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CME GROUP TOUR CHAMPIONSHIP

November 17, 2017

Mike Whan

Naples, Florida

THE MODERATOR: Good morning, welcome back to the media center at the CME Group Tour Championship. It is my pleasure to introduce the man of the hour, LPGA Commissioner, Mike Whan.

(Applause.)

MIKE WHAN: I got my staff clap, but not the media. Good job back there. We talked about this and whether she was going to ask me questions, but she realized if she asked me one question I would probably talk for 30 minutes, so I'm just going to talk for a few, a little bit, and then we can open it up to whatever questions you have. I'm not a Dolphins fan, so this is not about the Dolphins, but today we're announcing that we'll be racing for the CME Globe and we'll be here in Naples at the CME Tour Championship through 2023. So I figured I would don the 23. And we're pretty excited about, for obvious reasons, if you tell me I can come here every November until 2023, that would be just fine with me. And any tournament I can drive to is a win. And this is a drivable tournament for us.

I'm going to talk for a couple seconds about 2017 and the talent on Tour. It was a pretty incredible season for our fans. As most of you know and many of you in the room have written about, it took us 15 events, really 16 events better before we could even talk about a two-time winner. 22 different winners on Tour is pretty unique situation and just reinforces the depth on Tour. I said I think I said last night -- I know I said in a tweet -- I don't really remember everything I said last night, that's another quote -- but we'll have -- you know, last year at this time we talked about five players finishing with an average score of under 70. And as we tee up here with three rounds to play we have 12 players that are averaging under 70. We have players that have won the Rolex Player of the Year and have an average score now lower than when they won the award and probably not going to win the award this year. So the depth on Tour is like never before. I was floored when I tweeted, because I looked at the stat flying back from Asia, that if you hit 70 percent of your greens in regulation on this Tour, you rank 50th. So if you hit 70 percent of your greens -- and just think about your own golf game for a second -- you would rank 50th on Tour. If you hit 80 percent of tours you wouldn't be in our top-15. That just tells you how difficult it is to be out, to be out here and to compete at this level. Obviously we're excited with Sung Hyun Park and what she's been able to achieve in her first year on Tour. We knew she wasn't going to be your typical rookie. She was coming off 10 wins in two years on the KLPGA, but being the fastest to a million and the fastest to two million and being in the kind of races that she's in makes her pretty unique. And obviously it's a unique time for golf, period, not just women's golf, when you have a Chinese born No. 1 player in the Rolex World Rankings. I don't know what that's going to mean to the future of golf, but if it, if it means what it meant for Yani, and if it means what it meant for Lorena, then everybody buckle down the hatches. And I'm really excited about the fact that some of our races are this tight. The depth on the Tour especially at the top is like a time we have never had before. I think our fans have responded to that season with our viewership being up 17 percent versus a year ago. I'll be the first to admit that an incredible Des Moines drove a big chunk of that. If you take Des Moines out of that, we're still up five or six percent. And I said this in a few conferences ago, I don't know a lot of other sports or a lot of other leagues that are talking about viewership increases for four or five years in a row. It just, it's just not as easy to do anymore and I'm excited that we're in that elite company. The Solheim was definitely the thing that we'll probably remember most at the end of this year, depending upon what happens this weekend though, but having over 7 million people come in and view that from the States at that time, a billion social followers, you know, our social following is up over 50 percent, again this year, so it's an exciting time. But Des Moines was a unique experience and we're only hoping to take that to the next level when we get to Scotland.

