On women being invited to mens tourmaments

DN - Sport - Goosen mot att kvinnor får frikort

Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter today reports that Retief Goosen is against women being invited to mens tournaments. (Here we do again ;-) Basically the same argumentation as Vijay Singh had last year. His idea is basically:

• Handing out invitations to popular female golfers is wrong
• If they qualify, it's perfectly ok that they participate
  
• It is fine to compete with women in special tournaments, such as the one he was involved in earlier this year.

This is a discussion that stirs up a lot of emotion. Personally I think that Goosen is right, but that Vijay was only basically right. Reason: It was time that such a great player as Annika got a chance. The world wanted it to happen. Too many years had passed since someone else did it. I also have a personal reason that most certainly affects my standpoint: Seeing Annika at Colonial was for me the single reason I rediscovered golf again & started playing after basically holding up for five years. With that in mind, I think I am entitled to have my positive opinion about Annikas participation, regardless of what others may think.

Annika did reasonalby well. She was not far from making the cut and beat several men. Not bad considering the huge media attention and enormous pressure she had to take heading into the event.

Finally a prediction: The next big story in this chapter will probably be Annika qualifying for The Open Championship or Michelle Wie qualifying for U.S. Open.

I do think that any woman will have success playing with the men until they manage to get their clubhead speed up. Main difference is that women are generally not able to spin the ball as much as needed to make it bite on the fast greens on the mens tours. Annika has indirectly stated this on numerous occations.

For this reason I think that The Open Championship is the most likely venue where a longhitter woman would stand a chance. On that venue the greens do not seem to be as fast as on the Masters or the U.S. Open - the challenge being more weighted to playing in the wind.

Still The Open Championship is not a benign challenge, and any woman playing there would face pretty brutal conditions - as the men do.

(I reserve the right to edit this post later on :-)