[MUSIC] >> Welcome back. Today, it's our great pleasure to welcome the commissioner of the LPGA Mike Wann. Mike, thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for having me Peter, I appreciate it. >> Absolutely. Our audience has your bio. Our class knows all the great things you've done for the tour since you came on board. As you know, in this course, we study the four stages of the pre-professional and professional athletes career. What trends have you seen? Let's start with one of our board members, Hall of Fame member Karrie Webb. How have you seen her progress over the years through her four stages of professional evolution. She's still an active player, but how about, just take us through Karrie Webb as an example of a player who, without having gone to college and turning pro at a very young age, makes the World Golf Hall of Fame at, I think, the youngest age of any ladies professional golfer in history. >> Karrie is one of those great examples, that's so good that you almost worry that she'll affect a bunch of other young girls to go pro as early as she did. But Karr grew up in Australia. At eight years old, started taking trains two and three hours away to play in junior events and then, like a lot of great juniors, started winning pretty significantly in the amateur level turned pro. Joined the Australian Ladies' Golf Tour. From there joined both the Ladies European Tour and then later the LPGA. And Karrie is a great example of someone that has always been a learner. You know, Karrie is oftentimes the one asking the most questions, whether it's in a board meeting or a player meeting. But she's done a great job. I took myself as far as I thought I could from an amateur rank and how much competition I could generate to taking myself to the next level of tours. And then she used the women's the women's tour universe to go from one tour to the next. Slowly building up to the best tour, which is the LPGA where the best of the best come together from all over the world. Carrie's another great example where she was born in Australia and is certainly Australian has lived in America so long, but most players on tour don't really realize that she's not an American and 41 wins later, World Golf Hall of Fame and LPGA Hall of Fame later has really nothing left to prove other than how long somebody can be as great as she's been. >> Absolutely and it's been our privilege to share a board seat with her and also to have represented her when I was at IMG Golf. But let me go back and replay that tape for an American player Paula Kramer. Let's use her as one of our great American stand outs who, you know, went to the IMG Golf Academy and has had a great career herself. How is that different from the international career that Karrie has enjoyed? >> Well, Paula probably didn't start hitting the road, you know, world wide until she joined the tour kind of right out of academy. Right out of high school, if you will. Both of those examples kind of went pro before going college. I see a range of how you make it to the LPGA these days. There's players that go play four years in college, join the Symmetric Tour, which is our Triple-A team, if you will, and then make it to the LPGA. I see players that go to college for one or two years and then go to our qualifying school in the summer. And if they make it on tour, they leave school. And then there's players like Paula, who I think knew pretty early on that she really, if she could, she wanted to go pro right after high school. Went to IMG Academy to hone her skills with some of the best coaches in the world and then join the tour. What's different a little bit on the LPGA in where they both, both Paula and Carrie became more similar than they ever thought they would is we literally play all around the world. So when you play on the LPGA tour and we're starting in Ocala, Florida, then go to the Bahamas and then it's Australia, Thailand and Singapore. So you become a global player pretty quickly, even though Paula had more of a hometown upbringing in the states and Karrie came through Australia and through Europe, they both started before college and then I said, "probably got half and half of players that have actually gone through four years of school." >> Yeah, we traced this throughout each of the sports. So now we've got that quintessential 18 year old, Mike, and she's trying. I've got an NCAA Division I scholarship to a great school. Llike let's take a Stacey Lewis. A great American player. I go to school or I try to go onto the tour. Well, I know you're the commissioner, you've got to be careful, but what are the "go", "no go" factors when somebody's trying to make that decision. >> It's funny, I just had a conversation with a young player and her parents two nights ago, just kind of a calling for some perspective. And I said, and I was being honest with him, I've seen some of the greatest "can't miss athletes come on the tour at age 19, 18, 20, 21 and a couple of years later", the LPGA tour is such a significant jump from wherever they're playing now, whether it's high school juniors or some level of college golf. And some of them aren't either physically ready to play at that level or emotionally ready to deal with the fact that they're going to start missing cuts when they never even had that concept in their life before. And as I always tell them, at the end of the day at the LPGA, there's 40 to 60 players that are making a lot of money out here and they're really the best of the best. And then there's a lot of players that are hoping that they have a pretty good Plan B in their back pocket. And so you'll never, as you know and we both know, you'll never lose a four year degree. You'll never wish you didn't have that background. So, I always tell players, "unless you just aren't interested in college, why not build a safety net that quite frankly is going to help you grow up. You don't get much 'team' at the LPGA. You're kind of playing for yourself in your own group and it's 'mano a mano' against