What do you do when you’re Annika Sorenstam, and you’ve laid to waste virtually everything and everyone put before you on the LPGA Tour? You propose a deal, you make a pact – not with the devil, who’s notoriously crooked, both on and off the tee – but rather with golf’s most omnipotent deity.
“Oh, he knows,” Sorenstam says, barely suppressing a giggle.
“He” is Tiger Woods, and what’s on the line is no less than a dual chase after the most immense feat in the sport. A competition that began months ago will resume this week at Bulle Rock Golf Course, not far from Baltimore, where Sorenstam will try to win the second major championship of the season, the LPGA Championship.
If she is successful, Sorenstam will be halfway to winning all four of golf’s majors in one year, the Grand Slam. It would then be incumbent upon Woods, who won the Masters, the PGA Tour’s first major, to try to keep pace next week at the U.S. Open at Pinehurst.
Woods, himself a fierce competitor, would undoubtedly be ecstatic, but his euphoria might only last so long – Sorenstam could take the lead again the very next week at the U.S. Women’s Open at Cherry Hills Country Club.
“I’m going to be first – our majors are first on the calendar, so he has to play catch up,” Sorenstam said teasingly. “See? I can always find some competition.”
There hasn’t been much of it lately on the LPGA Tour. In the past three-plus seasons, Sorenstam has won 29 tournaments in just 64 starts – an astounding rate of 45 percent, which, by the way, is better than the 32 percent mark set by Woods when he dominated the PGA Tour between 2000-03. During his run, Woods won six major championships; Sorenstam, the winner of eight majors overall, has won four during her stretch of superiority.
Recently, her dominance has been even more pronounced. Sorenstam won four of her last six tournaments last season and four of her first six this year, one of which was the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the season’s first major. That was the third of three straight wins to start the year, which gave Sorenstam the chance to break Nancy Lopez’s LPGA record of five consecutive victories.
Although she failed, finishing in a tie for 12th at the Michelob Ultra Open, Sorenstam came back the next week to win the Chick-fil-A Charity Championship by 10 shots, shooting 23-under-par.
“She’s like Michael Jordan at the peak of his ability and talent; it’s a shame it’s not being talked about more,” said Meg Mallon, one of the few players to best Sorenstam on the major stage, holding her off by two shots in last year’s U.S. Open. “Every inch of her swing is in perfect position, it’s what Ben Hogan was trying to do.”
In control
Sorenstam has been so commanding there is genuine surprise when she doesn’t win, which in turn causes people to be seized by lapses of rationality. Such was the case earlier this season at a news conference before the Michelob, when a reporter asked Sorenstam what she needed to do to become a factor in the tournament.
Sorenstam, who had finished sixth and eighth in the event the previous two seasons, gave an LPGA official a bemused look and asked, “I haven’t been a factor here?”
The moment was a flash of the competitiveness that has been a trait of Sorenstam’s since her childhood in Sweden. Back then, many of the challenges came within the walls of her home; the Sorenstams may have been some of the first people to discover the thrill of interactive participation.
“We’d play cards and they would go flying; we’d play Yahtzee and the dice would be all over the place,” she said. “Somebody would get mad; that was just my family.”
On the course, it has taken time for Sorenstam to channel and control those instincts. After winning back-to-back U.S. Opens, the first at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs in 1995, Sorenstam missed the cut at Pumpkin Ridge in 1997. The Oregon course was the site of another meltdown in the 2003 Open when she lost what seemed to be a certain victory by bogeying the 72nd hole.
Since then, Sorenstam has won half of the six majors that she has played; one measure, she says, of the progress she’s made.
“I learned that lesson the hard way,” she said. “I’d come into tournaments and be so excited and try to win it on Thursday. It’s Sunday that really matters, you want to put yourself into position to win, but you have to be patient. I’ve learned that, and gotten better at that. I have a lot more patience than I used to. And I have a lot more confidence.
“I know if I have four days to play, I can turn a bad round into a good one.”
And a good day by Sorenstam tends to have a snowballing, carryover effect on the rest of the field. Her name on the leaderboard tends to get people talking; that includes the media, which is quick to ask other players if they’re concerned about Sorenstam.
Though they may say they’re not, and they may actually believe it, Sorenstam is at least in their heads – pressure that often leads to collapses that make it easier for Sorenstam to walk away with another victory.
Mallon says other players “feel they can win, but Annika has set a standard that’s pretty high.” So much so that other players admit they can’t help but feel at least a slight sense of relief during the weeks Sorenstam doesn’t play.
“It changes the dynamic when she’s not at a tournament,” veteran Leta Lindley said. “It just gives you a better chance; she’s a machine, and you know you’re going to have to play, well, for me, my super-duper best golf ever. That could surely happen, but you know she’s not going to make any mistakes, she’s not going to give you the tournament.”
Lopez and other former players have wondered why players have been unable to step up and challenge Sorenstam more consistently, why they have indeed been cowed by her. For her part, Sorenstam says she doesn’t know if that’s true. In any case, she doesn’t want to spend much time trying to figure out exactly what’s going on.
“It’s tough for me to see that as a player,” she said. “But it seems that once I’m in the hunt – first of all, I love to be in the hunt – that’s my game, where I excel and I’ve been able to pull through. For whatever reason, if I’m just stepping up, or they get nervous, I’m not really sure.
