LPGA Season Begins With More Events, Optimism

DOUG FERGUSON

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — A dry board in the office of LPGA Tour Commissioner Mike Whan is filled with black-and-blue, an appropriate color scheme for a tour that had been taking its lumps over the last couple of years.

The colors are used for the schedule — blue ink for those that are a work in progress, black ink for the done deals.

The board is mostly black these days.

A new LPGA Tour season gets under way this week at Royal Melbourne with the Women's Australian Open, one of four additional tournaments on the 2012 schedule that have helped nudge momentum in a favorable direction.

"It's a blip if we have a nice ramp up and then ball back down," said Whan, who starts his third full year as commissioner. "It took a year to take us from negative momentum to positive momentum, and the next year to turn that positive momentum into success."

He measures success by a 39 percent increase in television viewers in the United States, and by 26 percent overall. While his predecessor, Carolyn Bivens, had a reputation of alienating sponsors with a hardline approach, the LPGA was able to renew eight of the nine tournament contracts that ended in 2011.

It lost one tournament and added five others, including player favorites in Kingsmill, Va., and Toledo, Ohio. The LPGA also renewed 10 of its 11 marketing agreements.

So where was the big swing in momentum?

"If there was one, I missed it," Whan said. "I couldn't tell you that I got on a plane one day and said, 'Today we crossed the bridge.' It's like any small business. If you want to turn your business around, it starts with your customers. Everybody we've added either came through or had dialogue with existing customers.