ANNIKA SORENSTAM sets off on stage three today of her quest for a grand slam of major championships when she tees off in the first round of the US Women’s Open in the shadow of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains at the Cherry Hills Country Club, west of Denver.
With the Kraft-Nabisco and McDonald’s LPGA Championships already safely tucked away, the world No 1 is the overwhelming favourite to lift this week’s title before turning her attention to the Weetabix Women’s British Open, at Royal Birkdale, at the end of next month.
No player, male or female, has won four major professional championships in one season and with Tiger Woods narrowly missing out on his second of the year at the men’s US Open on Sunday, the stage has now been cleared for his friend and training partner to go in search of sporting immortality. So dominant has the 34-year-old Sorenstam become that it is difficult to imagine anyone seriously stepping up to challenge her.
One rival once cattily remarked that the Swede was the “Queen of the ShopRite Classic”, a player capable of dominating the lesser events but one who struggled to make the step up to the bigger stage. Now, Sorenstam is queen of all she surveys. “She is so good that she makes the rest of us look bad, which we’re not,” Laura Davies remarked after Sorenstam’s three-shot victory over Michelle Wie in the LPGA Championship in Havre de Grace two weeks ago.
Much of that dominance can be traced back to the week in May 2003 when Sorenstam became the first woman since Babe Zaharias, 48 years earlier, to compete in a men’s tour event. Although Sorenstam missed the cut at the Colonial tournament in Texas, she left it with her self-esteem brimming and the knowledge of what she needed to do to take her game on to a new level.
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Since, she has worked hard on her short game, increased the length of her drives and become a seriously good putter. In short, she seems to be better at every aspect of the game than anyone else.
The figures do not lie. Of the 38 US tour events since the Colonial, Sorenstam has won 19, including five majors, and is an aggregate of 410 under par. This season alone, she has won six out of eight tournaments, has a scoring average of 68.70 and is 91 under par. None of her fellow competitors comes anywhere near.
Coincidentally, Zaharias is the only woman to have won three major championships in succession, and were Sorenstam to match that feat this week, she would also draw alongside the American into fourth place in the list of major winners, with ten in all. Patty Berg leads the list with 15.
So who can challenge Annika? There is the inevitable swath of South Koreans in the field, while among the youngsters are Wie and Paula Creamer, an 18-year-old rookie from California with one victory already this season and a second-place finish last week. And while you might have thought that it would be asking too much of Wie to seek victory, the 15-year-old Hawaiian schoolgirl is having none of it.
In finishing runner-up at the LPGA Championship, she was the only player to have four rounds under par and silenced some of the critics who said that an amateur should not have been invited to what had previously been a tournament open only to professionals.
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Most telling is Wie’s own assessment of her performance that week. “I was very happy when I got second place, but I want to do better,” she said.
The British challenge will be led once more by Davies, who has found a rich vein of form but who will need to be careful off the tees with the course’s tight fairways and deep rough. Karen Stupples, the British Open champion, has stuttered this season but could still be a contender, while Catriona Matthew has four top-three finishes and plenty of experience.