Michelle Wie West has expressed reservations about LIV Golf beginning a girls’s circuit.
The 33-year-old stepped away from the sport final 12 months, however is the host of this week’s Mizuho Americas Open on the LPGA Tour. Throughout a media day, she defined she believes the origins of the LPGA Tour imply the involvement of the Saudi-funded organisation is just not clear reduce.
She defined: “I all the time suppose competitors is nice. I believe sadly the scenario – the supply of the place the cash is coming from, it’s a very totally different ball recreation when it comes to women and men.
“I believe that inherently us being a tour of females, comes with its further set of issues when coping with a tour that’s funded by a sure company or nation. It’s a really sophisticated reply however we’re a tour based by girls, led by girls, and I might love for us to continue to grow.”
Earlier than final month’s LIV Golf Adelaide event, CEO Greg Norman revealed he’ spoken with LPGA and LET gamers eager to get entangled in a brand new girls’s sequence. Nonetheless, Wie West mentioned there are different components to think about. She defined: “I might have interaction in a dialog if it could obtain our intention of selling girls’s golf, however there must be enter from gamers and sponsors. There’s plenty of components to think about earlier than we do enterprise with LIV.”
Regardless of her reservations, Wie West careworn that she wouldn’t blame anybody for accepting higher monetary safety and alternatives a brand new circuit may deliver. She mentioned: “If the cash is there, if it creates nice alternatives for the ladies on our tour, who am I to cease anybody from gaining monetary stability in the best way that all of us deserve?
“However it’s a sophisticated state of affairs as everyone knows. There is no such thing as a one proper or improper or good versus evil. It’s very sophisticated and it will get much more so sophisticated when it’s about girls.”
Wie West additionally identified that, in comparison with different sports activities, girls’s golf is nowhere close to as profitable. “We watch the NBA, the NFL, the PGA Tour, and the way luxe their lives are, driving in non-public planes and staying in five-star accommodations each week — and that’s not the lifetime of an LPGA Tour participant,” she mentioned.
“We’re lugging our golf bag, looking for actually good offers on accommodations, as a result of, what individuals don’t understand with golfers is we pay for all the pieces. We pay for our caddies, our [physical therapy], our resort – you don’t make the reduce, you’re down nevertheless a lot that’s.”
After this week’s event, Wie West will flip her consideration to July’s US Girls’s Open at Pebble Seashore, the place she is going to play. Final week, she admitted that the Main she received in 2014 will likely be “almost certainly a farewell.”
