From a Notepad at Medinah to Dhaka's Cantonments: The Women's Team That Was Never Born

MEDINAH, Ill. — On a Tuesday afternoon I stood on the narrow sliver of path between the practice green and the first tee at Medinah Country Club, scribbling thirteen names onto a notepad. Twelve players, plus one substitute. Beside each name, a single number: world ranking.

Ryan Fox of New Zealand walked past, stopped, and leaned over the list. The last name on it read: No. 16.

"If 16 is the worst you've got," Fox said, "that's the strongest team on paper of any of them — the U.S. team, the U.S. men's team, whatever."

Then, half to himself: "Maybe that's why they won't do it."

Fox probably didn't realise he had just summarized the entire politics of Presidents Cup week. The list on my notepad is not a fantasy. It is a team pulled straight off the top shelf of the world ranking — and that is precisely where the trouble starts.

My email friend Sam

An American reader who exists in my life only as an email thread — I call him Sam — wrote to me two weeks ago. His argument ran like this: week after week during the LPGA season we watch Korean, Thai, Japanese and Chinese players dominate the leaderboard. When Nelly Korda plays, she is almost always top three or top five. Outside Nelly, hardly anyone from the U.S. or Europe can challenge those countries. Well-recognized journalists, he said, should start a movement urging the LPGA to organize a new Cup pitting the best of Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world against the U.S. and Europe.

The Solheim Cup, Sam conceded, has a long history and is well promoted. That does not change the fact that many of the best women players today come from elsewhere.

I did not delete the email. It has sat in my drafts folder for two weeks, and every time I walked the path at Medinah I felt the same thing: the proposal is emotional. The question is structural.

First, look at what the team would actually be

Before starting a movement you need the truth, and the truth is this: have you actually pictured what a women's international team looks like? It is not merely drawn from the world ranking. It is the world ranking.

On my notepad: Jeeno Thitikul (Thailand, No. 2), Haeran Ryu (Korea, 3), Hyojoo Kim (Korea, 4), Miyu Yamashita (Japan, 5), Ruoning Yin (China, 6), Sei Young Kim (Korea, 9), Hannah Green (Australia, 10), Brooke Henderson (Canada, 11), Lydia Ko (New Zealand, 12), Shiho Kuwaki (Japan, 13), Gaby Lopez (Mexico, 14), Minsol Kim (Korea, 15) — with Minjee Lee (Australia, 16) as the sub.

Thirteen names: six Korean, two Japanese, two Australian, then one each from Thailand, China, Canada, New Zealand and Mexico. No European. No African. Nobody from South Asia.

Fox's point carries weight. A team whose weakest player is No. 16 is close to unbeatable in any mixed format. And in Solheim format, Europe's best women sit well below No. 10 — the depth comes from players ranked between 20 and 50. On paper, the mismatch is one-sided.

But golf is not played on paper. Golf is played inside a television window.

The team that exists, and the team that does not

Here is the core problem. There is an International men's team. This week at Medinah, Fox and eleven other leading golfers from outside Europe are playing the Presidents Cup against twelve of the best Americans.

There is also a Solheim Cup, twelve American women against twelve European women — its latest edition played two weeks ago in the Netherlands, which is what prompted Sam's email.

There is no 12-woman International team, because there is no 12-woman International women's event.

There is a four-woman, eight-team event with international players — the Hanwha Lifeplus International Crown, which next year will be played at Lake Merced Golf Club in California. But why no International version of the Solheim?

One answer may come from television ratings. According to Sports Business Journal's Josh Carpenter, this year's Solheim Cup drew just 179,000 viewers to Golf Channel on Saturday and 170,000 on Sunday. By comparison, Sunday singles at the 2026 Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black peaked at 5.3 million.

But keep two things in the same sentence: the Solheim was played in the Netherlands, six hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast, and it landed on week one of the NFL season, which swallows every American rating in sight.

Still, you would have to think an International women's event would go over well in the golf-mad countries on the international side. Television time zones are brutal, and they build entry lists all by themselves.

I once built a spreadsheet for a year that refused to keep a calendar

Those two ratings numbers are not new to me. In 2026 I split the year between Doha and Kurmitola. In Qatar I filed on cooling technology and what I called "a spreadsheet with a stadium attached." Then at the Bangabandhu Cup Golf Open I watched Thailand's Danthai Boonma collect US$400,000 while the domestic BPGA circuit still paid roughly Tk 145,000 for a win.

