Augusta National Women’s Amateur Clashes With ANA

When you’re the Augusta National Golf Club, you can basically do whatever you want — even if it means clashing with the LPGA Tour’s first major of the season.

The Augusta National Women’s Amateur makes its highly-anticipated debut this week, it’s being highly touted by NBC basically because that network gets to broadcast golf from the site of The Masters — a sacred act that has basically been reserved for our friends at CBS.

Don’t let  the name of the tournament fool you.  Only one round is being played on holy grounds, the Saturday finale.

And here’s where it gets deceiving.  The tournament has a field of 72 and the ladies are delegated to play the first 36 holes at a course called Champions Retreat in Evans, Ga.  Imagine that.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting — they’ll cut that field to the low 30 and only those 30 get to compete at Augusta National come Saturday.

This thing starts on Wednesday, second round on Thursday then the 36-hole cut.  So to make everyone feel better, Augusta National has kindly allowed those missing the cut to play a practice round on Friday, the course is closed to spectators — imagine that.

So on Saturday, NBC will be all giddy about this, they’re even bringing in Al Roker’s separated at birth twin — Mike Turico — to handle the play-by-play.

Sadly, it will steal some air-time from the first LPGA major — the ANA Inspiration.  What they’re not telling us is that the best female amateurs are playing in that event — yes, they get invites to an LPGA major which for most would trump playing just a single round at Augusta and that’s not even guaranteed if one were to miss the Thursday cut.

So there you have it.

A total conflict of interest in the world of women’s golf.