Columnist Dean Juipe: LPGA Tour sees foreign onslaught

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, March 20, 2001 | 9:49 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

The United States is an extremely sports-minded country.

There is a great deal of attention placed on sporting events and youngsters of both sexes are conscious at an early age that athletic prowess often translates into added stature (and, potentially, income).

The vast majority of Americans have at least a passing interest in sports and many live and die with the outcomes of various games. "March Madness" and all of that.

As a result, we Americans do predictably well on the international stage. Not that we dominate every sport, of course, but we seem to dominate the ones we especially love.

Which makes it all the more peculiar that not a single event on the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour this year has been won by an American.

That's seven tournaments and seven victories by six foreigners, Sweden's Annika Sorenstam having won the last two weeks.

And this may not be an anomaly. Only three of the current top 10 LPGA money winners are Americans and, by the looks of things, most if not all of the standout young players are from outside the U.S.

Many are from Korea.

A nation with a mere 135 golf courses is turning out an abnormal number of great female players. Two Koreans -- Se Ri Pak and Grace Park -- have already won LPGA events this year and at least two others -- Mi Hyun Kim and Jeong Jang -- appear to have world-class ability. Add in another eight Koreans who regularly play the tour and it's easy to see why that country has a contingent of a dozen writers who are in America and cover the LPGA on a daily basis.

LPGA commissioner Ty Votaw admits the tour is presently more popular in Korea than it is here.

That's startling when you get right down to it. But Korea is the only country in which every LPGA event will be televised this year.

Maybe American girls are being pulled away by soccer and basketball, at the expense of golf. Or maybe American girls are spending as much time as ever at golf, except that Asians and Scandinavians are spending far more on a proportional basis.

But representatives of Canada (Lorie Kane) and Scotland (Catriona Matthew) have also stepped into the winner's circle already this year, indicating that U.S. golfers are being swept aside by a wave of foreign players the likes of which the pro tour has never seen in its 51 years of existence.

It was one thing when the LPGA tour had a foreigner as its most dominant player, as has been the case with Sorenstam, Australia's Karrie Webb and England's Laurie Davies since the mid-1990s. But now we're seeing a boatload of excellent players with unusual sounding names and odd spellings charging up the leader boards.

Thumb through the tour's media guide and for every Nancy Scranton there seems to be two or three Helen Alfredssons, Kyong Nan Has and Patricia Meunier-Leboucs. TV commentators who once set aside time to study sand saves and greens-in-regulation stats are now immersed in phonics and linguistics.

It's change -- and change is good. But it also serves notice that American girls have become complacent in comparison to their international golfing counterparts.