As it relates to 2018, we're going to do the same thing this year that we did next year, we're going to release our official schedule after Thanksgiving. The reason for that is -- I'm going to tell you a lot about it, so you probably can be able to write the story about it anyway, which I'm sure will make my team happy -- but we have got three new events, two of which still want to be announced from a who the title sponsor is and have their own moment and sometimes when I get up here and you guys start answering questions I end up spilling all those beans. But here's what I can tell you about our season going forward. Obviously we'll continue to race for the CME Globe and we'll end up here in Naples. We'll have 34 events on our schedule, which will include the International Crown, the UL International Crown going to Korea, which we'll talk about in a second. We'll play for roughly 69 million in total purses, plus or minus a couple hundred thousand when it's all said and done, but safe to say it will be another record in the LPGA's history, in terms of how much we're playing for. We'll have three new stops on the schedule, again I'll let the stops be the ones to introduce themselves to you in the next month, but two in the U.S., Western U.S. specifically, and one new international stop. And then I would expect three of our current stops not to be on the schedule for next year. You've heard me talk about New Zealand moving from a fall event to a spring of 2019 event. I think most of you realize that Manulife is not coming back next year. And then we have one more event that I'm not anticipating being on the 2018 schedule. I think that event anticipates that they will be on the 2018 schedule. So that will be another three weeks of seeing if they can kind of finalize some things on a sponsorship perspective. But I expect our schedule to be essentially the same in terms of number of opportunities as this year, to have, you know, more purse money than we had last year and an increase in TV as well. I think that next year when we take the UL International Crown to Korea, I think that, I think you'll see in Korea what we saw in Des Moines. If the number of cameras that were at the announcement that we were going to have the UL International Crown in Korea is any indication of number of fans, we're not going to have a fan problem in Korea. We're going to play at the Jack Nicklaus Club, where they played the Presidents Cup two years ago. One, it's a phenomenal golf course, it's a great place to play within the city, real easy and convenient, and it can hold 100,000 people. And I think it's going to be awesome for the four women in Korea that make the team and it's also going to be incredibly tension filled, too, because the perspective in every interview I did that week on, well, you know Korea will win, right, commissioner? I didn't have the heart to tell them that there's eight teams playing in the UL International Crown. We'll -- next season when you see our '18 schedule you'll see the U.S. Women's Open moved to its new and permanent date, which will be two weeks before the men's U.S. Open, so always in late May, early June. Evian will remain in the September date. I did say in an interview late this week that we have a significant desire, as do our partners at Evian and the sponsors that sponsor that event, to find a summer date in the future. We're working on that for 2019 and going forward, but we haven't finalized that yet. Moving a Major around a schedule that's pretty full isn't easy, but that's our goal. We had, I don't know, somewhere around eight or nine or 10 title extensions for this year and if I was really being honest the thing I'm probably most proud of and I said this last year and I'll say it again this year, is I felt like in my first four or five years in my career I would come to this day and I would introduce a schedule or talk about a schedule and the anticipation and the anxiety and the unpredictability was high, are you going to pay 22 times, 32 times, 28 times, are you purses going up, down, you have more or less TV events. And I feel pretty good that the last three years, generally you already know our schedule, our players already know our schedule -- our caddie at player dining just told me our schedule, which he was about 80 percent right, which scared me -- but the good news is I think we're in a predictability and a stability on the Tour that we haven't had in a long time and I think that's, that was really the thing we most wanted to give to women's golf. We'll have a couple of new locations the Volunteers of America North Texas Shoot-out will relocate to Volunteers of America North Texas Classic and be at a different location, as will our Toto event in Japan. Last year or maybe it was the year before, when I wore a cheesehead, we actually talked about an event that was a year and a half out. I really want to, but my team won't let me talk about we have three new events in 2019 that are sort of done and negotiated. We haven't put them through final contract, but those will probably be announced early in 2018. Again, two U.S. based events and one international. And then in 2019, again, we'll be taking the Solheim Cup to Scotland. I hope that you'll agree that stability and predictability hasn't always been the calling card of the LPGA but it has been maybe the last few years. I'm proud to tell you that the revenues of the LPGA in the last five or six years are up almost 90 percent. We have added 20 title sponsors and over 20 official marketing partners in the last five or six years. Don't know too many sports that could claim that. 14 new marketing partners in the last three years alone. And I'm proud of every one of our marketing partners, but it's pretty cool when I can sit up here over the last few years and give you names like UL and ANA and CME and KPMG. These are big-time names. And one of the new ones that we're announcing this week that will join us next year is XL Catlin, one of the largest insurers in the world and actually -- Sally-Anne, thank you for being here to be a part of this -- but part of the XL Catlin official marketing partner concept is that they will also do what they did when they were the title sponsor at the America's Cup, and have a volunteers of the year award. So we're going to have an XL Catlin Volunteer Service Award. Every month our tournaments will recommend their top volunteer. We'll recognize that volunteer every month and at the end of the year at this time we'll actually recognize the XL Catlin Volunteer of the Year on the LPGA and give $10,000 to the tournament charity from which that, from which tournament nominated them, because they will get nominated from an LPGA tournament. Should your tournament be the one where the volunteer is selected, we'll add another $10,000 to your tournament charity. I shouldn't say we'll add another $10,000, XL Catlin will help on that. But thank you guys for being a part of the family, we really appreciate it. We have got -- like the new tournaments for 2019, we have got three more official marketing partners we're going to be excited to talk to you about in probably January, February, time. And one of the things that I'm most excited about in some of these new partnerships is how it's going to impact TV. One of the things that we love when we're at a Major is all the different camera upgrades that we get, but we don't get those week-in and week-out and most of you who follow us on TV know that. Some of these official marketing partnership deals that are coming together will upgrade our TV experience on a week-in and week-out basis and give us more of a Major feel from our TV on a regular basis. I'll just take another couple seconds and talk to you about the future of the LPGA. We don't talk about it much in this forum, but I wanted to make sure you knew about it. When it comes to the future of the game and Symetra Tour, the Symetra Tour has a lot in common right now with the LPGA Tour, a 10-year relationship that goes through 2021 with Symetra. Just like the LPGA, the Symetra Tour tournaments over the last few years are up 50 percent and the purses are up over a hundred percent. One of the things I like to talk about is we didn't get real serious about investing in the Symetra Tour until 2014. And in 2013, if you won the Symetra Tour, you won $47,000. Now all of you travel around the world, your expense budgets are probably about $47,000 so that's not a great year. But this last year, if you came in 10th and got your card, you made $63,000. Three of the players in those top-10 made well over a hundred thousand dollars. And what I've said many times and you guys have all heard me talk about it, the globalization of women's golf isn't slowing down, it's not going away, and it's only going to create a bigger and better sport. Of the 10 women who got their card this year at Symetra Tour, they represent seven different countries. So what we're seeing, both at Symetra Tour and certainly at Q-School where we had 367 people show up from all over the world, that the world is coming to the LPGA, trying to make it to this global Tour. I remember a time when I started that, if you won a Symetra Tour event, you could pretty much go home, because you were going to get your card in September. Now that's simply not the case. We had a player win twice in 2016 and not get their card. And the No. 1 player on Tour this year actually never won and actually finished No. 1, which says a lot about her consistency. So we have had multiple winners on Tour, but to actually win that Tour without a win is a pretty impressive and actually not get in the top-10 with a couple of wins, as we saw a couple of years ago, tells you about both about the number of events and the number activity. Like the LPGA there will be three new stops on the Symetra Tour and this doesn't, this isn't meant to wow you because I know we play for much bigger numbers out here, but we're going to be at an average purse of 140 and I remember just a few years ago when the average purse on Symetra Tour was 90. So it's a different game out there, just like it's a different game out here. You'll be happy to know I'm on my last card. Well maybe I lied. Maybe I got one more. Whoops. This is even a better Mike Whanism. I numbered my cards one, two, three, four, six, seven. Unless you were trying to mess with me and took number five out. As it relates to the future of the game and reaching the LPGA, there will still be the ways to reach the LPGA like there has been. Win as a non-member. Top 40 in money as a non-member in events with cuts. You can get here through Q-School. But you will see, in 2018, an official change to Q-School into the Q Series. We have talked about it for about a year, we meant it to be the worst kept secret and it has been. But I want to tell you a little bit about what Q Series is and what Q Series isn't, because I read a lot of articles and quotes from me that are sort of right, but here's kind of the thinking as it relates to Q Series -- and this will begin in 2018. First off, Stage 1 and Stage 2 are unchanged. Same time, same venue, and essentially everything that you would experience today as a Q 1 or Stage 1 or Stage 2 follower. Stage 3 is what really changes. Stage 3 we replaced with something we call Q Series. It will be held in a different location, actually a different state. It will be title sponsored and we'll announce that in probably late January. And it will be quite different. Rather than playing five days in Daytona Beach, you'll play eight rounds, four, like a Thursday to Sunday, break Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and play Thursday to Sunday again. Those eight rounds will be cumulative. So if you finish the first four days at 6-under you'll tee off next Thursday starting at 6-under. You'll play two different venues in those two different four-day rounds, even though you'll be in the same market for those two different spots. But what's really different about Q Series is who is in and who plays. We're anticipating a field size of about 108. So you can kind of do your math on this one, but in that field will be players who finished from 101 to 150 on the LPGA in the previous season, so in the 2018 season. Will be players from 11 to 30 in the Symetra Tour, so top-10 will still get their card, but 11 through 30 will get an invite to this Q Series or replacement Stage 3. We'll offer five spots to the top-5 collegiate ranked players from the Golfweek -- there's my plug for you -- Golfweek Collegiate rankings. And we'll offer a limited number of spots, I'm not exactly sure what the number is, Heather probably knows, but I didn't write it on my card, for players that are in the top 75 of the world rankings. It might not be 75, it might be five or 10 spots, but we'll hold some spots based on your World Ranking, for the best players in the world that aren't currently playing on the LPGA. And we'll fill the rest of that field from Stage 2. So that may not feel a lot different than you, but I would say today, when we go to Stage 3 in a week, you'll probably have 80 and 85 players in that field that came from Stage 2. In 2018 I'll bet that number will be somewhere around 20 to 30, maybe 20 to 25 that will come from Stage 2. So what that means is you can still go Stage 1, Stage 2, Q Series, LPGA card. But that will be a much tighter funnel and harder to do. The superstars of the time will still get through that, but generally speaking most players will get to Stage 2, play a year on Symetra Tour and play their way on to the LPGA. What else was I supposed to tell but that? Oh, I tell you the most important reason for these changes, there's really three. One is I feel like in today's day and age of Tour seasons, there's so many places you can play and play a full season, we should give more credibility to somebody who has played over the course of a season, not a weekend or two weekends in Daytona or Florida. The second thing is, we have always had the challenge internally -- and some of you have critiqued that process, depending on what player you like or dislike -- is if you finish 11th in Q-School, or 107 on the LPGA, who should have the higher Tour priority card next year? The answer is, somebody back in the headquarters makes that decision and the real answer is every year that's a little different. Sometimes Symetra's so deep it should be the Symetra Tour player and sometimes the opposite. Or if you finish 32nd in Q-School, or 147 on the Money List this year, next year's card what's, what should your number be versus her number be? What I like about this is you get together and over eight rounds you play and these 108 players that play we'll probably give away somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 cards. Somewhere between 40 and 50, depending upon availability. And the rank of those cards will come right out of how you finished in those eight rounds. So if our first card ranking coming out of Q Series is 101, we'll start at 101 and go right up. So where you rank relative to the somebody elses rank will be based on how you competed. If you finish inside the top-100 of the LPGA or you finished top-10 in Symetra, you'll be slotted before that, but after that it will really become from head-to-head competition over eight days. As I said, it will be sponsored, we'll triple our purse there versus what we have been playing for in Q Series. We'll have a TV component. I don't know that we'll televise the final four rounds, but we'll have a lot of television coverage in terms of live interviews, live look-ins, and that kind of thing, just so we can make sure that these players, as they're preparing to be members of this Tour, are getting the kind of exposure that they deserve, from a television perspective. The fact that I'm getting a dry mouth tells me that I've been talking for a long time. And the last thing on the future of the game is something that I think we have gone from having the greatest secret to not being such a great secret is when I started this job we had 4,500 girls a year getting introduced to the game. This year we'll introduce 72,000 girls to the game through U.S. LPGA, USGA Girls Golf. If you go back 15 years ago, 17 percent of golf was women and 17 percent of junior golf was women. And if you look today, 32 percent of junior golf is women. And I don't know that we can take all the credit in the world for that, but I'm certainly going to try. Because I think that -- I believe there's no other program like Girls Golf and as I heard the NGF say one time, when you look at what's happened in girl's golf, especially girls under the age of 12 which is really what's exploded, they would say two things are driving that. Girls learning to play golf in an all-girls environment -- And that's not just us, we're doing that at First tee sites and a lot of other locations, so a lot of people have pulled together on that rope and pulled the same way. But the other thing is happening is teenagers are at the top of the world rankings in women's golf. So 12-year-olds are changing the way they think about being a sports leader because this is the sport in which it's happening. As you guys know, last year when we were racing for the CME Globe, the three women who finished one, two, three were all less than 21 years old. So what's happening in women's golf does trickle down, it's certainly trickling down in the States. I don't have the data on the growth of women's golf worldwide, but I'm comfortable to tell you in at least the countries we play in it's certainly growing at least as fast in the U.S., with a combination of us coming and what's happened with the Olympics, because the Olympics really has changed the perception for quite awhile.

