Swinging Skirts Golf Team Rewrites Golf History for Taiwan, US LPGA

In recent years, women’s golf has become one of the most watched sports in Taiwan. This has been due in large part to the success of Yani ­Tseng, but is also the result of active promotion by local groups. One of the most important of these is the “Swinging Skirts Golf Team,” which for three straight years has plunked down serious money to invite international golf stars to Taiwan to participate in their “World Ladies Masters” tournament.

The Swinging Skirts Golf Team has gotten many of the world’s top women golfers to come to Taiwan to participate in their events. From left to right: the legendary Annika Sörenstam, the “Pink Panther” Paula Creamer, and 2013 tournament champion Lydia Ko.

Among the golfers who have accepted invitations from Swinging Skirts to come to Taiwan have been Annika Sörenstam, widely considered the ­greatest female golfer of all time; US fan favorite Paula Creamer (nicknamed the Pink Panther); and 2013 world number one Inbee Park of Korea. These visits have not only created the opportunity for Taiwan’s leading local golfers to observe highly skilled players up close, they have also stirred up public enthusiasm for watching women’s golf.

As the reputation of the Taiwan event has grown, the US Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) has taken notice, and has extended an unprecedented official invitation to the Swinging Skirts Golf Team to sponsor a tournament in the US. The Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic will be held on April 24–27 in San Francisco.

The three women from Taiwan who have qualified for the LPGA tour—Yani ­Tseng, Candie Kung, and Teresa Lu (who is based in Japan)—have already confirmed that they will play in the tournament. In addition, the LPGA has taken the extraordinary step of leaving 22 “wild card” spots for other golfers from Taiwan, meaning that this will be the LPGA tournament with the most ever golfers from our island. By participating in the event, Taiwan’s top women players will be able to earn points to be included in the Women’s World Golf Rankings (a.k.a. the Rolex Rankings).

Who funds the Swinging Skirts? How have they been able to afford to get so many of the world’s most prestigious players to come to their tournaments? What prompted the LPGA to seek them out, thereby writing a new page in the history of golf in Taiwan?

The Swinging Skirts Golf Team was founded in 2010 by 50 golf enthusiasts. (Taiwan has many such amateur teams, who compete against each other in their own events.) Swinging Skirts is not the offspring of some high-powered corporation, but is composed of small businessmen and women who have achieved some success in life. They simply found themselves often playing golf together, and, having the same interests and ideas, founded this club.

The group name Qun Bai Yao Yao sounds youthful and energetic in Chinese. Though the English translation “Swinging Skirts” may sound a bit condescendingly girlish, there is in fact a high-minded and totally non-sexist reason behind the name. Golf originated in Scotland, where the traditional attire for men is the plaid kilt, and out of respect for this tradition, during Swinging Skirts tournaments the men wear kilts. Since in Chinese the same character qun is used in the compounds for both “skirt” and “kilt,” it is clear that “Swinging Skirts” in English fails to capture the full significance of the Chinese name, which is not gender-specific.

Hung Yi chose the “18 transitions from girlhood to womanhood” as his theme in decorating the approaches to the tees on the course for the 2013 event. The photo shows Korean star Na Yeon Choi in front of the entryway to the 6th hole.

The men and women who make up the Swinging Skirts Golf Team did not set out from the start to become major promoters of women’s golf in Taiwan.

The group’s key figure has been Wang ­Cheng-sung, the head of the Swinging Skirts Golf Foundation. A graduate of the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University, he spent many years in the art world as an appraiser and auctioneer. This cultured gentleman and his wife Qiu ­Fengyu, both golf fanatics, had long aspired to make some contribution to the golf community in Taiwan.

In 2011, Qiu learned from her coach, a member of the Taiwan LPGA, that despite being the birthplace of Yani ­Tseng—who held the world number one spot for 109 straight weeks from early 2011 to early 2013—Taiwan lags far behind international standards in its infrastructure for women’s golf in terms of both number of events and prize money, making it very difficult to systematically produce more high-quality female players.

After discussing the issue with all the members of the team, Wang and Qiu decided to collect money and donate it to the Taiwan LPGA to hold the first-ever women’s golf tournament here to offer more than NT$10 million (roughly US$350,000) in prize money.

However, after all the big talk, these amateurs (in the best sense of the word!) discovered that holding a professional tournament would not be easy. Besides getting together the prize money, they would also need funding and service providers for the course, ticket sales, hotels, transportation, and media advertising. Someone would also have to organize promotional events and handle corporate sponsorship.