I counted the other 51 weeks of the Bangladeshi golf year and found them almost entirely unfunded — no sponsor, no broadcast. That is why I write an annual "The Other 51 Weeks" column: the elite purse set beside every domestic cheque.

On the LPGA the arithmetic is inverted. Money is not the shortage. Events are. A twelve-woman International team does not exist because nobody buys its broadcast rights — and nobody buys the rights because the team does not exist. A circular lock.

Korea, Thailand, Japan: three different factories

When we talk about Korean dominance on the LPGA we make one consistent error: we treat those countries' success as one thing. They are not.

Korea's is a system. From the late 1990s, golf schools, club-based junior chains and corporate sponsorship built a pyramid whose junior-to-professional conversion rate is among the world's best. A large share of Korea's current LPGA contingent came up through the domestic Korean tour — an indoor system that prepared them for an international stage.

Thailand's story is stranger and, to me, better. A meaningful part of Thailand's pipeline runs directly off the caddie line, out of the countryside and along the labour paths of golf courses. Being a caddie there is not only carrying a bag; it is learning the game for free, green by green. That Jeeno Thitikul came through a version of that path is bigger news than any twelve-woman cup.

Japan runs a corporate, patient, long-horizon system and has kept its home ecosystem strong enough that its LPGA presence no longer raises the question. The question stays with the ranking: why does Japan have someone in the top five and we have nobody in the top three thousand?

Three different systems. One shared quality: investment at the bottom, not the top.

I once wrote a VAR proposal; the federation praised it and shelved it with a smile

In 2026 I filed from Russia. VAR's first World Cup produced a record 29 penalties and France beat Croatia 4-3 in the final. What excited me was the protocol: an official in a booth overruling the man on the field.

Back in Rangpur I drafted a seven-page proposal arguing the Bangladesh Open and the amateur championship needed a video review officer for ball-movement and drop disputes. The technical committee read it, praised it, and filed it away.

Since then I describe golf rules disputes in football's vocabulary — "the booth," "the drop," "clear and obvious." Because I have learned that the federation distrusts cameras more than it distrusts bad rulings.

The camera never arrived, so I streamed the final from behind the ropes

1. The BPGA Open at Kurmitola, no Bangladeshi broadcaster inside the ropes. I propped my phone against a water cooler and streamed six holes on Facebook Live. The feed drew 4,200 views; roughly 60 people were actually standing on the course.

I shadowed Jamal Hossain Mollah for all 18 holes, then spent two hours with three caddies explaining why a Tk 145,000 winner's cheque rarely reaches the man who carried the bag. TheGolfHouse ran it as a two-part caddie diary.

Since that day I begin every golf piece from the caddie's eye line — naming bag-carriers and their home districts before quoting a single federation official — and I stopped treating the winner's cheque as the climax of the story.

Reading Sam's email I felt the proposal is right and the climax is wrong. A new twelve-woman cup means another leaderboard at the top. A new caddie-pipeline cup means a lifeline at the bottom.

What my own ledger shows: the LPGA's shortage is not teams, it is options

In 2026 I opened a spreadsheet: every verifiable Bangladeshi professional round since 2026 — 62 events, 1,140 scorecards, with caddie names in a separate column. The numbers showed something I had not known: most of the country's pro field had, at some point, carried someone else's bag.

If I run the LPGA's arithmetic through that sheet, my scale shrinks. Still, one thing transfers: if a twelve-woman International team is two Koreans, two Japanese, two Australians, one Thai, one Chinese, one Canadian, one New Zealander, then the difference between that team and those left out is not talent. It is who was born near a pathway.

It is not International — it is a bloc

Here I want the other side of Sam's proposal. Read that list of thirteen again.

What the LPGA calls "International" outside Europe is in practice a bloc of the Anglophone Commonwealth plus East Asia, with Mexico as a single dot. India's Aditi Ashok would not make that team, because she is not high enough in the ranking. Yet India's women's golf infrastructure sits far ahead of Bangladesh's, and southern Africa has a literacy rate in the game that any circuit would happily keep.

So the question is not Solheim versus International. The question is: if the team built from the top 16 of the world ranking is already the strongest team, whose problem does a new cup actually solve?

Answer: more entertainment for people who do not have that problem.

The structural truth on the LPGA today is this: the number of events for the Western market is not small, but the top-level competition is not where the television money is. The Solheim Cup is a Europe-America marriage with its own commercial logic. Building an International Cup means building a third house — and, as Fox said, perhaps nobody wants the best team to be built.