the golf course. And golf at a college level is your last chance to really experience 'team' like you may never experience again on a golf course." >> Let's go back to what you and I have worked on together now for a number of years: age eligibility. Now somebody like Lydia Ko or Lexi Thompson comes along and when do you say, as commissioner exercising your authority, "Okay. They're ready" What track record have they proven coming to that decision on a pre-professional basis? >> I try not to be too formulaic where I say, "well, this is it and if you fit these things then check." I definitely think every player deserves their own individual look. But I do use some basic guidelines and basic guideline number one that I tell all parents, agents and kids who petition is, "what you did before you were 16 is impressive, but probably not going to be of interest to me." Before you can drive, I'm not really sure how I apply that to a tour that's going to play in 17 different countries. But I have a lot of 16, 17 and early 18 year olds that are, that are doing some impressive things. What I typically walk through is, does this player not really have the ability to improve her game based on the competition that she would have to continue to play against? Is the amateur ranks in which she's playing against going to limit her, because she's, so far surpassed that. I typically ask, you know, would is there a home tour, a home professional tour that might be easier in their transition? If they're from Japan, would it be better if they went to the Japanese LPGA first and not bring in all the global travel and global TV into their first runs. And then I typically look and say, "when they have competed against the best and the best in the LPGA, how have they fared?" And I don't mean, how many top 20 or top 50. I mean, can they win on this tour and how do those wins look convincing enough that they would actually be able to stay in that winners circle. I'm not trying to limit their ability and I'm certainly not trying to limit their earning potential. What I want to make sure is that players don't have the best years of their lives at age 14, 15 and 16, but have the best years of their lives playing on tour in front of our global fan base. And so if they come too soon and we either create burn out or emotional let down or they just can't physically keep up with the demands of a global tour. Then I think it's not only in my best interest, but in theirs to make them just kind of take some time to get their act. I think in my time I've only approved two petitions to instantly become an LPGA member. That's Lydia Ko and and Lexi Thompson. I have allowed some players that are 17 to come to Q-School and see for themselves if they can qualify for the tour. But generally speaking, I'd say, 90% of the time my typical answer is the age limitation for the LPGA is 18 and we'll see you then. Great team. >> Let's drill down a little more deeply. Great answer, and thanks. Lydia, I mean, unparalleled success, but she had won twice on the tour as an amateur, had she not? So what, what was her track record coming in? >> Yeah, it's funny, I've always called her the freak before, because she's freakish in terms of her resume at that level. But who knows? I mean maybe there's more, there's more like her. And what they are, I'll definitely look at them with, in the same individual case. In Lydia's case, she was already in the top, I think, 35 in the Rolex world ranking, so she was already ranked over a two-year period of time, and all the different events she'd played in, as one of the top 35 players in the world. I mean, there's only a few players on tour that could have made that statement no matter how long they've lived worked on tour. The second thing in Lydia's case is she had not only won a tour event, but she had won back-to-back wins on the same tour event. It was the Canadian women's open, which I know and probably a lot of folks watching don't, but the Canadian women's open has one of the greatest fields on the LPGA schedule. Meaning the strength of field, the quality of player in that is equivalent to a major in terms of who's playing in that event. So for her to win that event on different golf courses in different parts of Canada against a major worthy field instantly told me that she could succeed on this tour and succeed pretty quickly. She had a very good base around her in terms of both family and agent in order to be able to afford and to be able to be accompanied around to our events. As you know Peter, we do a lot of customer interaction on this tour much more so than other sports where you're playing golf with older gentlemen or older women, there's alcohol involved, and Pro Am parties. All kind of things that both a commissioner and parent, I want to be aware of it before I put a 16 or 17-year-old in that scene, but she had a great network around her. She had clearly proven that she could play at this level. And in my personal opinion, I don't believe she could have honed her game any more, at any other place other than the LPGA. Luckily, for both us, she not only has proven that to be right, but she blew away both of our expectations by I think now being the number two player in the world. And winning the first ever race to the globe and raised $1 million for being the best player throughout the entire season. >> Amazing. That sort of path slightly less traveled. Let's go to Lexi and she's had maybe a more regular path to stardom, but still it's one of their great shining stars on the tour. >>Yeah, and Lexi and Lydia have one incredible thing in common. Both won on the LPGA in very strong fields before they turned 18. Originally Lexi and her agent had petitioned me to allow her to go to Q-school at 17. And if she made it through Q-school could she become a member? At first year, I think petitioned out with 16 and I said no, I wanted to see more playing time and I wanted to be able to spend more time with her and other customers that knew her. The second summer when