I'll -- you want me to stop? I'll stop and take questions first and then I'll --

THE MODERATOR: Before we open it up for questions I want to let you know, in the back of the room we do have the press releases regards the CME Group extension and joining with XL Catlin, as well as a preliminary 2018 Symetra Tour schedule and release. We'll have those available they will come out via e-mail to you as well. We'll open it up for questions.

Q. I'll actually ask two. Television ratings are up 17 percent, at what point are you going to be able to start selling domestic television rights as opposed to, this week, for example, buying them?
MIKE WHAN: Well, we do sell our domestic rights. We have a rights program with the Golf Channel and so that's a contractual rights program that has give and take on both sides. That won't be available until 2020. We did a 10-year deal in 2019. If the second question is when is somebody at the networks going to pay me to be on their networks, I don't know, but I sure hope it happens fast. I don't know to that. You've heard me say on things like this, whenever anyone asks me in a TV interview, what's the one thing you want, I say I want one TV executive to wake up and take a chance on us. Because if you gave me 23 weeks on network TV, I feel pretty comfortable I could surprise some people. But I haven't been given that opportunity. We're still buying our network opportunities, short of a couple of incredible partners like PGA of America, KPMG, and USGA, where those come to us -- or Evian in that matter -- where those are purchased for us. So I'm really excited about the opportunities we have, but if I was about being perfectly honest with you, frustrated that I'm not farther eight years in than I was in 2010.

