LPGA Charity Event of Champions to characteristic A-Record celebrities

Charity, friendship, and rising the sport of golf.

These are the phrases that describe this week’s Hilton Grand Holidays Event of Champions, the season-opening occasion on the LPGA Tour.

Lake Nona Golf and Nation Membership in Orlando, Florida, will host the event for a 3rd straight season, as this distinctive occasion is celebrating its tenth anniversary total.

A-list celebrities will take part alongside the very best feminine gamers on this planet to lift tens of millions for youngsters’s charities inside the Orlando and Central Florida areas.

“The superstar demographic attracts the frequent one who desires to come back out who could not essentially be a diehard golf fan, however with a various subject of celebrities from sports activities, leisure, and music, you possibly can type of seize a a lot wider viewers that may come out and help these occasions,” stated Mike Flaskey, the founding father of this event and former CEO of Diamond Resorts, in an unique interview with Taking part in By means of.

Flaskey additionally based the Payne Stewart Invitational, which raised $140,000 at its inaugural occasion in December. He began the Invited Movie star Basic as effectively, an identical occasion held in Dallas every year on the Champions Tour.

This 12 months’s Hilton Grand Holidays Event of Champions options 36 LPGA stars who gained in 2023 and dozens of family superstar names.

Ray Allen, Brian Baumgartner, Roger Clemens, Landon Donovan, City Meyer, Emmitt Smith, and Brian Urlacher, amongst others, are all on this 12 months’s subject.

Defending champion Mardy Fish, one of many prime American tennis gamers all through the 2000s, can even tee it up this week at Lake Nona.

Picture by Julio Aguilar/Getty Photos

So, too, will Annika Sorenstam, a 10-time main champion on the LPGA Tour.

Sorenstam and her household dwell at Lake Nona, and since she is shut pals with Flaskey, she competes within the superstar division yearly.

“What moved this occasion to the subsequent degree was asserting that Annika would compete within the superstar division of the occasion,” Flaskey defined.

“I believe that basically made the occasion particular, as she is the best of all time.”

Undoubtedly, Sorenstam’s presence elevates the status of the LPGA’s season-opening occasion.

However so does Flaskey’s—in addition to Hilton Grand Holidays.

Three years in the past, Flaskey offered Diamond Resorts to Hilton Grand Holidays. However Flaskey wished to make sure that his event would proceed to thrive sooner or later.

“I do know that that is my labor of affection due to the charitable side of it and since I really like the LPGA, and it was the primary event I ever created,” Flaskey detailed.

“And I didn’t need to go away as part of this sale… So, I used to be capable of go to the Hilton Grand Holidays CEO Mark Wang and say, ‘Look, Mark, we have now the choice to maneuver the event from the 4 Seasons [Golf Club] to Lake Nona, the place the Hilton model wouldn’t be compromised in partnership in any manner with the 4 seasons or vice versa.’”

Previous to that assembly, Flaskey sat down with Joe Lewis, the British investor and majority proprietor of Tottenham Hotspur.

Flaskey and Lewis made a handshake settlement to maneuver the occasion to Lake Nona as soon as the transaction closed. Lewis owns Lake Nona, which, together with the golf course, is a 17-mile neighborhood close to Orlando’s airport.

The sale was finalized, and Lewis agreed to host Flaskey’s occasion at Lake Nona, securing the event’s future. It additionally assured that Hilton’s model wouldn’t be compromised on the 4 Seasons Golf Membership.

“It means the world to me that the CEO of Hilton Grand Holidays has embraced this occasion,” Flaskey stated.

Picture by Ben Jared/Getty Photos

“[Wang] instantly raised the purse by a few $100,000 once they took the occasion over, and he has actually made this the North Star expertise—and the occasion of the 12 months for Hilton Grand Holidays… I’m honored that he permits me to proceed to play within the event and compete within the superstar division.”

