LPGA Tour player Lori Kane, speaking to The Canadian Press and quoted by Shackleford, sums up my reaction after a couple days of thought:
"I am of a strong belief that, yes, we need to learn to communicate. But whether or not you can communicate shouldn't determine whether or not you have a card on the LPGA Tour."
Precisely. What should determine membership is talent. Pure, raw talent. Those international players who can't speak English, or can't speak it well, should be encouraged, cajoled, prodded and pushed to work on it - and most of them want to do so, and most of them do work on it (the LPGA already has a language program in place). But suspending those who can't master the language is going too far.
Padraig Harrington had this reaction upon hearing about the LPGA policy:
"It is an amazing statement. The person that brought it to my attention did ask: 'Does that mean if you're mute you can't play golf on the LPGA Tour?'"... Who draws the line about how many words you've got to know in English? Some people are natural talkers and some people aren't. What if you have a person who genuinely struggles with learning a new language, they have a learning disability?
"There are people out there who don't naturally pick up second languages."
There are also people out there who are just plain shy, don't enjoy public speaking, and are just naturally quiet around others. Do they face suspension if they don't sufficiently chat up sponsors? Will somebody be counting the words such players speak during pro-am rounds to decide if they've talked enough to their partners?
What is really nagging at me is the thought that this isn't about English at all, it's about decreasing the number of Asian players on the tour. As Angela Park - born in Brazil to Korean parents, now an American citizen - put it in the original Golfweek article that broke this story:
"The LPGA could come out and say they only want 10 Koreans, but they’re not. A lot of Korean players think they are being targeted, but it’s just because there are so many of them."
Yes, the LPGA could "come out and say they only want 10 Koreans," but that would strike many as racism. Might the language policy eventually produce the same results?
The LPGA Board of Directors has 12 tour players on it, all of them American. There are many people - tour players, sponsors, fans, independent observers (many articles have been written on the subject) - who believe an American audience won't rally to a tour with so many "foreigners" on it (never mind that the LPGA Tour has never had a significant media presence, no matter how close to 100-percent it has been comprised of English speakers). There are surely some American golfers who believe the "foreigners" should be decreased to make more Americans more competitive on the tour.