Q. And just one other question, I know you're not prepared to go over the new events yet, but for those of us who are making our travel budgets, should we plan to go home from the Bahamas or go somewhere else domestically?
MIKE WHAN: You should plan to go home from the Bahamas. You might not plan to come home from Hawaii as fast as you usually do. I can't help myself.

Q. Can you take advantage of the LPGA, PGA alliance, and work out a mixed gender Presidents Cup or is, could that be on the table? You talk about exposure. That could give you huge exposure, and lord knows that event could use an infusion of competitiveness.
MIKE WHAN: When you write that story doesn't say, Mike Whan said, "lord knows."

Q. I've already written the story, so you're good.
MIKE WHAN: So, yeah, there's four parts of the PGA TOUR alliance with us and all of those -- I mean the only one where we feel like we would be farther, we thought we would be farther today than we are would be on the joint event. The others actually are moving pretty good and have all been exciting. To me -- it's a little thin, for you but when we see on the PGA TOUR telecast where the LPGA is that day, I mean 45 seconds on NBC, talking about where the LPGA is, what time we're on, and that matters. We're on their website, they're on our website, we're doing a lot more collaborative things together. We're certainly doing a lot of digital things together, some that you've seen and some that you'll see in the future. And then the TV rights as we talked about won't happen until 2020. But we do have a team, kind of a committee between the two of us, that get together, I think it's monthly -- they didn't invite me to the team, for obvious reasons -- but they are talking about the different opportunities we have. I don't know if the PGA TOUR would agree with you on a need for radical change of the Presidents Cup. I don't know, I haven't asked. But I did take a couple of your articles and at least forward them on to Jay and said, if you want to talk, I'm available. But I think that I'm not sure that would be our top target either. In a perfect world for me, I would really like for us to play together, in a perfect world, in an official event, where we really are playing on two score boards, the whole thing. That would still be an interesting idea. As I've said at the LPGA, because I got asked this my first three or four years, when is there going to be women's Presidents Cup? A women's Presidents Cup doesn't makes a much sense on the LPGA as it might make on the PGA TOUR and that's why we developed the International Crown. We really think the UL International Crown, in my personal opinion, is the future, is the future idea of team golf that will last until 2050. Because that one, in my mind, sees the future of global golf, doesn't have a selection committee, you got to get on one way, we're not talking about coaches and captains. I like the UL International Crown for us. If we got asked to be a part of the Presidents Cup would we take that seriously? Of course we could and of course we would. But I don't know, I don't know personally if that was, if that's even on the table. That's a big event for them. They're big invested in that and I don't know if there's a desire on their end to make a change.

Q. Why are you not, do you think the two tours are not further along on a joint event?
MIKE WHAN: Two reasons: One is they play -- I can't even remember the number, 48 weeks -- so when we talk about availability, I say that one works great and they say, oh, not that one. That one works good for me, oh, not that one. They play quite a bit. And I think for both of us the idea wasn't to essentially blow up an event you have, but to create something new. We do have a couple of events that we're working on that have opportunity, but it's not the -- I wasn't, when we did the coalition it wasn't my way of saying, can you invite me to a couple of your events. It was more of, why don't we sit down and create a format that our fans, our media, and our players would really get excited about and so building that in a time that works for them, where we both believe it can be successful -- and I can't really blame that all on them, the other side of that is we're not, we're not here as often as they're here, right? So sometimes when they talk about a date, I'll say, oh, yeah, we're going from Taiwan to Hainan Island and they're in Sea Island, Georgia. So a lot of times we're just not even in the same zip code. But there isn't a lack of -- I would say -- and I would tell you otherwise, I think you guys know me well enough -- I would tell you, there isn't a lack of interest, either by the two tours or by the two players and it's, I think it's, I think it's just a matter of time of finding the right fit.

Q. Can you talk about the, not only having an extension, but the length of it, and also what CME Group and Naples and Tiburon have meant to getting that extension.
MIKE WHAN: Yeah, I mean, I talked about this maybe back in 2011 or 2012. When somebody asked me, you know, what's missing for you. And I said for a couple of years, like I've said for seven on network TV, what's missing for us is the umbrella that holds the whole thing together, the what we're driving for, the grand finish. And it was here one night after a Rolex awards dinner, sitting in that bar up there, that we started to build the Race to the CME Globe. If I was being honest with you I pitched the CME Gold Rush. Man, I thought that was creative. Because they're a commodities trade, right? And so I said, let's get a big gold block, it's a million dollar gold block, we'll put it on tee box and Terry Duffy looked at me and goes, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard. But then he kind of walked away and said, but the race thing. And I said, oh, come on, Terry. I said -- so, so once a year I get a letter from Terry saying, aren't you glad I don't listen to you, because we could be talking about the Gold Rush. But I think Terry and the entire CME family, their board, their executives, and their customers have become friends of ours, right? I mean, when you, when I walk the pro-am range here on a Wednesday, I know half his customers. I know who the bad golfers are and I know the good golfers. They're dressed like the players. Like they have become part of our family. So not extending this would have felt like family loss. And the nice thing for us is we weren't badgering them, they called us and said, let's do this longer. And you know, being around the sports world, that doesn't happen every time. You don't usually pick up your phone to great news, you pick up your phone to challenges and picking up your phone to great news here is a game changer. And to know that this is something that we not only don't have to think about for a lot of years, but can think about how to grow it, is special. And I really, I don't have an event that's easier for me, the players, the staff, it's, this is really pretty convenient. It's the only event I stay a day after the actual trophy is handed out. That's not a normal occurrence for me, but I'm hanging in the Ritz as long as I can, as long as I get a free room.

Q. I was just wondering if the sweet spot on the total number of events has changed for you in terms of how many you would like --
MIKE WHAN: I don't have a good memory with me, that's a problem.

