Not everyone is thrilled with the Chevron Championship's success in Texas

The LPGA’s Chevron Championship, the first major championship of the year on the LPGA Tour, is being played in Houston this week. Even though it has been three years since the event was played in the Coachella Valley for the 51st and final time in 2022, watching the tournament in Texas is a little bittersweet for California golf fans.

It’s great that Chevron has put money into the tournament and is trying to keep the history of the event alive, even if that history was made more than 1,000 miles away in Rancho Mirage. There are so many reasons that the tournament left -- reasons that built up over the final few years of the event, all seemingly making it an easy decision to leave the tournament’s desert home after 51 years.

But for fans who loved The Dinah, the name of the event no matter the sponsor, seeing it played in another state with another name isn’t easy. What is easy is to think about what the desert has missed since the tournament departed after 2022.

For instance:

A Nelly victory

In her last two starts at Mission Hills (she didn’t play in the 2022 finale because of a blood clot), Korda lost a playoff to Mirim Lee in 2020 and finished third in 2021 when Patty Tavatanakit won by two shots. Since the event has moved to Houston, Korda placed third in 2023 and won the event in 2024, meaning she has been third or better in four straight years of the major championship. Korda was clearly trending up when she started playing well at Mission Hills, and she loved the course. She would have won the desert major at some point.

A Lilia victory

Back in 2014, Lilia Vu, then a junior golfer, won what was known as the Kraft Nabisco Junior Championship, giving her a berth in the major championship that week. She made the cut and tied for 46th, showing that she had the talent to be on tour. In the first Chevron Championship played in Houston, Vu beat another past Junior Championship winner Angel Yin in a playoff for Vu’s first major win. She won another major later that year and because the No. 1 player in the rankings, but that first major championship could just as easily have come in the desert had the tournament stayed.

The leap

The jump into Poppie’s Pond at Mission Hills Country Club was a significant part of the charm of the major championship in the desert, and at times, you felt the leap was the only reason some national media outlets cared about the desert tournament at all. It had grown from a spontaneous jump by Amy Alcott and her caddie in 1988 to a well-choreographed crowd-pleasing moment. You could compare jumps from one year to the next. Was Annika Sorenstam’s headfirst dive more athletic that Karrie Webb’s cannonball? In Houston, the tournament had to build a little pier for golfers to reach the lake, and the jump doesn’t send the golfers and caddies and whoever else toward adoring fans.

Network television

Dinah’s tournament had an on-again, off-again relationship with network television, getting its reputation as an important tournament for the women by being on networks but struggling in its last few years as a tournament that couldn’t seem to get a network deal. New sponsorship from Chevron also meant a new time of year, later in April than the desert temperatures would likely allow, but that also meant more opportunity for NBC to step in and broadcast the Saturday and Sunday play from the event. That kind of coverage likely wasn’t going to happen staying in the desert.

 The major vibe

Okay, in its last few years, the Dinah or the ANA Inspiration or whatever you want to call it wasn’t attracting big galleries in the desert. But the top players in the world were still coming year after year, the history of the tournament was honored each year with champions’ dinners and past champions hanging around for the week and a new player had her life changed each year with victory in the desert major. All of that left when the tournament moved after the 2022 season, and actually, the 2022 event had a strange feel because we knew the event was leaving. Still, the glory years of the tournament were great for players and fans, and they could have remained great with just the right breaks here or there.

Larry Bohannan is the golf writer for The Desert Sun. You can contact him at (760) 778-4633 or at larry.bohannan@desertsun.com. Follow him on Facebook or on X at @larry_bohannan.