No fair way on pro fairways

Last week, many of the nation’s top women college golfers completed their seasons in the NCAA Tournament in Daytona Beach, Fla.

You hope they enjoyed the course, the practice facilities, the transportation, the housing and the food, all of which should have been equal to what the top men got at this week’sr NCAA Tournament.

You hope they enjoyed it because for those women who go on to play on the LPGA Tour, the equal status with their male counterparts will become a distant memory.

Title IX, the sweeping 1972 equal-rights law that requires schools receiving federal funding to treat the genders equally, abruptly stops once an athlete enters the professional arena, where market forces and the largely male audience determine who gets what.

The differences between the purses for the PGA Tour and LPGA Tour are huge. Rory Sabbatini won the PGA Tour’s Crowne Plaza Invitational and earned a $1,080,000 first-place check. Young Kim won the LPGA Tour’s Corning Classic and pocketed $195,000.

In pro golf, the title sponsor, not Title IX, has the power.

The disparity doesn’t stop with purses. Most PGA Tour players can count on having a club or ball deal to augment their winnings; endorsements are scant on the LPGA Tour except for a few high-profile players.

Marketing people will tell you that their companies want their clubs and logos seen on television. That’s another area of inequity, where the LPGA gets the scraps left by the PGA Tour juggernaut.

When it’s not getting the tape-delay treatment from The Golf Channel — which with a 15-year contract with the PGA Tour has reason to focus on the men — the LPGA gets relegated to ESPN’s second-string network, ESPN2.

The size of the disparity is larger than it would be if the PGA Tour did not have Tiger Woods, whose immense popularity and TV ratings cachet have prompted a unprecedented boom of PGA Tour purses. In 1996, the year Woods turned pro, the average purse on the PGA Tour was $1,571,111. Last year, it was $5,351,042.

In the same time span, the LPGA Tour’s purses have grown steadily, but not at the PGA Tour’s meteoric rate, going from an average of $662,500 in 1996 to $1,482,429 last year.

This week’s LPGA tournament is the Ginn Tribute, a first-year event with the LPGA Tour’s biggest purse. On the PGA Tour, the stars are at Jack Nicklaus’ Memorial.

Fair or not, you probably can guess which tournament will have the bigger purse, and which will be tape-delayed.