“But I love to be in that position; it doesn’t scare me anymore. To the contrary, I can’t wait to get there. Thursdays and Fridays are more like, ‘OK, I have to do this,’ then Saturday and Sunday come and it’s like, ‘OK, let’s put it into another gear,’ and I’m going. I love it.”
Achieving unthinkable
Though Sorenstam may be playing it coy about her “rivalry” with Woods, she is very clear that winning majors is her main goal. Yet throughout the season, she hasn’t talked in the context of a Grand Slam.
That may be because of last year. Sorenstam openly spoke of winning all four majors at the start of the season, only to crash and burn at the Nabisco, finishing in a tie for 13th.
Asked about her hesitancy to utter the magic words, Sorenstam insisted, “I’m not afraid to say it. I said it last year and it didn’t work, (but) I would love to win a Grand Slam, no doubt.
“It’s very, very difficult to do, but then again, that’s what keeps me going. If I have a chance to do something no one else has done, that’s what I gotta do now. For me to just go out and play, just to play, that doesn’t make me tick any more.”
As good as Lopez was, she only won 48 events. Mickey Wright, considered by many to be the best female player ever, won 82 times. The all-time record is held by Kathy Whitworth, who won 88 tournaments in her illustrious career.
If Sorenstam wins this week, it will be her 61st victory. At age 34, she is seemingly well within reach of Whitworth’s mark.
“I’ve always thought that 88 was incredible,” Sorenstam said. “I don’t know if I could ever achieve that. It’s never been a goal of mine, because I thought it was so unbelievable, so far away.”
As recently as two years ago, Whitworth’s record seemed to be safe, if only because Sorenstam wasn’t going to be around long enough to break it. She was eager to start a family, and it appeared to be only a matter of time before she walked away from the game.
Circumstances changed however, when Sorenstam announced in February that she had filed for divorce from David Esch, her husband of eight years. The fact the two were separated for much of 2004 made her season, eight wins and 16 top-10s in 18 starts, that much more remarkable.
“She’s never miserable inside the ropes,” Lopez said.
Sorenstam hasn’t dwelled much on the failed marriage, but has allowed that chances are she’ll be playing longer than she had anticipated.
“My personal life has taken a drastic turn,” Sorenstam said. “I’m trying to throw myself into golf and doing something that I enjoy. I’ve nothing else to pull me away from the game really, unless I want to start a new career or do something else. It opens up doors.”
Even so, the once-shy girl who wondered if she would ever win one LPGA event can’t bring herself to grasp the idea of winning 89 times.
“Let’s say I play for another three, four years,” she said. “If you have 75, that’s still 13 wins away and you feel like you’re coming to the end. That’s a lot (to get). But let’s say I was at 80 or 85, yeah, maybe then it would be, ‘Let’s play another year and see what happens.’
“If you continue this pace … I don’t know if I can do that … the competition is getting so much tougher. I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know how I’ve done it the last few years. So maybe I shouldn’t question it, I should just go play and see what happens.”
Not a dew sweeper
By the time Sorenstam nears Whitworth’s record, there may indeed be a group of players ready to provide a more consistent challenge. Cristie Kerr, already one of the LPGA’s better players, beat Sorenstam at the Michelob and is only 27. Then there are other younger players like Grace Park, Lorena Ochoa and Paula Creamer who are coming into their own.
Then again, the competition may drive Sorenstam to even greater heights.
“She doesn’t like anyone getting too close to her,” Kerr said.
Some wonder if Sorenstam’s drive would be better served by making her confrontation with Woods an actual, full-time occurrence, playing on the PGA Tour.
“Every time I play with a guy, I love it,” Sorenstam said.
Her highly acclaimed appearance two years ago in the PGA Tour’s Colonial opened the door to all sorts of flirtations between the sexes: Park, Michelle Wie, Laura Davies, Se Ri Pak and Jan Stephenson are among the female players who have teed it up in one sort of male event or another.
However, apart from the occasional offseason event like the Skins Game, Sorenstam hasn’t been part of the romance. She says she would love to see men and women play separate tournaments at the same venue, as is the case with major championships in professional tennis, but she steadfastly insists she won’t play in another PGA Tour event.
“I think Colonial was just so great, it wouldn’t matter where I went, it would never be the same,” she said. “I did it for the experience. It just got so big (with) the pressure, and I just didn’t expect that. In a way I wish I could have played and nobody saw, just compete against them and see what happened.”
But as perfect as the event was for Sorenstam, the bottom line was she missed the cut after shooting 71-75. While she didn’t throw any clubs or overturn a Yahtzee board in the clubhouse, her competitive instincts are never far away.
“I love to win. So what if I play in a PGA Tour event and I make the cut,” Sorenstam said. “Well, that’s great, but I’m going off first on Saturday morning? Right behind the mowers? I want to win!
“There’s nothing like being in contention and winning a tournament. Whether you’re three shots ahead or three shots behind, it’s always a different situation, but that’s what’s exciting. I don’t want to play and play for 40th or 50th place, it’s not the same excitement.
“What am I trying to prove? That I can finish in the top 50? That would be a great achievement, but that doesn’t do it for me.”
Staff writer Anthony Cotton can be reached at 303-820-1292 or at acotton@denverpost.com.
