While the Tour has a viable number of superstars to carry the sport, players like Wie, Paula Creamer, Lorena Ochoa and Natalie Gulbis, it also has a deep, talented international pool of golfers, many who arrived by way of South Korea.
The harsh truth is that unless accompanied by a standard bearer at all times, Ji Young Oh would be viewed as interchangeable with Yani Tseng (Taiwan), Jiyai Shin (South Korea) and In-Kyung Kim (South Korea), who all rank among the world's top 10, by the majority of casual American fans who attend LPGA tournaments.
And while there is significant international interest, especially in Asian markets, in the LPGA Tour as evidenced by the LPGA's new lucrative television deal for Korean television rights to its events with J Golf, a subsidiary of Joongang Daily News, worth a reported $4 million annually, even the large contingent of Korean fans in attendance at the Sybase Classic was more interested in Wie until it was clear that Oh had a legitimate shot to win the tournament.
With so many players on the Tour coming from outside of the United States, it's almost impossible to believe that the LPGA will be able to continue as a strictly North American circuit. In the future, the LPGA will need to branch out and hold events in South Korea, China and Japan to capitalize on the interest in those countries, like they did by returning to Mexico, home to the No. 1 women's player in the world Lorena Ochoa.
But for now, I thought it was encouraging to see such a large amount of Asian faces watching the action at the Sybase Classic. They made up a significant portion of the crowd that came to Clifton, New Jersey last week.
As for the American fans who still follow the LPGA Tour, and the new fans who will begin watching women's golf in the months to come, you should at least be expected to try and distinguish between one international player and another instead of simply uttering, "I don't know it's Wang or Chin or one of those Korean players."
Not to make us all sound bigoted, but that's the truth, and I heard that kind of language more than a handful of times over the course of the week. Can you really expect people who probably couldn't name the congressional representatives from their state to spend time learning the identities of the South Korean players on the LPGA Tour. And don't take that the wrong way if you were in the crowd at the Sybase last week, it's a statement that is true across the board.
Plus don't feel bad, even golf writers who are paid to intently follow the game have trouble managing to keep up with simple facts when it comes to the South Korean players on Tour. Take Alan Shipnuck, who writes the weekly "Hot List" column for Golf.com. This week, Ji Young Oh was No. 5 on his list.
Shipnuck wrote, "How do you win your first career tournament on a tough golf course, as Oh did at Upper Montclair? Start by hitting 49 of 56 fairways. I'll be lucky to hit 49 fairways over the entire summer!"
Actually you don't. Last year Oh won the State Farm Classic. So she won her second career tournament by hitting all of those fairways.
But the fans and media aren't all to blame for the inequality between the big names and the rest of the pack on the LPGA Tour. Remember the little incident where the LPGA wanted to suspended players if they couldn't attain a certain level of proficiency in English language.
It was poorly presented and poorly received, but it can't be ignored that the language barrier does keep the fans and reporters from getting to know international players who must resort to a translator to conduct interviews. Oh did an admirable job answering questions and taking them in English following her victory last weekend, but for more elaborate points, she had to communicate through a third party. More interaction would only help us get to know her, and in turn, we'd be more apt to follow her career.
As I followed Paula Creamer and her Pro-Am group Tuesday, there was no need for anything to be translated. It was one of the most enjoyable mornings I've spent on a golf course, probably because I didn't have to swing a club, but I'd imagine everyone participating in the Pro-Am doesn't get the same experience.
If the player your group drew at the pairings party had a limited english vocabulary, or perhaps just wasn't as pleasant and as personable as Creamer, you probably didn't walk away with such a wonderful experience. Nobody is to blame, it's just the reality of the situation. Every PGA Tour event can't be won by Tiger Woods and every Pro-Am group at an LPGA event isn't lucky enough to draw Annika Sorenstam and Creamer back-to-back years as the group I followed did.
How the LPGA Tour handles the influx of so many talented international players and their approach to marketing these players to an American and worldwide audience for the next 10 years or so will be an interesting case study not only for sports, but for our society as a whole as we become even more integrated and co-dependent on other cultures and countries.
I'm not subscribing to the doomsday scenario so many are selling about the LPGA as it loses sponsors and tournaments. The LPGA Tour may not end up looking like the female version of the PGA Tour, but it might actually end up being healthier decades from now when that Woods guy walks away from the game.