Moreover, having come up with significant prize money, the tournament would also have to include players of sufficient caliber to really make an impact with the public. Obviously just having Taiwan’s top local women golfers would not be enough—it would be essential to attract foreign marquee players, so that the tournament could bathe in their reflected glory. But right from the start Swinging Skirts, being just a group of ordinary people, faced numerous obstacles to getting such competitors to come.

To make a persuasive case that would prompt world-class players to come to Taiwan, Swinging Skirts not only increased the prize money to US$1 million, they let it be known that they would pay a generous “appearance fee” to top players in order to make it more attractive for them to participate.

Also, working through various connections, they appealed for help to official and non-governmental organizations (including the LPGAs of Japan and Korea, as well as the International Management Group, which represents more golfers than any other agency in the world). At the same time, Yani ­Tseng—who competed in a skirt for the first time in her career for a Swinging Skirts tournament—spread the word to her colleagues at LPGA events about Swinging Skirts and helped persuade golfers from other countries to come to Taiwan.

After half a year of hard work, the team held their first major event, the Swinging Skirts 2011 TLPGA Invitational. The Taiwanese public was dumbfounded to see many of the world’s top ten women golfers playing in the tournament, and tens of thousands of fans turned out at the Miramar Golf Country Club in Lin­kou, New Tai­pei City, to watch this landmark event.

The Swinging Skirts Golf Team has gotten many of the world’s top women golfers to come to Taiwan to participate in their events. From left to right: the legendary Annika Sörenstam, the “Pink Panther” Paula Creamer, and 2013 tournament champion Lydia Ko.

In terms of scale, best practices, and quality of the field, Swinging Skirts has consistently aimed at the highest international standards. But they have not forgotten their roots. For the 2011 TLPGA Invitational, Wang ­Cheng-sung, who you will recall has a background in fine arts, decided to add a completely novel artistic dimension to the event. Taking traditional Chinese city gates as a model, he decorated each hole (18 in all) with a model of a historic city gate as well as giving each a meaning of one of the “18 passages of life.” (The Chinese character for “gate” is the same as that used for “passage” in this case).

For example, the first hole had a “passage through obsessive love” (with the gate design borrowed from the ancient city wall of Nanjing). The second hole had a “passage through fear,” with the meaning “hiding from problems does not necessarily mean you will escape from them; facing up to problems does not necessarily mean you will suffer more” (with the gate modeled after the entrance to the Confucius Temple in Tainan). These “passages” continued up to the 18th hole, which had a “passage from life to death” (having a gate patterned after a World Heritage Site in mainland China’s An­hui Province). The overall design, rich with Chinese philosophical ideas and architectural history, was well received by the visiting golfers from other lands, all of whom could identify with the difficult passages required to succeed in their highly competitive profession.

The artistic tradition has been continued over the years. For example, for the 2013 World Ladies Masters, Swinging Skirts commissioned the renowned Taiwanese artist Hung Yi to design 18 works of installation art for their event.

A lot of people assume there must be some commercial or financial goal underlying Swinging Skirts’ willingness to put up the big bucks to sponsor international tournaments, but the fact is that all they really want is to have some fun, to share the joy they take in golf with others, and to give local golf fans a chance to see outstanding players in tournament conditions. If there is any “objective,” it is simply to expose Taiwan golfers to a higher quality of play and thereby offer them greater competitive advantage in the future. As Wang says, “Women’s golf is the one truly global sport at which Taiwanese have been able to compete at the highest international level.” Who knows when the next Yani ­Tseng might be found?!

The Swinging Skirts Golf Team, soon to embark for the US for their very own LPGA event, has rewritten golf history for both the LPGA and Taiwan. We look forward to even more Taiwanese women golfers shining on this tournament stage which has been built single-handedly by their own compatriots.

The members of the Swinging Skirts Golf Team, men and women small-business owners who love the game of golf, all wear “skirts” (kilts for men) in competition. While the picture brings a smile, it should be remembered that the underlying reason is to show respect for the traditions of Scotland, the homeland of golf.

The Swinging Skirts Golf Team has gotten many of the world’s top women golfers to come to Taiwan to participate in their events. From left to right: the legendary Annika Sörenstam, the “Pink Panther” Paula Creamer, and 2013 tournament champion Lydia Ko.

Hung Yi, a well-known artist in Taiwan, created original works of installation art to decorate the course for the 2013 Swinging Skirts World Ladies Masters. This engaging photo shows German golf star Sandra Gal with a work entitled Dragon of Fortune.