July 1, 2008 -- First off, Grant Me This has been and always will be a vocal advocate for gender equity. Which is why I say it's only fair that the LPGA scores as big a TV ratings dud this summer as their Tiger-less brethren.

What Sunday's final round of the U.S. Women's Open lacked in drama, it more than made up for with a pre-Independence Day parade of American players marching to the spirit of 76 -- or 76.3, if you want to get picky. That was the average Sunday score of the girls of the Red, White, and Blue, who spent most of the day deep in the black at Interlachen Country Club in Edina, Minnesota, a younger sibling suburb of the Twin Cities.

Meanwhile, the same bluster that blew most scores above par appeared little more than a walk in the Park for the player who turned the last two hours of the Peacock Network's Open coverage into Inbee C.

Nineteen-year-old Inbee Park methodically made history as the youngest of the U.S. Women's Open's 63 champions. In just her second season on the LPGA Tour, Park made her first professional win a big one, adding yet another U.S.G.A. title to the two Junior Girls trophies already on her mantle.

In a now common scene, fellow South Koreans celebrate with Inbee Park after her first professional win. (Photo: Getty Images)

She's also the third national Park (joining fellow South Koreans, Grace and Gloria) to win an LPGA event, unless, of course, you count the player who got Inbee in golf in the first place. It was 10 years ago that Park's parents woke her up to do some Seoul searching on late night TV for one of their own, a 20-year-old from down the road in Daejeon who was on the other side of the world changing the course of not one but two countries' sports destinies.

Se Ri Pak -- same surname as Inbee's family, different English spelling -- won the U.S. Women's Open before sunrise that morning. Two days later, Park picked up a club for the first time. Fast forward a decade and Park has the most coveted championship in women's golf. And her victory Sunday, on the shoulders of Pak's 10 years earlier, nudges South Korea ahead of the U.S. in major titles, 7 to 6, since 2001 when the first wave of Pak-Rats crashed onto LPGA shores here in the States.

Those numbers are part of a larger and more disturbing trend for women's golf in America. In the decade prior to Pak's arrival as a rookie in 1998, U.S.-born players won 32 of the 40 major championships contested. Since that time, they've taken just 13 of 43. (Cristie Kerr at the U.S. Open a year ago was the most recent.) Even worse, unless an American wins the British Open later this month, it will be the third time since 2001 that the U.S. has taken the collar in the majors for a season. That had never happened once in the 70 previous years they've been playing at least a single major tournament in women's golf.

These days, it's American TV executives who're sitting in front of their sets in the middle of the night, except they're not watching; they're staring at their flat screens in a glassy-eyed stupor, wondering if they're going to catch another break this year. Tiger Woods' absence for the remainder of the season has pooped the men's party. Having not seen the numbers, I'll take a wild guess that yet another young Asian, largely anonymous to American viewing audiences, playing virtually unchallenged over the final two hours of Sunday's telecast didn't exactly have them doing cartwheels down the halls of NBC's corporate headquarters at 30 Rock. (Although I believe they get their rights fees from the U.S.G.A. back if the ratings aren't better than the eight episodes from the first and only season of "Manimal.")

None of what TV people think should matter, of course. Except that it does. Inbee Park's victory Sunday stands on its own as an historic achievement. But the media, of which the American TV networks are a significant part, helps decide how often and loudly that history is told. They prefer to tell it with an American (ideally a really attractive American) as the central character. If not, they'll settle for one of those two traits, so long as they're exceptionally one or the other, such as new French Open champion Ana Ivanovic. Have you noticed how much pub NBC's given her in its TV and online coverage of Wimbledon these last couple of weeks? Hint: she's not American.

The bigger issue is not how the network promotes but how we watch. By and large, I'm afraid we as Americans would rather be entertained than inspired. That's what happens when you grow up with 500 digital channels available at the flick of a finger. Seriously, what would it take for you to wake your kid up in the middle of the night to watch a sporting event -- any event -- happening live on the other side of the world? I mean, besides a two-liter of Mountain Dew?

Tiger Woods is the most popular athlete, let alone golfer, on the planet. But compare his impact to that of Se Ri Pak. In 1997, Woods won the Masters, becoming the first African-American to win a major. Zillions watched and still do every time he tees it up. But a decade later, he remains the only African-American on Tour.

In 1998, Pak won the LPGA Championship and U.S. Women's Open, giving South Korea its first-ever major champion. Ten years later, she's been joined by 44 of her compatriots, 16 of which have won official tournaments.

There are probably multiple explanations, not the least of which I'm sure is the fact that many Korean players -- beginning, not coincidentally, with Pak -- have had domineering fathers who demanded of their daughters a dedication to the game that has produced remarkable results. (And often resentment.) But surely some of it has to do with the enormous resources poured into that nation's junior golf programs. The U.S., for all its wealth, is disproportionately low on the list of nations who make sure kids who want to play golf have the opportunity to learn the game, compete against others, and improve.

The good news for the LPGA is that the league's popularity continues to grow everywhere else. Park is South Korea's newest national celebrity, and media outlets in that country and throughout the Far East will continue to pay out the yin yang to get a piece of the LPGA pie, which has an increasingly Asian flavor. It's possible that women's golf could actually not just survive but thrive without the U.S. as its primary fan base. And it may have to unless Americans start playing better on Sunday at majors. Or Ana Ivanovic takes up golf.

Grant Boone is a husband, father, broadcaster, and journalist born in Tennessee and living in Texas. During his nearly 20 years in sports journalism, he's been heard on tape delay in pizza joints half-filled with fully-drunk beer league softball teams and around the world covering major sporting events for ESPN, Turner Sports, Golf Channel, and CBS Radio. To read past installments of Grant Me This, click here http://www.pga.com/news/grantmethis/. You can contact Grant at pgagrant@hotmail.com.