SOUTHERN PINES, N.C. — Allison Emrey played Pine Needles “a million times growing up,” she said earlier this week, including once during a junior golf tournament she remembers as much for the weather as anything that happened on the course.
“I have never played in more rain in my life,” said Emrey, a Charlotte native and former Wake Forest standout. “It’s sand, so everything soaks in. So the entire day it rained, but we had a blast.”
This week, it turned out for Emrey, proved to be about $20,000 more of a blast.
Emrey was among those players in the U.S. Women’s Open who arrived here on the margin of the highest level of her sport. She worked her way back on the LPGA Tour this season with her performance in 2021 on the Epson Tour, the LPGA Tour’s version of a minor league. In a way, her performance at Pine Needles embodied her young career to this point, given that she grinded her way past the cut line, just barely, and into the weekend.
In doing so, Emrey guaranteed herself the largest payday of her career. The U.S. Women’s Open purse of $10 million was the largest in the history of the sport, and “the story” of the event, Morgan Pressel, a one-time golfing phenom turned television analyst, said before the Open began. Minjee Lee, who finished 13-under par and won the Open by four shots, received $1.8 million in prize money on Sunday, the most ever for this event. Mina Harigae, who finished in second, took home almost $1.1 million.
“We’re only moving in the right direction,” Lee said afterward, of the significance of her payday and the overall purse. “I think it’s only going to get better and better from here. It’s such a large sum, and I’m really honored to be the first winner, I guess, of this sum.”
‘A massive change’
The highest dollar amounts generated the most attention here this week. For the first time ever, the top three finishers at the U.S. Women’s Open all received at least $685,000, a larger sum than the winner received in every other women’s major last year. Overall, the top 12 finishers at Pine Needles all earned at least $200,000; the top 22 all received at least $102,000.
Emrey, a part of the first pairing to tee off on Sunday, finished a modest 12-over par, and in a tie for 60th. Only eight others who made the cut finished with a higher score, but Emrey still received a little more than $20,000 in prize money — more than enough to double her season earnings. Her payday at the Open also exceeded the $17,933 she received for finishing tied for 16th in the JTBC Classic in March.
It’s players like Emrey, those on the margins, who in some cases had the most to gain during the most lucrative U.S. Women’s Open in history. While most of the players at or near the top of the leaderboard here on Sunday — Lee and Mina Harigae and Lydia Ko and Anna Nordqvist among them — arrived in Southern Pines as established successes, and millionaires, the field was also full of players for whom a $20,000 or $30,000 check would have been the largest of their lives.
The prospect of increasing overall payouts and allowing for more “life changing” financial rewards was “absolutely on our radar,” said John Bodenhamer, the Chief Championships Officer for the USGA, which runs the U.S. Men’s and Women’s Open. A year ago, the U.S. Women’s Open purse was $5.5 million, the same it had been in each of the previous two years.
The purse nearly doubled this year because of the USGA’s partnership with ProMedica, a non-profit healthcare company. ProMedica became the first title sponsor in the history of the Women’s Open, and in the process infused the event with cash during a time in which gender equity, especially as it relates to compensation, has become part of the national sporting dialogue.
In recent years, members of the U.S. women’s soccer team pushed for pay equal to that of their less successful male counterparts. The fight paid off, in a literal way, when the U.S. Soccer Federation announced last month that the men’s and women’s teams “have come together to agree to new collective bargaining agreements that will run through 2028 and achieve true equal pay — including equalization of World Cup prize money.”
Other sports, basketball and golf included, have a ways to go before they approach that kind of balance in compensation. Even so, the money that was up for grabs this week at the Women’s Open represented a kind of turning point in the sport, and it so happened that it arrived 50 years to the month after the passage of Title IX, the landmark piece of gender equality legislation best known for its effects in the world of athletics.
Already this month there has been, and will continue to be, no shortage of reflections surrounding Title IX and its long-term influence. On one hand, women’s sports have never been more visible, the opportunities they provide never more lucrative. On the other, change has been so incremental that something like the $10 million purse here this week — which would rank 10th among PGA Tour events this season — was lauded as a kind of revolutionary moment.
The financial impact of this particular event, at this particular course, speaks to that slow progress. Pine Needles first hosted a Women’s Open in 1996, with a total purse of $1.2 million. By the time the course hosted the event for the third time, in 2007, the purse had grown by almost $2 million, to $3.1 million. In the 15 years since, the Women’s Open prize money grew little by little — until it nearly doubled between 2021 and 2022.
“I think it’s fantastic,” said Annika Sorenstam, who received $212,500 when she won the Open here in 1996. “I think it’s great. I want to thank the USGA for doing that and giving the women that opportunity. That is a massive change. I think it’s a massive boost.
“I think it gives the women a lot more credibility and respect for doing that.”
Worth the ‘wow’ factor
The prize money Sorenstam received in ‘96 at Pine Needles was roughly equal to that reserved for the 12th-place finisher here this week. When the U.S Women’s Open was last in the neighborhood, down the road at Pinehurst No. 2 in 2014, Michelle Wie West won her only major, which came with a winner’s share of $720,000.
Wie West has always been among the most marketable players in her sport, since her days as a pre-teen phenom, though leading into the Women’s Open she announced her intention to retire. After she missed the cut here on Friday — and finished 5-over par through two rounds — she said her clubs would collect some dust before she plays in the 2023 Women’s Open at Pebble Beach, which she intends to be her next and final professional event.
In the meantime, she is playing a leading role with LA Golf, a company through which Wie West is hoping to address some of the gender equity problems that have plagued her sport.
“We’re coming out with a full healthcare benefits plan, paid maternity leave, paid mental health days, and travel — just making everything more seamless,” Wie West said before she began play at Pine Needles. “I just know as a female athlete, travel is not as glamorous as what people think.
“We’re lugging our bags on and off carousels every week, bags are getting lost, and we just want to create a more seamless experience for female athletes and just kind of show them what they’re really worth and respect that.”
John Podany, the USGA’s Chief Commercial Officer, said before the Women’s Open began that the USGA considered boosting the event’s prize money in a more incremental way. The Women’s Open “could have gone to $8 (million) and still been the highest major in the game, even $7 million,” he said, “and (we) just felt like that wasn’t enough.”
In part the motivation behind the $10 million purse, he said, was to “create that ‘wow’ factor, so to speak.” But it was also about a chance to “really create the kind of stage that these women deserve and to take it beyond that.”
“You’re going to see increases over the next few years. We’re committed to that.”
By early Sunday evening, little drama remained at Pine Needles. Lee began the final round with a three-shot lead and led by five strokes as she walked up the 18th fairway.
The gallery applauded her arrival on the green, while spectators filled in the fairway behind her to watch Lee make history. After bogeying the final hole she won by four strokes and soon held the Semple Trophy high.
She’d finished in the top 10 three other times this season, and won the Founders Cup about a month ago. Yet after four days of work here, she more than doubled her winnings to date this season. Sunday brought the most lucrative payday of Lee’s 10 seasons on the LPGA Tour.
Many of her colleagues and competitors could say the same.
