Some Lazy Reporting on the LPGA Ruling

Beth Ann Baldry really mailed this one in for Golfweek on the reactions of several people to the LPGA English requirement. Basically, it's the standard lazy piece of talking to a couple of different sides of an argument and forming no conclusions. Read it if you want, but here's the part that interested me.

Richard Lapchick has studied diversity in sports for nearly 40 years. He thinks the tour has “unleashed a public-relations disaster” and predicts the LPGA will have to change its decision “pretty soon.”

Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, can’t think of a single instance when a policy that has garnered this type of negative reaction hasn’t been reversed. While the LPGA points to its English policy as fundamental to its business initiatives, Lapchick said sponsors can’t publicly embrace the rule.

“It’s a decision that’s going to be too offensive to too many people that a large corporation can’t associate itself with it,” Lapchick said.

“It’s as politically incorrect as it can get.”

But the reaction for this really hasn't been all negative. From what I have seen, it appears mixed at worst. Some love it. For Baldry to qualify this as drawing such a negative reaction is lazy.

I will agree, though, that the LPGA has done a number of things in the recent years that have resulted in reversals. First, it was media rights. Then, it was Ginn. Maybe this is next.