Potentially unpopular opinion coming: Brooke Henderson is better at golf than Sidney Crosby is at hockey.
You won't see the major sports networks fawning over her, with multiple stations hiring teams of analysts at the major events like the big two do for hockey. But Canadian golfer Brooke Henderson quietly won her fourth ever LPGA event.
She's still only 19, and won't turn 20 for a few months.
The defending KPMG women's PGA champion won last week in the Meijer LPGA Classic — a leadup tournament to this year's KPMG major taking place at Illinois' Olympia Fields. She was the first Canadian woman to win a major tournament in 48 years, since Sandra Post turned the feat.
It's no surprise that women's golf hasn't been the most avidly followed sport south of the border. There's a stigma attached to many women's sports that they either aren't as good as men's sports or as diversely fielded as the men.
The organizations attached to these female athletes haven't helped themselves out either. The acronym LPGA is short for Ladies' Professional Golf Association. That's right – ladies.
The stove I had in the house I rented a few years ago was a Lady Kenmore model. The stove wasn't subservient to any other stove I ever had. Somehow the brand thought it to be a good idea to add 'Lady” to it. It's the kind of sexist stuff that should really have gone the way of the dodo.
Lady is a Kenny Rogers song, a part of a Tom Jones song. Old timey song and jinglewriters wrote about 'ladies' in the context of how nice they look and how great they are when they cook and clean. It's not how we should refer to elite female athletes in 2017.
So to start with, the whole LPGA organization ought to be changed to Women's PGA. Get the L out of it.
Then, the Women's PGA needs to modernize and fix their schedule to certain dates. The US Open always falls with the final day on Father's Day. The second week of April is the Masters.
Meanwhile, the women's majors aren't nearly as rigidly scheduled. There are five events that officially qualify as majors in their books. A few years ago, they added the Evian Championship (held in France) to try to drum up more money and prestige from a major sponsor, I presume.
Henderson won't have the chance to golf in an LPGA event in Canada until Aug. 24-27 at the Canadian Pacific Women's Open in Ontario.
As sportswriters, we need to be extra careful in how we label women's sports. We can't keep doing this thing where there's a subconscious of patronization about the sports. In the sports section of this newspaper, you'll find that a local golf pro winning a Lady Pro Am, as labelled by the Sask PGA. This is again something that doesn't need to happen. You won't find the word 'lady' in any of the Ontario PGA event calendar. On the other end of the spectrum, Alberta and Manitoba have plenty of lady events. There doesn't seem to be a consistent naming protocol.
It's not just a golf thing, but it's an obvious choice to start when it's constantly presented in the way it is on so many platforms.
Brooke Henderson is a 19-year-old phenom who doesn't deserve to have the attachment of decades worth of sexism and patronization to her accomplishments.
