Who’d have thought it, but South Korea (and to a lesser extent all of East-Asia) is producing lots of winning golfers.
The fired radio host said the following:
I count 38 players from the Republic of Korea on the LPGA tour manifest. Add in the eight female Japanese golfers, two from China and four from Chinese Taipei, and that’s a lot of Asians! Fifty of ‘em, if you add it up. Again, unless I counted wrong, there are 396 LPGA players on the entire list, but that includes retired players and those who don’t tour anymore. Still, that is 13 percent of every player, both active and inactive, on the LPGA tour. Break it down further and you will find five of the top eleven on the money list, nearly 50%, are Asian golfers, and finally, 26 of the top 100 money winners on the current tour are Asians — a whopping 26 percent!
I used to look forward to the LPGA tour event coming to town. I used to mark it on my calendar months in advance, ask off of work, and make sure I was at one day’s play at least. Not any more. Now, I couldn’t care less.
…[The East-Asian golfers] [don’t] have easily distinguishable names. It’s hard to remember specific golfers when half of them seem to have names that sound like the sound you get when you bang pots and pans together.
…I’m sure I sound culturally racist, but I would be willing to bet that I am not alone.
If I were the LPGA, I would put limits on how many golfers can qualify for the tour from a country each year. A cap if you will. If you cap the number of Korean golfers on tour at, say, twenty, then if you are Korean, and you want to play on the tour, you have to wait until one of those twenty retires.
The thing is….South Korea itself has an ethnic-national quota system for its sports teams. I’d always heard that the Korean baseball league limited teams to one foreign player. For some reason it’s always a pitcher. Now that I look it up, Wikipedia claims it is two foreign players per team. The cap may have changed since 2009, I don’t know. Let me point out that two foreign players (defacto limited to pitchers) on a baseball team’s roster is miniscule. I think similar rules apply in the other Korean sports leagues: basketball, soccer.
In other words, Schaller’s “outrageous” suggestion of trying to ensure local-players’ dominance of the league actually is…not so outrageous in Korea. It is the accepted practice in Korea. Of course, when Koreans do it, it becomes not so “outrageous”. Our instinct, even my own, is to look to justify it or excuse it away. Koreans are right to limit the number of foreign players; this is a Korean league. Koreans would not support teams that are mostly full of foreign “mercenary” players who can’t speak Korean and have no connection to this country. Korean fans need to feel a connection with these players, whom they are supposed to like and support — if the league is to succeed!
I think the above is a fair summary of the rationale for why the KBO (Korean Baseball Organization) and the other leagues put such a low-cap on the number of foreign players here. The tricky thing for the critics of Schaller is, if you replace “Korean” with “American” in the above, well — Is that not the entirety of Mr. Schaller’s rationale?
I pointed this out in a comment on ROK-Drop, but got no meaningful reply.
I now see that someone has responded to my comment at ROK-Drop. Click the link above to read the comment by “Seouldout” (#18).
He says:
(1) foreign-player quotas are in effect for all the Korean sports leagues,
(2) foreign-players’ salaries are capped,
(3) foreign-players (alone) are limited to one-year contracts,
(4) the Korean basketball league even limits the *heights* of the few foreign players they do let in.
Update:
On closer inspection, I see that the entry on ROK-Drop was not written by the main author behind the site (who posts as GI-Korea), but another man posting as Bill. I didn’t realize that ROK-Drop was a group blog.