If you are a professional female golfer playing on tour in America next year, you will be required to have another skill beyond hitting the ball effectively. You will have to speak English or face suspension.

Talk about an eyebrow-raising handicap.

As The New York Times reported Wednesday, the tour has been dominated by foreign-born players in recent years. "We live in a sports-entertainment environment," the Times quoted Libba Galloway, deputy commissioner of the Ladies Professional Golf Association as saying. "For an athlete to be successful today in the sports entertainment world we live in, they need to be great performers on and off the course, and being able to communicate effectively with sponsors and fans is a big part of this."

But no other sport is believed to have such a policy and none is apparently contemplating a similar move. So it's not the whole sports entertainment world that requires English proficiency. Case in point: Foreign baseball players and hockey players don't suffer in fan affection because they speak little or to English; they become popular to the extent they are great athletes.

Instead, this policy speaks to the peculiar situation of the LPGA, which is said to depend for its success on keeping corporate sponsors happy. The LPGA will do what is in its own interests, of course, but it's a sad commentary that players apparently are not judged by the same criteria as men but have to be able to schmooze in English to make an impression. It doesn't speak well of the sponsors or the fans either.

To be sure, speaking English should be encouraged. But since most of the players do anyway, threatening a suspension appears a stroke of something less than genius. The LPGA ought to take a Mulligan on an action that suggests women's professional golf can't survive on its own athletic merits alone.