The world’s best player will skip the 2021 Olympics golf tournament, if it goes forward at all. This follows the sport’s underwhelming return to the Olympics five years ago, when a slew of top players opted out, and at least one two-time major champion questioned golf’s inclusion in the Games altogether.
With that run of luck, one wonders if golf has any future with the Olympics at all.
That is, if one forgets about the women’s game altogether.
This is, of course, something that happens all the time: media coverage of golf routinely ignores the women’s game, or offers attention that is passing at best. In recent years, independent outlets like The Fried Egg and No Laying Up have purposefully (and admirably) brought more focus to women’s golf. Even among well meaning golf journalists, though, women’s golf often remains in the media’s collective blind spot: never far away, but somehow out of sight — and, in turn, out of mind.
With Dustin Johnson’s announcement that he would skip the Summer Olympics, golf podcasts renewed discussion this week of whether golf has a future in the Games. As those conversations continue, though, they should begin with an important distinction: the women’s side of the Olympics is doing just fine.
To be sure, COVID is a factor across the board: the pandemic forced the postponing of the Games in 2020, and undoubtedly will cause legitimate reluctance to participate this summer. That’ll affect men and women alike. But the structural dilemmas that have hampered the men’s tournament since golf’s return in 2016 are unique to the men’s side alone: the Olympics’ proximity to the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup Playoffs, and the lack of prize money opposite a cash-soaked tour, among others.
But no such problems hampered the women’s tournament at the 2016 Olympics, where Inbee Park — a Hall of Famer — won the gold medal, and the world’s top-ranked player took silver in a field chock-full of stars. One reason for the field’s strength was that the LPGA built its 2016 schedule to accommodate the Olympics — and the PGA Tour didn’t.
That suggests that responsibility for the talent gap between the women’s and men’s events at the Olympics might rest not with the International Olympic Committee, but with the PGA Tour. By distinguishing between the men’s and women’s tournaments, journalists can better set the stage for conversations about who’s best positioned to address the problem.
More importantly, though, specifying that the talent gap is a men’s problem avoids marginalizing the women’s game yet again. Where that distinction hasn’t occurred in recent podcasts, I’m certain that it has occurred without malice. But that’s the nature of a blind spot: you forget that it’s there.
By raising that distinction, though, those conversations can give deserved credit to the women’s game for answering the Olympics’ call, and begin to address how top men’s players can better follow women’s examples.
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