Sweeping generalizations about female golfers piss me off, but I’m used to them.

John Huggan, who usually writes such thoughtful and interesting golf articles, put up a rare sensational piece in which he says coach David Whelan is “making great strides towards closing what is perhaps the biggest gender gap in golf.” Baloney. David Whelan is making sweeping generalizations about female golfers to get himself some attention and John Huggan gave him the vehicle.

First of all, that gender gap to which he is referring is the short game – everything from 100 yards and in. I think we all know that’s not the biggest gender gap in golf. That would be the long game. Okay, you caught me. Some sweeping generalizations are true.

Second, if we’re talking about a real gender gap in golf, that includes the millions of golfers who don’t play professionally. Not just the elite on tour. From my experience playing with amateur women and men, short games are created equal. Interest, focus, training and experience all factor into whether a person plays well inside 100 yards. Not gender.

Whelan’s whole spiel is about training women (he seems to prefer the term “girls”) on the short game. If they pay more attention to that part of the game, they’ll get better at it. Wow, maybe he read a book! But to get himself noticed, he thought it would be a good idea to say that not only are women worse at the short game than men, but that it’s because they are women. Maybe he is a good technical coach but his social and communication skills are primitive. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t want her in his camp (the David Leadbetter Golf Academy in Florida).

Huggan points out a more reasonable explanation: “Another factor in the relatively poor short games on the LPGA Tour is the level of facilities typically available to the players.” And he supports it with Whelan’s own observations:

“When I started working with Paula, she was a 15-year-old amateur who was getting invites to events where there were no chipping greens or pitching areas. Even at the Nabisco event, which is a major, there is still no chipping green.”

But it goes downhill from there:

“So bad technique around the greens is the biggest thing holding the girls back. That and a constant reassurance that they have to hit balls all day. A lot of them feel that, if they don’t hit a lot of balls, then they don’t deserve to play well.”

So you see, their girly lack of self confidence and perhaps the pressure of the REAL gender gap is causing them to spend too much time on their long games, thus creating the short game gender gap. Silly girls! So let’s undermine them some more and give them a new way to feel inferior, because we wouldn’t want to hold them back. Too bad the only support for his assertion is a stat related to putting, not chipping or pitching:

“Look at the stats. A 29 putts per round average barely gets you into the top 100 on the PGA Tour; on the LPGA Tour, that number has you in the top 30.”

And isn’t it funny there is no mention of the difference in the putting greens on the courses the men and women play. And too bad the good point is buried in the middle of the article surrounded by all the other crap:

“You have to be more ‘softly softly’ with girls, and they need more encouragement. They seem to lack self-confidence. So that needs to be instilled in them early. They are competitive, though. They hate to get beat. Which is a good thing.

There’s that “girls need more encouragement” statement again. At least he gets one thing right: self-confidence does need to be instilled in them early. Then they need to stay away from him so it doesn’t get talked out of them.

“Still, it’s a lot easier to work with the guys than the girls. You can work with more men than women. For example, the men aren’t as bothered about me watching them play. The girls like me to watch. They are convinced that there is something happening out there that isn’t on the range.”

Then go back to working with the guys. The girls like you to watch? Are you sure you’re focusing on their short games and not their short skirts? Do you have pillow-fight drills in your sessions just to hammer home what girls are really good for? For a guy who used to play professionally, you sure don’t seem to remember that there is a difference between working on the range and playing in an event or even just a casual round. It’s called the mental game. Maybe they want you to identify what their weaknesses are when they’re under pressure so they can work on those. The men probably figure that you’ll be watching anyway since they’re on TV. At least I assume you’re talking about the pros when you mention “men” and the kids from the academy when you mention the “girls.” Oh wait, you were just talking about the pros, right? Well, many of those “girls” get about as much TV coverage as the kids do anyway. Plus they know you’ll be watching that other channel with the REAL golf.

The short game is important – revolutionary! Gee, your instruction methods focus on the short game. How unique. Wow, you work with some big names like Paula Creamer, Catriona Matthew, Aree and Naree Song and Rachel Hetherington. Too bad you had to act like such a caveman while getting the word out.

Huggan makes a reasonable observation about the golfers he has watched lately and that the women’s short games weren’t as good as the men’s. I can accept that. He sees what he sees. But to broaden it into a sport-wide gender gap by giving it the sensational title “Why women can’t match men even with the putter” and support the idea with one coach’s idiotic ramblings that basically amount to “because they’re girls”? I’m inspired. I’m going to go hold up the fast lane as I put mascara on while I drive to the golf course to play really slowly and ignore the rules and etiquette.

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