We all knew this was coming, but Golfweek confirms it.

The Fields Corporation, title sponsor of the Fields Open in Hawaii, has announced it will not renew its title sponsorship for the LPGA tournament for 2009, leaving an early-season hole on the tour’s schedule for next year.

Fields officials said the Japanese entertainment company will concentrate its future marketing efforts primarily in Japan. There had been speculation the event was in trouble and might not return, one of several LPGA tournaments that is having title sponsor issues.

That’s not really news, but this sounds interesting:

“I think our No. 1 objective is to get more U.S. tournaments (with) full fields,” Inkster said.

That seems to fly in the face of international expansion of the LPGA Tour. I’d be very curious to know the explicit objective of Commissioner Bivens. I don’t know it one way or the other, but I’m not certain that Inkster and the Commish would see eye-to-eye on that.

I don’t have a very good eye for catching minor errors in golf reporting. If I do catch a minor error, I usually just laugh. But, I was emailed by the originator of the Florida Masochist Blog, Bill Jempty, about an egregious error by Golfworld’s Ron Sirak in previewing the LPGA Championship.

In the piece, he writes:

For dark horses consider impressive rookies Na Yeon Choi and Yani Tseng, as well as Juli Inkster, who turns 48 this month and just needs to remember that she is a great putter to win again.

Two problems. One, Juli almost won the SemGroup Championship about a month ago. Second, she’s not in the field this week to attend her child’s middle school graduation.

Cue the sad trumpet. That’s just bad.

This one is courtesy of Doug Ferguson, who is buddies with Juli Inkster. And Juli – if you know her – will always break it down for you in simple, blunt terms.

A half-dozen players not eligible for the pro-am last week on the LPGA Tour were on the putting green, with their caddies standing on the fringe. That’s courtesy of a daft new policy that bans caddies from being on the practice green between the hours of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Turns out a couple of players were having a putting contest when a caddie was standing in their line. They asked him to move, he did, but that wasn’t enough. They went to the commissioner to complain about crowded conditions on the green, and a new policy was enacted.

The fine for a caddie being on the green – to work with his player’s mechanics or retrieve balls from the cup – is $500.

The policy even applies to the chipping area, and it’s peculiar to see players hit three or four chips, then shag their own golf balls.

Count Juli Inkster among those who think the policy is bordering on ridiculous.

“You know what? It’s women,” she said when asked for a comment. “If you just put that down, everyone will know what you mean. Just capitalize ‘women’ and you don’t need to explain anything else.”

You cannot even make something like that up, and why would you? You would be wasting everyone’s time. I would expect that this new policy goes away awfully quickly, but it is funny what will make professional golfers (of both sexes) complain and find annoying when they are so locked into their element.