she petitioned, I said yes go to Q-school. She went to the first round of Q-school and I think won that round by 12 strokes. I mean the next closest player was 12 strokes behind her. And while she was waiting, I think she had to wait three months for stage two. During that wait, she got invited to an LPGA event, I think, that had 35 of the top 50 players in the world in it, won it by, I think, four strokes. And we both talked on the phone and I said, it's pretty difficult for me to tell you go to back to Q-school and prove you're ready when you just beat 35 of the best 40 players in the world over four days, so she became a member the following year. >> Okay let's take the more normal path, he said these are absolutely meteoric rises to stardom. Now I played in the NCAA for a while, how do I qualify? We got the Q-school thing, and then more likely than not I'm going to be on the Symetra Tour. Maybe we could talk about that. The qualifying tour as it were, the Symetra Tour which has achieved unparalleled successes most recently. >> Yeah, they married. The pack marries a typical player if she's going to play four years at school, or even if she decides after her sophomore year to go pro, she'll typically, you know, finish her college season in the spring and then she certainly can and often times will go to our qualifying school, which is three stages. It starts in June and finishes in September or October, mainly October. And so she can try to make it through qualifying school where about 15 players will get their cards for the following season. But they're going to be competing against about 1,000 golfers over the course of that period of time. The other option and quite frankly many of them do both of these at the same time is to play on the Symetra Tour, which is a development tour that prepares you for the LPGA. They only play in North America, so it's not a global tour. 23 events around North America. They play for much smaller bursts. It's not televised, so it's a great place to build your game skills and understand the business of the tour, but not have to worry about tough press conferences and all the other things that come with the tour. The top ten players every year are off the Symetra Tour, so the top ten money winners over the course of that 23 tour schedule instantly go and become rookies on the LPGA tour the following season. And the next 10 or 11 through 20, on the money list are granted the opportunity to go right to finals stage or stage three of Q-school and now they only have to compete against a couple hundred golfers in an effort to try to get one of those 15 cards. So, bottom line is, if you're a college player, or even if you're a high school player that decides to make a run and go professional, the typical path of the LPGA is go to the Symetra Tour, try to finish in the top ten. If not, try to finish in the top 20. Both of those provide advantages. Even if you don't finish in the top 20 it's great, you know, generally speaking about 75% of the players that come through Q-school have some Symetra Tour experience. So I think most players have realized, if I'm going to make it to the LPGA a great way to get that experience is on the Symetra Tour. We run it, we own it. All rule officials are there. So the experience is very LPGA-like. >> On the other side we're going to want to look at the legends tour, Mike. But let's say these hypothetical college players now qualify to be in the LPGA tour. And she's doing okay but not great. She's 75th in the world rankings. What kind of income opportunities are available to her through prizes? Let's start with that. >> I'm glad you raised that example Peter because we talked about Lydia and Lexi. We're talking about the one percenters. So let's talk about the 99 percenters which is you come out and you realize, "my gosh this is an incredibly higher level of competition." And I can't tell you how many all Americans have come out on tour and have finished their first year and they're back in qualifying school because they didn't really make any cuts. Some of that is just an incredible amount of time to get used to our schedule, new golf courses. It's just comfort. It's like joining a new high school or college. I mean, there's a bunch of players out there that are already playing and know all the ins and outs and how to travel, and where to stay and what, and how to play in this golf course. Those players typically will find extra income in three different ways. Obviously, the sponsorship that's on their clothes, their hat, their golf bag are all things. Because, we're televised in 170 countries, and 34 times a year, there's an awful lot of brand exposure that can come with being part of us. Obviously, those financial opportunities get better the better you play. So early on, you're, you're not receiving as much as you want if you're not succeeding early on. Second thing is there's a series of programs around the US. Some built around our tournaments. Sometimes even on a Saturday, there will be a separate outing around our tournament where 50 players that missed the cut may go play in a separate program and make a couple of thousand dollars or at least pay for the trip for the week, and pay for their caddy. And those are happening more often than you think. And then, separate from that is corporate outings that they'll do at their home or in their own trips so they might go go with MasterCard, and seven of their customers, or go to national sales meetings that do clinics, and kind of corporate America. And those are the three ways that they'll essentially supplement their income, but as you know, Peter, in the world of sports, all three of those things get incredibly more lucrative as you find yourself in the winner's circle, There are good ways to supplement your income. Those ways become incredibly more eyesighted when you start lifting trophies. >> And I've looked at this now with you for a number of years, being a board member. What impact, I call it the Se Ri Pak, has the flood of young