From Doom to Boom: Whans LPGA is Rolling

“Are you sure?”

That was the response Mike Whan directed to members of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) board of directors when — after several months of searching through hundreds of job applications and interviewing dozens of candidates — they offered him the job of commissioner in late 2009.

“Why would you ask that?” Whan was asked.

He wasn’t doubting his aptitude for the job. He simply wanted the organization to know what it was getting. Up to that point in his professional career, Whan had excelled as a creative brand marketer, strategic thinker and consensus builder. He cultivated those skills as a marketing executive beginning in 1987 while working for Procter & Gamble, and later for Wilson Sporting Goods and TaylorMade Golf.

Still, he was a bit of an unfamiliar name while being considered by the LPGA, which was wobbling at the time in terms of finances and perception. The tour needed to make the right hire, but Whan hadn’t worked in the golf industry in a decade. He came to the tour’s attention as an independent consultant after the company he last led as CEO, Mission Itech Hockey, was sold.

During a recent telephone interview, Whan recalled how he answered the board’s question, just before he accepted the job to become the eighth commissioner in the history of the LPGA, founded in 1950.

“I don’t run sports [leagues] and television deals. In fact, the only time I will be really comfortable in this job is sitting across the table from somebody who is about to write a really big check,” he said. “I know what it feels like to be a sponsor. I have sponsored just about everything in my career, and I know what it feels like to do a deal with a sports league and then wonder if we’re really going to be partners or if they’re just going to cash the check.”

One of the board members told Whan that was exactly why they wanted him as commissioner.

“They had a lot of people who knew pin placements and tee boxes and where the television angles should be and what the rules are,” Whan said. “What they didn’t have were many [people] who knew the life of sponsorships, and that is the lifeblood.

“In a strange way, what I was worried about is exactly what they were looking for.”

Now in his sixth year as commissioner, Whan has not only guided the tour back to respectability, it’s in the best shape it has ever been — both financially and in popularity.

“Our fan base is growing, our viewership is growing, and it’s because of everything Mike Whan has touched,” Ricki Lasky, the LPGA’s vice president of tournament business affairs, told the Golf Channel in November.

Whan’s efforts will be on display June 22-28 at Pinnacle Country Club in Rogers when the top female golfers in the world compete for $2 million at the ninth annual Walmart NW Arkansas Championship. It is the largest three-day purse on the tour, and the winner of the tournament will walk away with $300,000.

The tournament is also broadcast around the world through the tour’s television partner, Golf Channel. The 10-year partnership to make the network the exclusive cable home of the tour began in 2010.

 “This might feel like a Northwest Arkansas event, but [television viewers] in 171 countries are going to watch it,” Whan said. “If you jump back 65 years ago when women were playing for $1,000 winners’ checks, and jump to this week and there’s a $2 million purse and you see [live television] coverage on the weekend and 171 countries watching, in the scope of women’s sports, there just isn’t much that competes with that in terms of global attention.”

 

Record Growth

In the final days of Whan’s predecessor, the LPGA was struggling to survive. Carolyn Bivens’ oppressive style had sponsors fleeing and tournaments disappearing, and it took a mutiny from the players to force her ouster.

Under Whan’s leadership, the rebound of the tour is easy to see. In the last five years, prize money has increased 47 percent to a record high of $61 million in 2015, and television coverage has doubled, going from 200 hours per year to 400 hours of coverage in 2015, with more than 90 percent of the tournaments — there are 33 this year — being broadcast live.

More than half of the tour’s 24 events in 2010 were tape-delayed telecasts.

“Imagine that,” Whan said. “Watching sports where you already know the [winner].”

There are other tangible signs of success, for both Whan and the tour.

Earlier this year, the LPGA announced that Whan, 50, had agreed to a six-year contract extension through 2020. Mike Trager, the chairman of the tour’s board of directors, announced the deal March 31 in a letter to players and staff. 

Also this year, the LPGA was one of five leagues — along with the NBA, NASCAR, the Big East Conference and Major League Soccer — nominated by the Sports Business Journal as Sports League of the Year.

The recognition seemed to validate Whan’s stewardship of the tour, although he would not take credit.

“I think it’s nice to see others in the sports business realize what we are doing,” he said. “I think the bottom line, as the leader of any company, you quickly realize that you’re as good as your team, and I have a superstar team.”

 

Investment Plan

Whan said the LPGA leadership has focused the last five seasons on building out a more complete tour schedule. Now at 33 events, he said that’s a maximum number.

“If you have 50 events, then that makes 20 times a year you are apologizing to a corporate sponsor who wrote a big check because the best [players] aren’t there that week,” he said.

With the number of tournaments seemingly capped, Whan said the next five years will focus more on investing in existing events. He would also like to increase the amount of exposure the tour gets outside of the Golf Channel.

“I think you will see a pretty significant rise in our television exposure, I think you will see an increase in our purses, and I think you will see an increase in our attendance and on-site experience for our fans,” he said.

There is evidence of that this year at the par-3 17th hole at Pinnacle, where spectators will notice a different setup.

Since 2013, the LPGA has marketed the hole as the loudest on the tour, where spectators are encouraged to be noisy. Traditionally, the green at 17 during tournament week is loud, with fan favorite and former University of Arkansas All-American Stacy Lewis leading the crowd in a chorus of Hog Calls.

This year, the grandstand buildout has been extended down the fairway toward the tee box to give the hole even more of a larger stadium feel.

Tournament organizers say the buildout is the largest of any hole on the LPGA Tour.

“We don’t have an exact number [of seats], but we know it’s in the thousands,” tournament director Harry Hardy said.

Whan said the tournament has all the ingredients needed to make a successful event — a spectacular golf course, the players are treated top-notch and a slew of strong corporate partners.

“We travel all over the world, and it doesn’t exist every place we go,” he said. “The event is obviously lucrative for the players, but when the [best] players keep showing up year in and year out, it tells you they do the little things right. It’s a can’t-miss tournament.”