Interesting story this weekend up the road in Dubai. Lexi Thompson, 16-year-old American from Florida, rolled into the big city up the coast from Abu Dhabi and won the Dubai Ladies Masters by four shots. Pretty much blew away the field of, mostly, Ladies European Tour pros.

Thompson now is the youngest woman to win, as a pro, on both the LPGA Tour and the European Tour.

This could be the best thing to happen to American women’s golf in quite some time.

The women’s Euro tour is coming along, but the U.S. tour is where most of the significant competition still is.

What has been hurting the LPGA, considering that most of its events are in the States, is the massive dropoff of competitive American golfers.

Over the past 10 years, and especially the past five, golfers from east Asia, and particularly South Korea, have been extremely prominent on the LPGA Tour.

Three years ago, Karen Crouse of the New York Times did a story looking at some of the issues raised by a mostly-U.S.-based tour with so many foreigners, most of them young, many of them not English-proficient, dominating the tour.

Crouse notes in her story that, as of late 2008, half of the LPGA Tour’s membership of 120 came from outside the U.S., and 45 of them were from South Korea.

The biggest issue here … is with sponsors, most of them Americans, many of whom consider a meet-and-greet, some schmoozing with execs, maybe a round with the CEO, to be part of the sponsorship experience, and that all becomes difficult when half of your golfers have trouble with English.

Quick! Who is Yani Tseng?

Consider yourself an LPGA diehard if you know that she is 22-year-old woman from Taiwan who has been the LPGA Tour player of the year two years running. She already has won five “majors” in women’s golf, all of them at least once except for the U.S. Open.

She trashed the competition this year, winning $2.9 million to lead the 2011 money list by a mile. A distant second? The American Cristie Kerr, with $1.47 million.

Kerr, however, is 34, and that is about when golfers begin to lose their edge, and U.S. fans have been looking for the “next big thing” in the U.S. women’s game … and she may finally be here.

Alexis “Lexi” Thompson set a record at the LPGA’s Alabama event recently as youngest woman to win a championship … and in Dubai she set the record for youngest pro to win a Euro Tour event — though a Korean amateur is the youngest to win a Euro event.

Thompson’s apparent breakthrough is important for women’s golf, at least as long as most of the big events are based in the U.S., and as long as most of the money going into the sport comes from there.

We don’t yet know much about Lexi Thompson other than she comes from a family of golfers, her father is her caddy and she was home-schooled.

If she keeps up this pace, she may be the real Michelle Wie, in terms of becoming a major player in women’s golf, as opposed to the Hawaiian golfer who carries that name, who has never quite been as good as we thought she was going to be.

Wie holds a lot of records for “first/youngest” to play in various tournaments, including PGA events, but she has all of two professional victories — or as many as Lexi Thompson has at age 16.

Wie was a distant runner-up, in Dubai.

Lexi Thompson. You may hear the name again, and soon.