golfers in Korea had on the LPGA tour? It's like the Tiger effect in the US. Over there, once Se Ri Pak had all that success, every Korean young golfer wanted to be the next Se Ri Pak and how does that impact the tour? >> We've all seen, as fans of the LPGA, the Korean impact of Se Ri Pak. What I'm seeing now as commissioner, when I travel around, is that the Chinese impact of Shanshan Feng, who's a Chinese golfer, who's number five in the Rolex world ranking, who plays on the LPGA. When she won in Beijing with us on Tour, the amount of eight, nine, ten year-old girls standing at those yellow ropes looking up, I saw the early stages of the China effect. I've seen it with Yani Tseng from Taiwan who ascended to number one in the yellow when most people didn't think women in Taiwan played golf. And they couldn't be more wrong now. Now there's actually a Taiwan LPGA Tour and I would say driven largely by Yani's worldwide success. And we see it happening country at a time. We have players now from Kuala Lumpur. You go back ten years ago and there just weren't many women playing golf in Malaysia. Now we have women on the best Tour in the world. Same thing happened in Thailand. We started playing there in 2007 and 2008 and there just really weren't many women playing golf. Certainly not young girls. Today, we probably have seven, eight, nine players on Tour from Thailand, and probably two or three of them in the top 50 in the world. So all it takes for a lot of these young girls is a role model. Someone to make them believe it's possible. Not only did the girls get excited about being Se Ri Pak or being Kelly from from Kuala Lumpur. But the parents get excited, you know? They see financial opportunity. And our American colleges, it would probably not shock you, but our American colleges and college coaches, I'll see them all over the world. I'll see USC or UCLA coaches in virtually every part of the globe. Because they're finding these young golfers to build their teams. So, one thing that's true about women's golf right now is it is completely borderless. And the benefit of that for me, selfishly, is that we can sell our TV rights to fans all over the world, we have sponsorships from all over the world, and we're getting playing opportunities, aka tournaments, all over the world. And that's really quite a bit different than this sport looked and felt just 20 years ago. >> That's a great answer. We want to get to the media rights in a minute Mike, but talk about hoisting the trophy. We talked in this course a lot about the psychology of success. How hard is it to wear that crown? To hoist that trophy? I don't want to pick on anybody in particular, but you get to the top like Yani did, and then it's really hard to achieve that continuing championship level of play. What do you observe generally about focusing too much on Yani? Getting up to number one. Stacy Lewis, you see how hard she had to work. How she grinds every minute of every day. What do you see in terms of the elements of championship success over a long period of time? Maybe all the way back to Karrie Webb, who nobody works harder on their craft than Karrie. >> Yeah, I think this probably is not a whole lot different than other sports, but the reality of it is a lot of great female golfers can make it to the LPGA on pure talent. But when they get to the LPGA, it just changes. There is nobody who will tell you that winning or making cuts on the LPGA is easy, even though most of their golfing life, winning has been easy. In fact, most of them have never experienced losing, and what I mean by losing is making no money, going home, and figuring out how I'm going to pay for everything I just spent last week even though I didn't raise a dollar. The first experience most of my players get with that is on this Tour. And so, imagine if all your life you've been successful at something, and you finally get to the place you've always wanted to get to. And you start to wonder in your own mind, usually quietly, because you don't say it out loud, "am I good enough to be out here?" And these are athletes that have never questioned that. And so, it starts inside their head, and then it gets into their hands, and into their play. And I've seen it happen many times, and some of those players are just gone forever. It's tough. And then some of those players you've mentioned, like a Stacy Lewis, she was kind of recruited going into school, not a lot of people knew. By the time she got out of college, she was a superstar, but she didn't walk on to the LPGA and see instant success. And most of them will tell you that almost every part of their approach to the game has changed. They've changed the way they eat. They've changed the way they sleep. They've changed the way they train. They've definitely changed their swing, which is hard to believe, but most of these players tell you when they get here, some part of their game had to get significantly better and to do that, they had to take a risk they've never taken. They had to break down a swing, try to get more distance, work on parts of the game that, generally speaking, have always been natural for them and so, yes, it's tough. The hardest part of the LPGA Tour is the part that fans never see, which is the mental grind of a player shooting 78, which for you and I, I'd call my parents and say, guess what, I shot 78. For them, they have to call their parents and say I'm coming home Saturday morning, I won't be playing this weekend. And they feel like everybody's counting on them, and in some cases, that's true. Some of them are paying mortgages back at home, but they've always been the golden child and for the first time in their life, they have to deal real adversity and that's where perseverance becomes the separator. And if you talk about the players that are at the top of the top, all of them have had incredible lows along the way to get in there. But they also would but they all work at a level that other players quite frankly just haven't reached yet. [MUSIC]
