Perhaps Mike Whan put it best during a Zoom call with the media earlier this week.
“It’s not an enjoyable life on tour,” said Whan, the LPGA commissioner, about sports during the coronavirus pandemic.
The social joy of the tour, while perhaps not gone completely, has certainly been throttled back by COVID-19. That’s true in pretty much every aspect of life, of course, but it is on display in plain view at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage this week.
COVID-19 testing, masks for players, caddies, volunteers and LPGA staff and rules that seem to change a bit daily are a challenge. On Tuesday, you could walk in and out of one door at the clubhouse at Mission Hills. By Wednesday, the door was an entrance-only door. Rules, you know.
LEADERBOARD: ANA Inspiration
The time and effort being put in by staff of the LPGA and International Management Group, operators of the tournament, is to be applauded, even if there are those who wonder if all the effort and hassle is worth it just to hold a golf tournament, even an LPGA major championship.
But Whan was right about something else, too. The commissioner said that the ANA Inspiration holds a special place on the LPGA because it links generations of players on the tour, and it is one of the few – and some would say the only – LPGA tournaments to have significant history and tradition.
That’s important in 2020 because of what the tournament will celebrate in 2021. That’s when the event will be played for the 50th time, every one of those years on the Dinah Shore Tournament Course at Mission Hills.
The 50th anniversary will be about more than just jumping into Poppie’s Pond, the celebration created on the spur of the moment in 1988 by Amy Alcott. The jump into that lake is one of the few times the LPGA can be certain of getting on SportsCenter and other highlight shows, and maybe that’s the only thing a non-golf fan knows about women’s golf.
A big celebration coming
But the 50th anniversary will be about more than the champion’s leap. It will be about one of the greatest rosters of winners in golf, ranging from Mickey Wright to Annika Sorenstam to Inbee Park. It will be about the memorable shots, all of which can be remembered because the event has been played on the same course for five decades. Every brilliant iron or long putt or holed bunker shot can be re-lived by standing in the exact spot on the course the player stood.
And it should be about the great names who helped the tournament reach 50 years, from founder David Foster of Colgate-Palmolive to Ross Johnson of RJR Nabisco and, of course, to Dinah Shore, whose presence was so important she was put into the LPGA Hall of Fame, the only non-player so honored.
That 50th anniversary is just seven months away, by the way. Officials of the tournament say that IMG, ANA and Mission Hills are already deep into planning the 50th playing of the event, which started in 1972 as perhaps the most important and at the time the richest event in women’s golf.
Certainly everyone connected with the tournament this year is hoping that April of 2021 looks more normal, with fans in the grandstands and most COVID-19 restrictions gone. That’s the hope, even if there is no way to know for sure just how the search for a vaccine and the economic recovery will look in California or across the country in seven months.
If all returns to normal, the tournament could even boast having two defending champions, 2019 winner Jin Young Ko, who is not in the field this week because of travel restrictions from the pandemic, and whoever wins the title this week. That would be a nice twosome for the first two rounds next year.
In all, the 2021 ANA Inspiration will be a celebration of the greatest event in LPGA history. And a celebration is just what the LPGA and golf fans will need in seven months to recover from 2020 and the pandemic ANA Inspiration.
Larry Bohannan is The Desert Sun golf writer. He can be reached at (760) 778-4633 or larry.bohannan@desertsun.com. Follow him on Facebook or on Twitter at Sun.@Larry_Bohannan. Support local journalism: Subscribe to the Desert Sun.
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