Q. -- going forward. And then also how important is it to have a player-friendly flow to the schedule and how hard is it to achieve that?
MIKE WHAN: So first part of your question is if you go back to, you know, how many times have I opened my mouth on a stage like this, I've been talking 32 to 34 events for a long time. I really do think that is the sweet spot. I think when you really look at our schedule and you try to maintain a two-month offseason -- and I really believe in a two-month offseason. One, purely selfishly, I need eight weeks. I don't know if the players need eight weeks, but I'm going to give them eight weeks. And I like the idea that they can set the clubs down for four, because that's about what they do, they pick them up four weeks before we start playing. So if you look at a two-month offseason and you take some breaks, we generally have to take -- I can't get somebody to run an event during Masters week for obvious reasons so we're going to take that break off. We got to take some breaks off either before going to Asia, in most cases. So when you look at that, those are the numbers weeks I have to sell. Here's the kind of weird part about this job, is if you want to keep 34 events on the schedule, you probably have to find two or three new events every year. I never know which ones are going to struggle with extension, who, what companies' stock might go down, what new CEO has a change of philosophy on customer hospitality. Those kind of things happen all the time. So great example this year, I've known for awhile we're going to have three new events, didn't know if we're going to be up one, up two, down one, until you kind of get to the end. I feel pretty comfortable we'll have two or three events in 2019. Could we have 35 events or 36 in 2019? Could. More likely we're going to be in that 34, 35 range. And to stay in that window, that's the number of kind of new you always have to have available. I think the good news is, I think we're proving you don't have to always have new events to raise purses, you don't always have to have new events to raise TV numbers. Remind me your second question.

Q. The flow of the schedule. How hard it is to make it player friendly, considering how far people actually play?
MIKE WHAN: Yeah, yeah it's, I would say schedule flow is our biggest challenge on the LPGA today as it relates to Tour schedule. Mostly because we do try to work with the check writers and make sure we do something that works for them. Now that we're down to just somebody calls us and says, the only date I have is that date, and they're in Spain and we're in Toledo, you start to go, do I pursue that, not pursue that. But schedule flow's tough, I'm not really sure in Mike Whan's era we're going to get to the point where everyone just hops in the car and drives to the next one, because if you're going to be a global Tour you're going to be in the air. But little things that you'll see, even in the schedule for next year, two of the events we'll add on the West Coast will really make our West Coast time much more humane, in terms of us being able to move around. As opposed to following Hawaii with Kingsmill. Which, both great events, but those, that trip is pretty challenging. So I think you'll find even the things that we're adding on are, we can now start to address something that, if I was being honest with you, we really couldn't address the first four or five years, because we were just addressing making the schedule the size it needed to be for the best players to earn a living and have choice.

Q. Mike, 16 players have earned a million dollars or more coming into this event on the PGA TOUR last year I think it was 102 players earned a million or more. Do you ever see the day when that disparity is minimized and if it were to ever happen is it just simply going to come from companies that realize that this is a value for them to pump money into this Tour, what are your thoughts on that?
MIKE WHAN: Well two things. I mean, it's funny you bring up the 16 thing because I was actually going to tweet that a couple weeks ago and then I thought, let me just take a quick look at the PGA TOUR. And I thought, well, that's interesting, 102 I think played 14 events and made a million dollars. But in my first couple years if we had a couple of millionaires, it was a pretty good year, right? So 2016 will be a record and we'll probably have 18, 19 by the time this week ends. So we're making progress. If you would of told me back in 2010 if I could raise purses by 80 percent in the first eight years, and we would be farther behind the guys than we were when I started in 2010, that is really, that would be a real kick in the butt, so I'm glad you didn't tell me that, because that's kind of what's happened. I really feel like we have had a real difference and players can feel it, too, a real difference in your ability to make money out here and feel different about being number 45 on this list than you could feel just five or six years ago. But we haven't really closed the gap. I feel great, our Majors have been fundamentally lifted in terms of their purses, but just when I was about to tell everybody how great we were, all the men's Majors jumped up 2 million a piece and we didn't move by 8 million. So it's, it's a moving target. And if I was being really honest with you -- I tell this to players all the time -- people don't like it when I say it, but it's being honest -- I don't sit in my office and try to compare myself to the men's game, because I don't know how to move both of those sticks at once. All I can do is move the stick that's in my hands. In terms of what's going to, what's going to be the next step, I've said this many times and I say this to the players all the time, I will never talk about how our current purses aren't high enough, because the way that gets translated through your words is people that, the life blood of the LPGA, the saviors, the 35 people that make playing on the LPGA reality, I never want them to feel the wrath of purses not being high enough. Because when I was check writer, if I wrote a check and the result of that was media saying, your check's not big enough, I just stopped writing a check. So there's another great example of we're focused on one thing and get the exact opposite. I'll tell every check writer on this tour thank you and give them a high five, because I know they could have wrote their check to anybody and they wrote it to women's golf. It goes back to the comment Steve made, if I was playing on network TV 23 weekends a year I would have a different value and price point for the LPGA. I don't have that today. So I got chicken and the egg. I'm on only on seven times and when I'm on the ratings aren't that high. Are the ratings not that high because that's all the LPGA can get or are the ratings not that high because we show up seven weird times a year. I would like to believe B. I believe if somebody gave me a long run I would, players, fans would fall in love with these players. And all the stereotypes that I hear all the time about my Tour would go away. Because you can't listen to Shanshan Feng last night and not fall in love with her. But if all she is is a Chinese flag, she's easy to go, oh, China, she speak probably doesn't even speak English. You don't realize she speaks better English than you do. And so if I had an opportunity to showcase that to a larger casual fan, as I saw in the Olympics, I saw the embrace that happened for women's golf in the Olympics, because it was this incredible casual fan experience. And I don't get that. But today we're getting paid about a fifth of the men and we're getting paid about a fifth or a fourth of -- we're delivering about a fourth of the total viewership onsite value. That's the reality. If you just base it in the U.S. I mean, obviously, I do pretty well internationally. So the reality of it is we're tied more to that value todays. It's also a little bit of a cop out, but that's where it is. I do think that -- I have zero doubt that if you jump forward -- and I don't know what year jump forward is -- there's going to be events in women's golf in the future that are going to be the same as men's golf. I don't know if it's going to be across the board, but I would be hard pressed to believe long-term that you're not going to see that come together. I also think that the globalization of women's golf being so much farther ahead, quite frankly, of what's happened at the PGA TOUR, is going to be exactly what it's becoming every year, more and more an advantage. Where it isn't about how many viewers you delivered in the U.S., but how many viewers did you deliver worldwide. And as that becomes a more and more common question, I become a better and better answer.

