Bite the Hand: A Reaction to the Dinah Shore Move
Amy Alcott and her caddie after making the first jump into Poppie’s Pond, 1988
In what seems to be an effort to avoid biting the hand offering to feed it, the LPGA has agreed to move its most iconic tournament to Texas in 2023. Yes, the Dinah Shore, and yes, the Texas that recently enacted legislation designed to restrict the human rights of some of the very women expected to participate in the event (several members of the LPGA live and train in the state). Chevron, the tournament’s newest sponsor, plans to uproot the Dinah from Mission Hills, its course of origin, to a soon-to-be-announced venue in Houston, where 8,000 of its employees live and work. The offer that apparently couldn’t be refused? A purse increase of 60% and a broadcast of the tournament on NBC. While these incentives might seem like a surefire way to put more eyes on women’s golf, there are several implications of this decision that should be acknowledged.
Since its establishment in 1972, the Dinah has rebranded several times as sponsors have come and gone, but its relevance in the world of women’s golf and, more broadly, women’s history, has been constant. The glamorous yet down-to-earth Shore helped start the tournament as a way to promote women’s golf, inviting celebrity friends like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra to garner publicity. Traditions of pond jumping and white bathrobes arose over the decades, and its return to the same course year after year earned it the nickname “the women’s Masters.” The competitiveness of the players has always been fierce, but it’s been accompanied by the kind of carefree atmosphere that could only be generated by spectators getting to wear shorts for the first time in months.
This fun-in-the-sun vibe is probably as much a result of an annual boost to the desert economy as it is the weather. For years, spectators have patronized hotels, restaurants, shops, and golf courses while in town for the Dinah. According to tournament organizers, spectatorship has been on the decline for the past few years, so the move is not expected to impact local businesses negatively, and other events taking place during the high season will reportedly draw enough visitors to maintain the springtime cash flow. But it seems like a missed opportunity—attendance, and therefore revenue, could have been boosted with a little social media influencer based marketing. If a few Hollywood celebrities and golf-centric Instagram stars like Tisha Alyn or Paige Spiranac were hired to draw attention to the event, they probably would have been able to make the Dinah seem like the place to be and attract investors. There is no indication that the LPGA, its previous sponsors, or Chevron considered or attempted this approach.
One event expected to continue drawing visitors despite the uprooting of its eponym is Club Skirts Dinah Shore Week, also known as “spring break for lesbians,” according to The L Word’s Alice Pieszecki. Since the 1980’s, gay women have flocked to the desert to watch their favorite LPGA stars (some of them gay and therefore especially relatable and inspiring) in action, holding pre- and post-round gatherings around Palm Springs. The tradition was officialized in 1991, when Club Skirts founder Mariah Hanson established an annual pool party and concert in conjunction with the tournament. Hanson told The Desert Sun that while Club Skirts is now big enough to survive without the tournament, it’s a shame that the historic sociocultural linkage between the tournament and festival will now belong to the past. It comes as a bit of a surprise that Chevron failed to appreciate this connection, considering they are quite vocal about earning a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index for sixteen years in a row.
It’s unclear whether or not Shore herself was intersectional enough of a feminist to support gay women as much as she supported women athletes—it’s rumored that she resented the connection between the tournament and the festival—but it is certain that she was no stranger to the patriarchy and its impact on women’s sports. She built a career in show business during a time when men dominated the industry even more than they currently do, took up a male-dominated sport during middle age, and became the first woman member at Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles after publicizing the fact that she’d been denied access to the course following a swing lesson. No less significant is the fact that she dated a beefy, ‘70’s-era Burt Reynolds while twenty years his senior, making her a target of sexist tabloid reporters. And in a final salute to her womanhood, Shore died of ovarian cancer—one of the most excruciating and understudied diseases a cisgender woman can endure. While she’s suspected to have held some potentially GERF-y beliefs (yes, that’s a play on TERF, as Club Skirts was lesbian focused as opposed to trans women focused when it first started), her name, the tournament, and the festival still represent a historic moment in the ongoing conversation surrounding Queer-CisHet women’s unity, perhaps even more so if she really was homophobic.
The decision to move the Dinah Shore tournament is ironic (or not ironic in the slightest if you’ve studied women’s history) because it’s been made during a time when leading voices in golf claim to have an interest in “growing the game” among women, Black and Brown people, Queer people, and members of Gen Z. That growth is contingent upon those groups forming an emotional attachment to the game as well as professional tours and the traditions associated with them. So why eliminate one of the few traditions (others being the remaining majors and the Solheim Cup) associated with women’s golf, especially when it unites players and fans, gay women and straight women in a historically significant location? Professional golf organizers and tour sponsors are clearly aware of the power of tradition as a marketing strategy—every television commercial aired in the weeks before a major men’s tournament is packed with footage of past champions hoisting 100-year-old trophies, engravers adding new names to long lists of legends, preceding winners bestowing green jackets upon new ones. So doing away with one of the few existing women’s golf traditions seems counterproductive to the goal of growth.
As a multibillion dollar corporation, Chevron could have taken over a different tournament or started a new one. They also could have invested in revamping the Dinah as it exists at Mission Hills and helped their Houston-based employees in other ways (raises, perhaps?). Yes, the growth of a historically exclusionary sport requires change, but eliminating the women’s equivalent to the Masters ain’t it, especially when the proposal of an actual women’s Masters to be held at Augusta is rejected on an annual basis. And do we even need to discuss why allowing its relocation to Texas is a slap in the face to women in general?
Watching the victor of the closest thing we’ve had to a “women’s Masters” jump into that chlorinated pond is one of the most exciting moments junior girls could envision themselves experiencing one day. But the message is clearer than ever: golf organizers and sponsors do not value tradition in women’s golf in the way that they value tradition in men’s golf, and that these kinds of “investments” are made solely to further the sponsor’s own cause as opposed to actually and effectively grow women’s golf. We’re now left with another example of why women must be at the table when it comes to decision making in international sports and why their feminism must be intersectional enough to allow them to recognize a prime opportunity to unite straight and gay women athletes with their straight and gay fans.
Ideally, top women players would’ve bitten the hand—to borrow from the unflinching words of Solange Knowles—and demanded one of the many possible alternatives that would have kept the Dinah Shore tournament at Mission Hills, and the traditions of Poppie’s Pond, white bathrobes, and gay-straight women’s unity cemented like foundation stones into the structure of women’s golf. An organized, LPGA-wide hand-biting—that would’ve really put eyes on women’s golf. There’s still time for that to happen, but it’d probably be a better strategy at this point to start campaigning for the Dinah’s return to the desert after its contract with Chevron expires. By that point, it’s very likely that Chevron will have lost interest in women’s golf, since it seems they had little of it to begin with.
Photo by Lennox McLendon/AP Images