Still, a competition can be born — if it starts at the bottom

Criticism alone gets you nowhere. There is a workable version of the proposal, and it is one I know well. When my seven-page VAR proposal was shelved, I learned that a good protocol does not win on merit. To keep a protocol alive you first need the name of the veto player and the name of the shelving mechanism.

If a new cup is to replace the Solheim's missing counterpart, three things come first.

One: a qualifying protocol that counts not only world ranking but home-tour points, so players on the Korean, Japanese, Thai, Australian and Indian tours have a visible road.

Two: a calendar that does not fight NFL week one and does not insult the time zones. The Solheim's 179,000 viewers is really a time zone and an NFL win.

Three: a transparent ranking rule — which weeks count, published before the season, not after. That document is in my folder. I called it "The Shelved Protocol."

And the Bangladesh question

I write from Rangpur. Here the other 51 weeks of the golf year are, essentially, unfunded. By my own count Bangladesh has 19 courses, only five with 18 holes, and nearly all of them behind cantonment walls — which makes the question of who can physically walk in a matter of a gate pass, not a federation press release.

So while reading Sam's proposal one question surfaces: in a country with no women's world-ranking points on offer, is a twelve-woman International Cup a plan or a pastime?

Siddikur Rahman finished 58th at Rio 2026 — still Bangladesh's only Olympic golf entry. Tokyo's 60-man field contained no Bangladeshi. In 2026 I wrote "The Second Siddikur Does Not Exist," tracing eleven years of junior entries against federation spending. I planned six parts, published two, and stopped.

What I have learned, reader, is this: missing the international leaderboard is real, but the absence of an international cup is not the reason we are absent from it. A trophy does not search for a generation. A trophy only gives a stage to whoever has already been born.

Television, the people behind the ropes, and a circular lock

Put 179,000 beside 5.3 million and we tend to conclude that women's golf is weak. Instead I think about a phone propped on a water cooler, 4,200 views, and 60 people on the ground. Where the camera never arrived, I became the camera. But the distance between an on-course spectator and a national broadcast audience cannot be closed with a format. It has to be closed with investment.

The LPGA has a huge market, but it is a domestic one. An international team event needs a new television market, especially in Asia-Pacific. That investment arrives when Korean, Thai, Japanese and Australian players appear in the same cup — a team stronger than either Solheim side. A new market opens across Southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, China and Australia.

And then Sam's email has a second half: which countries get left out?

My sheet, and another world ranking

I know the limits of my own scale. In 2026 I wanted one spreadsheet for one year, and the year refused to keep a calendar: the Asian Tour calendar collapsed, my Tokyo accreditation slid back twelve months, and domestic golf restarted with 40-man fields and no gallery. On empty courses caddies spoke freely for the first time.

During Presidents Cup week I am simply extending that sheet. Names on the left, world ranking in the middle, which tour they came from on the right. The middle column is comforting: this team's bench equals anyone's starters.

One uncomfortable line survives. Not one of those thirteen names emerged outside a long golf ecosystem; all of them are children of a pipeline. That is the whole point of this piece.

Now it genuinely waits for a movement

Walking back from the Medinah practice green I thought: Sam asked me to start a movement, but a movement is bigger than a proposal. A movement needs a name, a committee, a timeline. Golf's history with such movements is not long.

If one happens, its demand should not be "we want a cup." It should be "we want a competition structure with a visible road, from the junior chain to a professional scorecard."

Nobody is proposing to abolish the Solheim or the Presidents Cup. Let them stand. The question is a third event — and that third event is an access issue, not a manufactured rating.

Judging a competition by Sunday television numbers will never get us to the real question: why are those Asia-Pacific countries so strong, and why do countries like ours need decades just to stand on the same course?

The answer to that is never a cup.

Takeaway

Fox's line is my test. "If 16 is the worst, maybe that's why they won't do it." Golf's beauty is this: the best team can be assembled on paper, but a real competition requires a decision in world golf politics that some people prefer not to take.

So my reply to Sam: the movement is fine, but it should not start at Medinah's practice green. It should start at Kurmitola, Chiang Mai, or a public driving range in Seoul, where an eight-year-old girl feels a club for the first time.

It will take time, and more names will move in the ranking. But one thing in my ledger stays fixed: until we build a new pathway, we are only lifting the same names off the same top shelf and arranging them in a new format.

Whether they will want it — that is another question. The caddie will vouch, the player will commit, the broadcaster will say the rating is low. And my spreadsheet will be there, slightly inconvenient. Because I once built a year whose spreadsheet refused to keep a calendar.

Golf is evergreen. The best stories live where the broadcast trucks do not park.