Q. You talked about the teenagers in or near the top, the flip side of this is this field has two mothers in it. Is, are people like Cristie Kerr the anomalies moving forward or is the cyclical, what, are we getting to a point on this Tour where women are compartmentalizing, they will have their careers and then leave to start families?
MIKE WHAN: Yeah, I mean, when you get into family-building issues I'm probably the wrong expert, but what I can tell you by spending a lot of time on the Tour here is I believe there's a new cycle coming, if I was guessing. I think the reality of what's going on on Tour is the average age of a winner is 23 and a half. Versus if you jump back 10 years ago the average age of a winner is 29 and a half. At 29 and a half you're in a different family mentality maybe than 23 and a half. I won't lie to you I think it must be significantly harder to be a mom on Tour today than it was to be a mom on Tour 20 years ago, for all kinds of reasons, and I get that. I also think, to be perfectly honest, because the money is better, you hear a lot more Lydia Ko kind of comments, right? That I'm going to do this for 10 years and -- although if I gave you the list of players that have told me in my eight years that next year is my last year and how many of those are still with me, I mean it's -- I've said that out loud, too, ah, I can only do this one more year, and that was probably seven years ago. But, so I think that, one, you just seeing this Tour being much younger across the board. Winning, the average even age of the Tour. Two, it's probably harder to be a mom, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised at all over the next five or six years if the number of moms on Tour were to double, triple, or quadruple. I don't know how everybody will handle that. Like I said, I've watched mom's do it. Karine Icher to me is unbelievable to watch her as they travel around the world. Same with Cristie and the rest. I remember watching Laura Diaz try to get her two kids in the back of the mini van in Toledo when they were throwing Cheerios at her and she had her golf club around her shoulder while she was trying to strap in -- and of course as commissioner I just walked right by, I didn't help her at all -- but it was just -- you just stop and think my toughest problem is that I'm 15 minutes late for my meeting and she's got to compete, on TV, get these two kids home, get to bed, probably go over her plan, meet with her caddie, I mean just, you know, my problems aren't that challenging relative to what these women have to deal with. But I imagine it's cyclical, but I think only time will tell, but I don't know that the, that youth on Tour is cyclical. I think we're -- I think youth is here to stay.

Q. The Q-School series stuff, I confess it was a lot to digest on the Mike Whan lightning speed informational highway, but I just wanted to --
MIKE WHAN: That's why you record me.

Q. Following some things up. If my math would be right it would be about 30 to 33 players coming out of Stage 2 to the finals, is that about right?
MIKE WHAN: My guess is it will probably be somewhere between 20 and 30. Defending upon how many come from that other groupings.

Q. Will you still award then Top-20 out of that Q-School series, the final, did you say that?
MIKE WHAN: So what we do today is we have sort of Top-20 cards and then we have the next 20, 40 cards and we do that because we have to slot in these people from 100 to 120 on last year's Money List. So now we'll literally just roll those cards. So 1 through 40 -- if you're 40th next year coming out of Q Series and I'm 19th, we'll be 21 points, we'll be 21 priority slots apart. That's right, isn't it? Are you in here? Is that correct? Okay. Usually she checks me after, but since you might be recording me, I wanted to make sure I was correct right up front. Do you follow that difference? Usually there was a gap between Top-20 cards and bottom-20 cards, that gap doesn't exist today because those gap players are actually in the field.

Q. So it's eight days, like two tournaments but with a cumulative score?
MIKE WHAN: That's correct.

Q. And two different --
MIKE WHAN: Two different courses, same city.

Q. Same city. Okay. And then the top-5 from college, how will you determine that?
MIKE WHAN: The Golfweek Collegiate Amateur, the Golfweek College rank, rankings. Golfweek, it doesn't know it yet, but they're going to pay 25 grand a year for that plug.

(Laughter.)

Otherwise, it will be the LPGA Collegiate College Ranks.

Q. So obviously you talked about changing the date for Evian. In sort of your post-mortem, have you talked a little bit about the 54 holes for Majors and what your philosophy is on that going forward and if it's maybe changed a little bit.
MIKE WHAN: You're the one person I haven't talked to about this, I feel like I've talked to everyone, but so, I tell you, hey, I don't know if you need the whole Mike Whan Evian spiel but I said this many times, the challenges at Evian are man-made and I'm the man who made them. I made all the challenges we're facing. I would love to blame a player, I would love to blame Evian, I would love to blame golf course, but they're all driven by a second year commissioner who made a lot mistakes. One is when we decided to make it a fifth Major, I wanted to move it to September, in a perfect world move it in that off week on the PGA TOUR playoffs, because everyone would pay attention to us, which is where it is. But because it was a Major couldn't have 70 players in the field, have to have 130 players in the field. So I did that. Not realizing, I mean a Farmers Almanac could have told me that you have three hours of less daylight in September, but I didn't own a Farmers Almanac. And it rains more in September. It rains in July, too, but when it rains in July, you take an hour break, you got three and a half hours left in the day. And the last thing I made is I made them change that golf course to make it harder, so it played significantly slower. So I filled it full of players, significantly slower play, and I have one hour of daylight. So if we sit for more than an hour, that day is already going to be into day two. If you sit for three hours, you're going to definitely be into two or three or four days to catch up. And have I known that for a couple years? I have. Just like anybody else, it took me awhile to come to the table and say, hi, I'm Mike, I'm the one who moved Evian. Hi Mike.

