Demise of The Dinah

It's one more and done in the Coachella Valley

On its face, this week’s announcement about the end of the women’s major golf championship in Rancho Mirage, Calif., and its future in another state with a new sponsor and different name is about the bottom line.

Decisions in professional sports that aren’t about money are as rare as a round played on tour in under four hours by a threesome on Thursday or Friday. Professional golfers don’t tee it up for free, and the tours where those players compete are obliged to maximize their income.

But beyond that basic equation, the demise of the ANA Inspiration and the formation of the Chevron Championship is also something else: an additional piece for the growth-or-preservation puzzle that always seems to be on golf’s kitchen table. Increasingly, tradition is the sliver of cardboard that goes missing.

The world’s best women golfers will return to Mission Hills Country Club one more time, next spring, ending five decades in the California desert. The tournament was first held in 1972 as the Dinah Shore Colgate Winner’s Circle. It offered a $110,000 purse, the biggest in LPGA history, at a time when most tournaments were contested for a quarter of that. The event will leave the Palm Springs area in part because its last sponsor, All Nippon Airways (ANA), like all airlines hammered during the Covid-19 pandemic, couldn’t keep up with the increases at other women’s majors. Chevron, the fossil fuels company that signed a six-year deal, is bumping the 2022 purse to $5 million, significantly larger than the $3.1 million offered in 2021. There will be a later date from 2023 onward that frees the event from a weekend conflict with the recently established Augusta National Women’s Amateur and pre-Masters Tournament hype, along with the promise of network television.

Perhaps The Dinah was dead in the water by the 18th green into which champions have splashed when it comes to a viable future in Palm Springs. As Larry Bohannan, longtime chronicler of the tournament for The Desert Sun, noted in his column reacting to this week’s news, when Kraft departed as sponsor in 2014, several companies were interested in taking over but only if they could relocate the tournament. Then-LPGA commissioner Mike Whan found ANA and the event remained in its longtime home.

Given the evolving, far-from-stable nature of major championships in the history of women’s professional golf—from two to five annually, the larger number becoming reality when the wand was waved at the Evian Championship in 2013—the constancy of The Dinah has been no small thing. The Dinah Shore Tournament Course at Mission Hills might not be a marvel of golf architecture, but it has become familiar terrain through the years, not unlike Augusta National or the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass in men’s golf. That kind of familiarity is a plus for players and fans, both of whom can recall what has happened where over the years, the past providing depth to the present.

For better or worse, the post-victory leaps into “Poppie’s Pond” also could be compared. What began with a spur-of-the-moment greenside sprint into the water by Amy Alcott and her caddie, Bill Kurre, in 1988 morphed into a formalized ritual after Alcott jumped in again in 1991 with 75-year-old Dinah Shore. “Over the years, every last drop of spontaneity has been wrung from the victory dip,” Karen Crouse wrote in The New York Times in 2011, “now a staged, sanitized celebration equivalent to cutting down the nets at the NCAA tournament.”

Let’s hope that wherever the Chevron Championship lands in 2023, there isn’t a water feature on the 18th hole. If there is, nothing but someone’s errant shot ought to make a splash. What happened in Palm Springs should stay in Palm Springs.

The Chevron will not have to apprentice to obtain major status. The Dinah did. With champions including Mickey Wright, Kathy Whitworth and Nancy Lopez in the period from 1972 through 1982 and a buzz factor from the outset, it wasn’t designated an LPGA major until 1983—four years after the Peter Jackson Classic, Canada’s women’s championship, was so labeled.

The year that The Dinah made its debut, thanks to Colgate-Palmolive chairman David Foster underwriting the unprecedented sponsorship, a women’s major reappeared on the 1972 LPGA schedule after a five-year absence. The Titleholders, which was a women’s Masters-like event before The Dinah assumed the mantle—it was held in Augusta, Ga., from 1937 through 1966, with the exception of a World War II hiatus, and champions got a green jacket—was resurrected by Warren and Peggy Kirk Bell at their Pine Needles resort in Southern Pines, N.C. It was a labor of love, given that Peggy had won The Titleholders in 1949, but a costly proposition for the couple, who spent close to $100,000 to put on a first-class event and revive a notable golf tradition, a championship that had been won by Hall of Famers such as Patty Berg, Babe Zaharias, Louise Suggs, Marilynn Smith and Whitworth.

It turned out to be a brief revival. “[Warren] Bell indicated that some major companies were willing to sponsor The Titleholders if their names could be used in the tournament title,” The News and Observer reported in early 1973 of the event’s demise. “Bell, however, felt the event was too prestigious to have a commercial association.”

Such sentiment might as antique as a hickory-shafted brassie, but a good golfer could hit one of those a very long way.