Certified pre-owned
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Can’t believe I’m agreeing with @tnord on this, being that it is adjacent to the distance discussion, but man, he is a salesman.
I want to be clear, I don’t mean that he hasn’t done a lot for the LPGA, he was an excellent CEO based on what I am able to ascertain and I’m sure he’ll do great as a USGA CEO.
But it is difficult listening to him. He says so much without saying anything. I’m a Big 4 CPA (shoutout to @Soly @Randy) and every time we get promoted (to senior, manager, senior manager), we go to promotion training/celebration/bullshit event. We usually have some corporate motivational speaker at the event, who speaks at us for a couple hours. They always sound like Mike.
Every morning I take my dog out for a hike and listen to a golf podcast, halfway through this one I realized I hadn’t actually intellectually consumed anything he said for the past 10 mins. Rewound and the same thing happened again. At the end of the podcast I half expected him to say “so anyways Soly, that’s why I think you’d be a great fit for this '07 Honda Accord, what do ya think?”
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Now do Mike Davis.
I’m not being flippant—who in golf, amongst the echelon of Whan, et al, is not like this? I tend to think part of rising as high as Whan has is an ability to BS and speak politically.
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Absolutely no disagreement from me on that point. I think that part of Mike’s skill set is something that most great leaders have.
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He did more for the LPGA than anyone in history, dismissing him for being a smooth talker is the peak of ignorance.
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I guess I’ll ask, if everyone expected nothing substantive from him two months into the job, why have him on the pod?
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Excuse me? Who dismissed him?
LOL. There are a whole bunch of female pioneers, from Babe Zaharias (one of the LPGA founders), to Annika who might have something to say about that. He did a good job, but he was also at the steering wheel at a good time for women’s issues.
In 2008 before he took over, there were 32 tournaments with $60.3 million in prize money (more than $76 million inflation-adjusted). This year, there were 32 tournaments with $73.3 mm in prize money. For several years after he took the helm, prize money dropped. Let’s all cool our heels on the Mike Whan lionization train.
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LPGA =/= women’s golf
LPGA is about maximizing revenue and exposure. Whan did that better than anyone else ever has, the people as the USGA surely agree or else they wouldn’t have hired an “outsider.”
I just told you, inflation-adjusted, prize money in the LPGA was less than it was when he took over. If that’s good for the LPGA, then who is the LPGA? I mean besides Mike Whan, who was happy to take a salary nearly as high as the top money-earner on tour each year.
If Whan wasn’t great for the LPGA why has everybody I’ve ever talked to associated with the tour spoken nothing but glowningly about him? You might be reaching here, @anon47037505
I’d think there’d be some, “yeah, but’s”
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Also did anything noteworthy happen in 2007-2008 that might affect finances? I can’t remember
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Cmon Randy, you’re better than this. Talk to me about what we can see and measure. I just gave you stats.
Is Mike Whan responsible for the game’s popularity in Asia, or for the economic prosperity we’ve seen in the last 10 years globally?
People speak glowingly because he was in charge at the right time. The same reason the NFL owners think Roger Goodell is Warren Buffet.
Exactly. And did anything happen economically in the past decade that has loosened corporate purse strings?
First, get your dates and facts correct and then we can talk
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@munihack7 and @Randy on the same side of an argument is not something I expected when I woke up this morning.
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Roger Is widely panned by media and players. The owners love him because he jumps on grenades for them.
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LOL. Listen, I don’t like Goodell as a person but he is a fucking assassin at his job. Any other major sport would kill to have him.
Wait, so now the selling point is that he wasn’t Bivens, and because he was lucky enough to take over on the way up from the worst recession in 80 years?
Why is the number of tournaments measured from the nadir of the recession? So he took the tour back to where it was in 2008? Cool, man. High bar.