Columnist Dean Juipe: LPGA tour has its ups and downs

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, April 14, 2004 | 9:52 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

With gaps in the schedule and fewer events, women on the LPGA tour are susceptible to feeling an economic pinch.

Attendance, TV ratings and Web site hits may be up, but no overall assessment of the tour's health would be complete without noting that there were 38 tour events three years ago but only 31 this year and that the winter offseason has been stretched to a full five months.

Things are so bleak that at least three tour regulars did something during the winter that seemingly hasn't been done in at least 20 or 30 years: They got jobs.

Michelle Estill, who is playing in this week's Takefuji Classic at the Las Vegas Country Club, pumped gas at a service station in Milwaukee as part of her winter sojourn.

Amy Fruhwirth, who is also playing here, worked at a Pier 1 Imports in Scottsdale.

And another Scottsdale resident and tour player, Dina Ammaccapane, served as a beer cart girl at a golf course there.

Although the combined 2003 LPGA earnings of those three players averaged almost $48,000, they still felt the need to supplement their incomes.

It's a practice other tour players may yet be forced to accept or embrace, given the decline of events and the resulting loss of prize money.

Estill, saying it "stinks" to have so few events scheduled that she feels the need to work elsewhere, has a point. The LPGA's contracting schedule sets it well apart from the men's tour, where events run virtually nonstop around the calendar and where tour players are not put in the potentially uncomfortable position of having to kill a few months.

But for every grumbling player on the ladies' tour, there is a contented one.

Kelli Kuehne spoke on their behalf.

"Strictly for selfish, personal reasons, I don't mind having some time off," she said. "Having Thanksgiving and Christmas off is fine by me, but, like I say, that's a completely personal point of view.

"Speaking as a professional player, however, I would like to see more tournaments earlier in the year in Florida like there were when I first came on the tour. I'd like to see a couple more tournaments than we have, just to warm up."

Kuehne, who first qualified for the tour in 1998 and who has won $1.7 million since, has a background that gives her a unique perspective. She has a brother, Hank, on the PGA tour and a husband, Jay Humphrey, who is an NFL tackle, so she has firsthand knowledge of the laws of supply and demand; she has a brother and a husband that the public wants to see play more than her, yet she has enough in the bank to not let it bother her.

She's not particularly sympathetic to the likes of Estill, Fruhwirth and Ammaccapane.

"If you play well enough out here, you won't need to get a (winter) job," she said, a matter-of-fact quality to her voice.

But the sheer decline in tour events is bothersome to younger players in particular and worrisome to even the most worn. The LPGA tour adopted a five-point plan two years ago that was designed to boost its players' sphere of influence and, consequently, lead to more scheduled events, but it seems to have stalled.

"No," Pat Hurst barked at me as I politely asked her for "one minute" of her time as she trudged between the range and practice green Tuesday morning.

That response would seem to have violated at least one of commissioner Ty Votaw's "five points of celebrity" for his players, which include performance, relevance, passion, appearance and approachability. So charge Hurst with a public-relations bogey.

But Votaw routinely comes across as heartened by the tour and readily cites these facts: attendance rose 9 percent last year and 12 percent in 2002; network TV viewership was up 4 percent last year after jumping 21 percent in 2002; and hits on the tour's Web site were up 45 percent last year.

Annika Sorenstam, who is not playing this week in Las Vegas, is, of course, the single greatest reason for those rising numbers and the increased attention that has come the tour's way. Yet as the slippage in the number of tour events shows, even her presence isn't generating the sponsorship interest that it takes to arrange and play a full, year-round schedule.

I'm not sure what the LPGA tour should be doing differently, but I do know this: Votaw and his players have had plenty of uninterrupted time to think about it, having not opened their season until March, having had last week off, and -- typical of the lack of fluidity on the schedule -- having next week off as well.