After playing the third round in the 2006 Florida's Natural Charity Championship, South Korean rookie Kyeong Bae and her father drove 400 miles from the LPGA tour event in Georgia to her Lakeland, Fla., home.
Soon after arriving at her doorstep, Bae wanted to find out how much money she had won and called up a Korean golf website. She learned she had won nothing. The tournament was a 72-hole event.
Barely able to speak or read English at the time, Bae had misread tournament information given to the players and thought it was a 54-hole tournament. So she and her father got in the car and drove the 400 miles back to Georgia. Tired after the overnight trip, Bae nonetheless shot a 68 in the final round to finish in a tie for 13th place and win $21,500.
"That's why I don't think this is an overall bad thing," Dottie Pepper, the former LPGA star and current golf analyst, said of the LPGA tour's new policy requiring its member golfers to speak English or face suspension. "And I think it also can really help the players become more comfortable in the environment they play."
The LPGA policy says players who have been on the tour for two years can be suspended if they fail an oral evaluation of their English proficiency starting at the end of the 2009 season.
I would like to add, i hope this becomes a basis for other sports! and also i wonder how long it will take someone to sue them over this.
Full Version: Speak English Or Die!
While it's the stuff of some infamy around the world how very many travellers cum tourists (and professionals in full-time jobs abroad) from the Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking world (especially Brits, Americans and Aussies) can be outright boorish and insufferable abroad, not least because they have never bothered to seriously master, to whatever levels of proficiency, a foreign tongue, nevertheless I actually welcome and agree with the LPGA's proposed new regulations governing its member professional players plying their skills in the top tournaments under its wing.
Ditto for new (and existing) foreign-born immigrants and naturalised citizens. As a liberal lion
as I may be, I find it exasparatingly odd and annoying how so very many of immigrants in Australia and elsewhere in North America and Europe(which brings in non-English speaking countries into the fray) are seemingly unable and more apparently unwilling to master the native tongue of the country they are settling in and aspiring to call their new home. That's why despite never being a xenophobic, anti-immigrant attack dog, I also back the British government's new policy of vetting new immigrants on their English language proficiency and requiring those already in Britain to seriously begin to smarten up in English. We in Australia ought to be going the same way with our litany of Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Lebanese and Arabs and even Indians with their irritatingly odd accents and all.
I don't know exactly all the issues that prompted the LPGA to decide to go this way, but I laud their intentions, at face value, at least....
Ditto for new (and existing) foreign-born immigrants and naturalised citizens. As a liberal lion
as I may be, I find it exasparatingly odd and annoying how so very many of immigrants in Australia and elsewhere in North America and Europe(which brings in non-English speaking countries into the fray) are seemingly unable and more apparently unwilling to master the native tongue of the country they are settling in and aspiring to call their new home. That's why despite never being a xenophobic, anti-immigrant attack dog, I also back the British government's new policy of vetting new immigrants on their English language proficiency and requiring those already in Britain to seriously begin to smarten up in English. We in Australia ought to be going the same way with our litany of Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Lebanese and Arabs and even Indians with their irritatingly odd accents and all. I don't know exactly all the issues that prompted the LPGA to decide to go this way, but I laud their intentions, at face value, at least....