LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan misplaced her job after failures with Solheim Cup parking hung over the occasion.
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The previous 12 months had all of it — loopy successful streaks, new main champs, a major-week arrest (!) and extra. With 2025 on the horizon, our writers are trying again on the most memorable moments from 2024.
No. 15 — Charley Hull goes viral
No. 14 — LIV, LPGA CEOs say goodbye
Lengthy earlier than the topic of parking entered the fray, the LPGA had staked the 2024 Solheim Cup as a reputation-altering occasion.
For good cause, too. The 2023 iteration of the Solheim Cup, held in Andalucia, Spain, featured perhaps probably the most thrilling end in Cup historical past — a final-day comeback for the Europeans punctuated by hometown hero Carlota Ciganda’s birdie-birdie end to conquer Nelly Korda and the Individuals. Korda had adopted up that have with the perfect season of her skilled life, successful each occasion she performed in for the higher a part of six months and establishing herself as the game’s long-sought dominant power. Now, with the eye shifting again stateside to Robert Trent Jones Golf Membership close to the nation’s capital in 2024, the stakes had been set. The Individuals and Europeans had been able to lock horns, and the LPGA confronted a golden alternative to indicate it might seize the eye of the professional sports activities world, to not point out present a much-needed boon for commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan.
After which the solar rose on the morning of the primary day, and the juice escaped from the occasion like a needle prick to a balloon. The primary-tee grandstands, a common indicator of a match-play occasion’s power and virility, sat half-empty. The primary matches of event week had been despatched off with restricted fanfare. After which, simply as the frustration set in amongst these anticipating a spectacle, information emerged from a number of miles away, the place 1000’s of followers had been stranded since earlier than daybreak within the event parking heaps.
Ultimately, the golf world realized that the LPGA had bungled the logistics, failing to line up sufficient shuttle buses to get followers to the golf course till effectively after the event had began. We realized little about specifics, together with how, precisely, a event with an already-written logistics playbook — RTJ Golf Membership hosted 4 PGA Tour occasions and a Presidents Cup earlier than the Solheim — didn’t correctly account for 2 of the precept issues of golf tournaments: folks and parking.
The oversight was pricey. The LPGA had misplaced the belief of not less than some followers, and gamers weren’t far behind. All of the shuttle buses on the earth for the next two days of competitors weren’t sufficient to salvage that first, essential error. Reputations are earned in drops and misplaced in buckets.
Just a little greater than two months later, Marcoux Samaan stepped down, leaving golf’s largest ladies’s skilled tour after simply three years within the submit. Liz Moore, the LPGA’s chief authorized officer, turned interim commissioner in her stead. The Solheim Cup parking fiasco was not the only real cause for Marcoux Samaan’s departure, however there was little query it performed a task.
Marcoux Samaan left her submit having dramatically elevated earnings for LPGA professionals, boosted purse sizes, and hammered out expanded broadcast agreements with broadcast companions like ESPN. However her legacy was swiftly and maybe irrevocably tied to the missteps that plagued her time in workplace: not addressing tempo of play, struggles with star-building in a time of explosive progress for ladies’s sports activities and, in fact, the Solheim Cup.
Now the LPGA heads into one other pivotal offseason with a completely clear slate. The runway is evident for a brand new chief govt with a brand new imaginative and prescient to reshape the long run earlier than the ladies’s sports activities increase passes golf by.
The LPGA has an opportunity to rewrite its repute as soon as once more. This time, with the Solheim Cup serving because the prologue.
