Rancho Mirage, Calif. – Carolyn Bivens loves to play golf, however, since being named LPGA commissioner in June last year, she has yet to play in any of her tournaments’ pro-am events.
“I’m just too vain,” she said about stepping to the tee without first shaking off some intense rust, for all the world to see.
When it comes to trying to improve her tour, Bivens displays none of that pride. In a Wednesday news conference on the eve of the Kraft Nabisco Championship, Bivens spoke openly about poaching from others, be it in sports or elsewhere, if it will help the product.
“We’re benchmarking the best practices,” Bivens said. “If you want to talk about building a brand in the sports world, it would be the NBA; from an entertainment standpoint, Oprah (Winfrey) is the best we know.”
In that vein, the LPGA has forged alliances with diverse elements such as NASCAR and the Speed Channel, even the Oscars, where presenters and award winners this month found a season’s pass and free lessons from a top-30 player in their goody bags.
It’s all about branding, said Bivens, who is taking the message to players whose idea of vision sometimes doesn’t extend beyond thinking whether to draw or fade their approach shot.
“Each golfer is a brand, they stand for something,” said Bivens, who has scheduled seminars between players and “individual branding coaches.”
“A number of these women have managers, but when was the last time they checked their press kit? What photo is being used? (They’ve) grown, they’re different personalities.”
Bivens arrived late here for the pretournament festivities at the season’s first major because she was attending a sports business conference. It seemed fitting because, at this early stage of the season, the LPGA has generated more news off the course than on, most notably in a scuffle with media organizations in Hawaii over the rights to words and images that led to virtually zero coverage of the second tournament of the season.
“It had to happen; it just had to happen,” Bivens said of the fray, which could have been disastrous for the LPGA had local favorite Michelle Wie scored her first professional victory. “Go onto the Internet and Google LPGA, and then pick out some of your favorite players and see what you can buy, see what kind of photographs have been taken at tournaments. We were the last mainstream sport that wasn’t controlling the credentialing and controlling the photographs.”
If your eyes are beginning to glaze over at this point, you should keep something in mind. These issues aren’t going to go away, and the resolution could affect all of professional sports. In that sense, Bivens’ chat Wednesday wasn’t really that different from the conversations that NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue is having with reporters at the league meetings in Florida, or the ones that NBA czar David Stern seemed to envision long before anyone else in sports. There’s a great big, wide world of opportunity out there, and only some of it has to do with touchdowns, baskets or birdies.
The difference, Bivens said, is that the LPGA is admittedly “late to the game.”
“If we sell production and distribution rights for a tournament,” Bivens said, “then who owns the hole-by-hole scoring, or the Internet rights? And if they’ve purchased the Internet rights, does that include cellphone rights? We have got to have control of our content.”
With stars such as Wie and Annika Sorenstam, Paula Creamer and Ai Miyazato seemingly ready to launch a series of spectacular ongoing rivalries, the LPGA is in position to go beyond its current reputation as a niche sport. Bivens wants to take maximum advantage of that. But what’s the best way of doing that?
“The LPGA sits at an interesting transition point,” Paul Swangard, the managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s climbed one flight of stairs, but it’s still trying to find its place. The issue now is how to attack the next flight of stairs.”
Staff writer Anthony Cotton can be reached at 303-820-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
