It was 1991.  The LPGA Tour had just fired its Commissioner, William Blue, after less than two years on the job.  Blue, like now-gone Commissioner Carolyn Bivens, had worked in his previous job as a marketing executive with no sports experience.  His "heavy-handed" approach - a label applied often to Bivens during her tenure - rubbed those within LPGA circle the wrong way.

Also like Bivens, Blue had some particularly embarrassing incidents. The SI Vault has the details from the way-back machine of 1991.

His biggest blunder occurred in the fall of 1989 when he scheduled a nationally televised Skins Game on the same weekend as the 13-year-old Corning Classic, which is held in an upstate New York community popular with the players. In the same week that Blue got his pink slip, J.C. Penney pulled its sponsorship of the '91 Skins Game because organizers couldn't come up with an alternate date.

Doesn't that sound like the problem with ShopRite and Annika's Ginn Tribute?  Shuttering a long-time sponsor in order to follow the money?

Perhaps on as large of a scale as the English-speaking policy that got Bivens in hot water, William Blue was racially insensitive and ignorant.

Blue also blundered last August, in the aftermath of the Shoal Creek controversy at the PGA Championship, when he claimed that the LPGA wasn't vulnerable on the issue of holding tournaments at clubs that discriminate against women and minorities. Only days later, however, NAACP officials threatened a protest of the Wykagyl Country Club, site of an LPGA event, because the New Rochelle, N.Y., club had never had a black member. It also turned out that at least two other clubs that hosted LPGA tournaments in 1990 had made no effort to attract minority members. The NAACP called off the protest after Wykagyl said it was actively recruiting black members.

Two major incidences led to Blue's downfall and the installation of Charlie Mechem.  Mechem went on to become one of the Tour's most beloved figures and, perhaps, its best Commissioner.  Golf Chick penned a piece about Mechem for Jackson Hole Golf Magazine.  It details Mechem's passion for a job that is poorly regarded in the golf world now as it was then.

The LPGA Tour has stared into the abyss before and found someone to take the Tour to new heights.  Hopefully, the lessons of William Blue are not too far removed from veterans like Juli Inkster and Helen Alfresson - players who were in the game when the Blue-Mechem transition happened.