So the reality is those were changes that were driven by me, driven by us, not driven by anybody else. When you come back now to the, to the decision this year -- I'm just going to be honest with you and you can write the same articles you wrote the week after Evian -- I would make the 54-hole decision again right now. I don't know, if I'm sitting here right now, if I love the idea of scraping Thursday's rounds. I made that decision, too, had that decision in front of me and made it. 54 holes, I would make again. And the reason I would make again is we had been sitting for four and a half hours, we weren't likely to finish on Monday, given what we had, what I saw in front of me on the schedule, and Monday and Tuesday was supposed to rain until midday Wednesday. And if that was all going to be true we were going to be sitting there on Thursday or Friday of the following week and I thought the articles you would write about that and the way my players would feel about that championship was worse than making a 54-hole decision and getting out and getting out the way we did. It reinforced I think for all of us the, let's see if we can find a summer date that works, because we still love the vision of Evian, we still love the idea that they're going to race to the mountain, we still love the idea that players, young girls are going to view this like our young girls view jumping into Poppy's Pond and you and I have talked about that, I've talked to players that were around when the Dinah Shore began and it seems really glamorous now but wasn't then. With sand storms -- because there wasn't a lot of product out there -- and getting to L.A. cars broke down. But as a lot of players would say to me and one in particular, we sucked it up so you guys could have this. And I feel like we're going to suck it up and make this thing work and because long-term we're going to create this moment for young women from all over the world that's going to be magical and it has been many times. But, so 54 holes, I know that half the Tour and half and two thirds of the media and people probably that I work for wouldn't agree with that, but I would make it again. Thursday's round, well, you know, I have my midnight sweats over that one. But the real answer for Evian, in a perfect world, is for to us find that summer date where we can do with Evian what we had done for Evian for 16 years before. And, quite frankly, create a real European swing, from a player -- we were talking about logistics before too -- perfect world for me is we go over there and play three or four times and have two majors and have one quality European swing. Hopefully by 2019, but not a given.

Q. Two questions. Firstly, the health of the LET how does, how is that important to you?
MIKE WHAN: I don't know if this is right, but what I said to my board is, as we became the world's Tour for women's golf, I feel like we have changed in responsibility. I don't know if that's true, but that's what I feel. I feel like we're the river that gets fed by a bunch of tributaries and if LET goes away or really gets crippled to the point where young women take other career choices, long-term, the LPGA's going to suffer from that, not just the LET, but the LPGA. Because will Charley Hull make it here? Of course she will. And Georgia Hall and the rest of them, if you're a superstar at 18 you're going to make it to the LPGA. But if you're the Mo Martin of Europe and you're going to play your best golf at 25, 26, 27, I need that player, that player needs to be able to develop their skills. And when we lose that region -- and right now there's a great regional play in Japan and they're building one in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, Korea is incredible. And so I mean I kind of went to the board and said, I think this is our responsibility, even if we don't, even if it's not in some mission statement. So I would like to see a strong LET. I will be honest with you guys, because I think in some of the coverage that came out it looked like, man, LPGA came in, made a great offer, and the LET said no. I don't think that's a fair comment to the LET. The LPGA went in, made an offer, we made an offer in a coalition. It was an offer between us, the R & A and the men's European Tour, so it was the three of us were together in this offer, but the end result of that offer was not only a pretty significant financial infusion over the next three years, but the LET would own it and run it. So I get it -- I mean not the LET, the LPGA would own it and run it -- so I get it, that's they were probably right up to me until they got to that slide, right? And so I think the hard part was they felt like they were making some leadership changes, they would like to fix this themselves and they said we would like our opportunity to fix this ourselves. I said, if that's the way you feel, let's halt, we'll come back and talk about this later because, quite frankly, if the ladies European Tour can be fixed and improved and flourish under the current Ladies European Tour structure, that's the best news I could possibly have. I don't think I'm ever going to make money running the LET. So, if it can happen that way, but if it can't I feel like we need to be there and try. But what I can't get my board or membership to do is say, let's go give them a bunch of money and see how it turns out. If we're going to invest in it, then we really feel like we have to run it.

Q. Secondly, this is kind of age old and a little bit out of your hands. But can you talk about the, I guess, the differences in bringing intense attention to the Tour when you've got so much, such a great depth, so much parity at the top, as opposed to having one person as opposed to having a Mickey or Annika or Lorena.
MIKE WHAN: Yeah, I feel like in my eight years we have gone through waves. We went through this wave where it looked like Yani was going to run away and hide and then we went through a parity again and then somebody else goes to the top and you might think she's going -- and last year at this time I was thinking, I don't know, maybe this is a Lydia Ko show and it kind of changes our marketing plans and everything else and one thing I learned in the job is what happens inside the yellow ropes happens. I always say this and I said this even when we had a No. 1 player and I'm not really sure if the media agrees, but I would rather have a bunch of players at the top, in a perfect world, from a bunch of different countries. Kind of battling it out for the top. Because that engages my fans all around the world. I also think when there's a superstar No. 1 and she's been a superstar No. 1 for awhile, when she doesn't play, the perception is -- in that event -- the perception is that event's not the same, right? I mean, when have you a superstar like that and they decide to play 20 times, then the other 30, the other 15 times people are going, yeah, but so and so is not here. And we don't really get that on Tour, haven't had that on Tour in a while, because I think of the depth and the strength at the very tomorrow. So I made this comment one time on ESPN when a guy asked me a couple years ago about, don't you need a face of the Tour? And I said, you know, you guys cover the LPGA pretty extensively, I don't think there's a face of the NFL, but if you asked my three boys that are NFL fanatics, they will each give you a face, but they will give a regional face, depending upon what team they follow. And I think that makes the NFL strong, because it's not just Tom Brady and it's not just, you know there's, there's people that are the faces of the -- and I feel like we're kind of the same way here -- I love the fact that when we talk about this race that there's Brooke from Canada, there's Lexie from America, Shanshan from China, So Yeon Ryu and Sei Young from Korea -- I mean if you could really sit back and you never had any history of the sport and say, hey what would be a really cool for women's golf, I think you would have as, you would have a superstar field at the top representing the world and we have that. I don't know if it will last forever, and if I'm up here next year and somebody's won 47 times, I'll probably try to tell you that's really good for the Tour, but between you and I, I really think it's much healthier this way. Healthier for my sponsors, healthier for TV and quite frankly healthier for the athlete. Because when you are that one, you feel that pain. You can't not play, you can't miss a press conference, you can't say no when Mike calls you and says, I need you in New York next week, I know it will just be a quick trip. But that's what happens when you become No. 1, you get every request. And maybe because of the that it makes it really hard to stay there. You know, it's, it makes me respect the people that have been there that long, the Annika's and Lorena's and Tiger's that have pulled that off, because I see what the demand is on that. Not just appearance-wise, but mentally that's a challenge that isn't for everybody.