This 12 months’s event includes a whole purse of $1.75 million, a powerful determine for an LPGA occasion with solely 36 gamers. Final 12 months’s occasion had a $1.5 million purse. In 2021, the final 12 months Diamond Resorts had its title hooked up to this event, the purse was $1.2 million.

Rose Zhang, Lilia Vu, Nelly Korda, and Leona Maguire are a number of the huge LPGA stars on this week’s restricted subject. Brooke Henderson arrives because the defending champion.

“I’m trying ahead to seeing the leaders of the LPGA,” Flaskey stated.

“We’re trying ahead to celebrating girls’s golf and persevering with to maneuver the needle for the women and the LPGA and proceed to push to assist that tour, do the issues that they need to do. Nevertheless it’s been powerful for them, you recognize? The tv piece of it on community TV has not been as mainstream as the lads’s tour.”

The LPGA has struggled to garner the eye that the lads’s recreation has obtained in recent times, regardless of the sport’s exponential development in recognition for the reason that pandemic.

And but, Flaskey has made it a precedence for his event to air on community tv every year.

NBC will broadcast Saturday’s third-round from 3 to five p.m. ET, a powerful time slot for any LPGA event.

Golf Channel can even air the primary, second, and remaining rounds for 3 hours every day—from 1 to 4 p.m. ET. Golf Channel additionally has an hour of third-round protection from 2 to three p.m. ET.

However for the reason that NFL dominates American tv, NBC has no alternative however to air the NFL’s divisional playoff matchup between the Detroit Lions and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday afternoon. Therefore, NBC will air dwell protection on solely Saturday as an alternative of each Saturday and Sunday.

“It’s onerous on the promoting and sponsorship facet for the LPGA,” Flaskey stated.

Picture by Roy Ok. Miller/Getty Photos

“That’s why firms like Hilton Grand Holidays and Diamond Resorts should get behind this LPGA model and assist proceed to take them north as a result of in case you perceive what’s happening there and what they’re doing, these athletes are unbelievable athletes, however extra necessary than that, is that they care, proper?”

Certainly, LPGA stars care very a lot about their followers, constituents, and kids within the recreation. Lexi Thompson’s presence on the PGA Tour’s Shriners Kids’s Open final October is an ideal instance of this.

“By PGA Tour requirements, by LIV Golf requirements, [LPGA stars] usually are not rich,” Flaskey defined.

“However it’s so spectacular for them to come back out and be capable to compete and play on the degree that they play at. On the identical time, [it’s amazing for them to] give as a lot as they offer off the course to the sponsors, the followers, and the pro-am gamers. I believe it’s extraordinary, and I believe it’s one thing that lots of people don’t find out about.”

The LPGA is a tremendous group with a lot expertise, however the circuit doesn’t garner the eye of the common sports activities fan.

Certain, diehard golf followers will tune into the most important LPGA occasions of the season. However that is why Flaskey wished celebrities to compete in a marquee LPGA occasion. These family names assist carry eyeballs and a focus to the ladies’s recreation.

Extra consideration creates extra income for the gamers.

This may not be doable with out Flaskey and Wang. The LPGA’s Event of Champions wouldn’t have this annual success, nor wouldn’t it be capable to develop the ladies’s recreation and assist tens of millions of kids in South Florida, with out their management and imaginative and prescient.

Creation Kids’s Hospital, Florida Hospital for Kids, and the College of Florida Shan’s Kids’s Hospital have all been key beneficiaries of this occasion, however so, too has the ladies’s recreation as an entire.

The LPGA deserves extra consideration, but its precedence because it begins the 2024 season is elevating cash for these much less lucky.

That’s fairly particular, and it speaks to the significance of not solely elevating the very best feminine gamers on this planet but additionally utilizing golf to sow seeds of compassion.

Jack Milko is a golf workers author for SB Nation’s Taking part in By means of. Make sure you take a look at @_PlayingThrough for extra golf protection. You may observe him on Twitter @jack_milko as effectively.