Q. The International Crown and the Solheim have been terrific successes --
MIKE WHAN: The UL International Crown.

Q. I always say UL when I write.
MIKE WHAN: I know, I know, just kidding you.

Q. Are you thinking about match play again this year or are you ready to talk about that on the schedule?
MIKE WHAN: What I would tell you is we're thinking about match play in one of the three events that we're doing, but we haven't nailed that down. I'm not, I would say it's more likely not to be in 2018 than to be in 2018, other than the UL International Crown. But I would tell you, that of the three events that I talked about in 2019, two of them of those three are unique formats, I'm not going to get into those formats, but I would just say they're different formats than what we play on Tour today. Both of those are U.S. based events that will have unique formats that we'll add to our schedule in 2019. The international event will be more like our international event because of the field size, etcetera. But of those three, two of them will have unique formats.

Q. For those five collegiate players that will be playing in Q Series, if one or more were able to get their card, would they have the ability --
MIKE WHAN: A deferral question.

Q. Deferral. Yes.
MIKE WHAN: We have agreed this off season that before we take Q-School out in a full formal launch to review that one more time. We have typically said no to deferral and I'll be honest with you we have said no to deferral for two primary reasons. One is our rookie orientation, I would say 90 percent of it happens in the first four or five months on Tour. To be honest with you, once you've been a rookie on Tour and you're in your 15th tournament, you're no longer the same rookie you were in your first couple where you're just taking it all in. By the 15th you got a lot of other things going on and rookie orientation becomes work as opposed to help. And we're always worried about somebody becoming a rookie in July and missing the things -- and our Tour requires some orientation that is unique to other tours, especially regional tours. And the second reason we worried about offering deferrals is what we didn't really want is to see 5,000 kids show up at Q-School every year because why not? If I make it I defer and if I don't -- and we that was actually anti-college coach, because kids that have the money or kids that have a backing would go because -- and you just play every four years and just the year you played well you just leave school. And we kind of felt in this way, if you really couldn't, then you really had to make that decision before you showed up. Given the fact that we're only going to take the top-5 and the Q Series will be significantly different and that at Q Series you're probably going to have close to a 45 percent chance of getting some sort of Tour card, we think it's time to relook at deferral. So I can't tell you that we're going to accept deferrals as I sit here today, but I can tell you we're going to take real good look at that between now and the time we announce, because we think we have changed some parameters that State 3 didn't have. And I think in those parameters it might be time to really relook at that.

Q. As successful and brilliant a concept as the UL International Crown is there any sense --
MIKE WHAN: Are you saying that comical?

Q. No, I'm serious. Are you at all surprised that the men haven't tried to copy you?
MIKE WHAN: Am I surprised? No. I'm not surprised the men haven't tried to copy me. I, you know, I think we change a little faster on the LPGA than most other leagues in sports and I get that. I don't know if they're looking at it or not. I think the problem with it -- and I've said this many times -- the problem with that on the men's side is you probably need five or six tours to come together and create a coalition and pick a date that we're all going to take off and -- like if I would have done -- to do the UL Crown, if I were to have to get seven tours to all say, yeah, we'll commit to that week and that time and -- but I could really play the UL International Crown primarily at the LPGA so the LPGA had to find a date, we had to find a sponsor -- if I would have probably had to try to get five or six tours to all come together I probably would have moved on, because not that, not that that's not a great concept, it's just trying to get five or six tours to try to come together is a great way to beat your head against a wall as a commissioner. It's just tough. So we were able to pull that off because of the membership we already have. I think that might be harder today on the men's side -- at least at the PGA TOUR side, maybe less so on the European Tour side -- but I'm excited, to me, we're looking at some of the formats that the men are doing. I think some of the stuff happening both at the PGA TOUR and the European Tour, from formats keeping it exciting and changing, I feel like they're leading us and not the other way around, so it's exciting for us to be watching some of those things and saying what of those can we incorporate or what variation of those can we incorporate. I thought the Zurich thing they did, with the two-man team was pretty cool. I think the Hero Challenge is -- I find myself watching it and I never watch men's golf. So, I would, I mean, I'm excited to see that the entire world of golf is challenging that and maybe we're catching up a bit but we'll catch up.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Mike.

MIKE WHAN: Hey, could I just say one last thing? So since we are here in southern California, we called the AD of the Miami Hurricanes.

Q. We're in southern Florida.
MIKE WHAN: What did I just say?

Q. California.
MIKE WHAN: Oh, sorry, I lived in southern California. We called the AD of the Hurricanes, since we're down here, and I said, we need a turnover chain. And so I would like John and Nancy to come up here for a second, because they're each going to get their picture. I feel in the last eight years we have had a couple of major turnovers. One is we have gone from people thinking that women's golf in America will never grow to be the fastest growing segment in women's golf, so I would like you to take a picture of Nancy with the turnover chain because Nancy has turned over women's golf in the States with the -- get your picture all by yourself.

(Applause.)

By the way, that came from the authentic jeweler that makes the turnover chain for Miami, so my wife made me put it in the safe last night. And there is no other sport in the world that has put together 23 title sponsors and 26 official marketing partners in the last five years. So John has turned around the LPGA and his team as well -- don't step on my glasses.

(Applause.)

I thought they were going to give them to us, but when they charged me, I just took one. So, just let me just say to this group, on behalf of all of us at the LPGA, I don't know if we're the hardest or the easiest Tour to cover, I don't know how often your bosses like the coverage that you give us, doesn't mean that we love every article that you write, but we're sure glad you're writing them. And if there's things you're seeing covering other sports or other tours that you think we're missing, I sure hope you bring them to us, because we can really get lost in our own world. I mean, I was in 17 countries and 23 states this year and when you're doing that you don't get a chance to watch everybody else. I mean, I really have given up other sports, which is really difficult, including men's golf, which I used to like watching, I just don't have time for it. So if you see things, either the way we're treating the media, the way we're treating the players, the way we're managing our sport, that you say, you really got to wake up and see what's happening in men's lacrosse or women's soccer or something else, please, please bring it to to me or bring that to some of our staff, because we are definitely in the world of steal and reapply. So if we can steal and reapply from somebody, please point it out to us. Especially if it can make your life or my life better, even more so if it could be the former. So thanks a lot and thanks for covering us this week, we appreciate it.

(Applause.).

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