A Woman Among Men

		1991 WOMEN'S OPEN	2003 COLONIAL
HOLE	PAR	YARDS	YARDS
1	5	530	565
2	4	335	400
3	5/4	460	476
4	3	195	246
5	4	390	470
6	4	365	393
7	4	410	427
8	3	167	192
9	4	348	402
OUT	36/35	3,200	3,571
10	4	373	404
11	5	552	609
12	4	359	433
13	3	148	178
14	4	400	457
15	4	385	430
16	3	165	188
17	4	360	383
18	4	398	427
IN	35	3,140	3,509
TOTAL	71/70	6,340	7,080

You can crunch the numbers yourself or let Annika Sorenstam—the most unassuming of superstars—analyze them for you. She's done it anyway. On the LPGA tour last year she hit 80.3% of her fairways, which would have ranked her second on the PGA Tour . She hit 79.7% of her greens in regulation, which would place her first among the men. You'd think she'd have no trouble going head-to-head with the men. The numbers lie. The truth is that compared with your garden-variety PGA Tour players—your Skip Kendalls, your Heath Slocums, your Fred Funks—Sorenstam's golf skills are inferior. Her approach shots, by men's standards, lack height, spin and shape. On the PGA Tour , even with her newly developed strength, she'd be short off the tee. Driving the ball about 265 yards, she'd be at least 35 yards behind the long knockers. She's the best female golfer in the world, but by PGA Tour standards her putting and chipping are mediocre and her bunker play is worse. In May she will compete in an elite PGA Tour event, the Bank of America Colonial, in Fort Worth , Texas , playing the fabled Colonial Country Club course from the same tees as the men. At the end of the week her apparent shortcomings may prove meaningless. Jack Nicklaus expects her to make the cut. Phil Mickelson thinks she could finish as high as 20th. There's one reason why they might well be correct: Sorenstam has the best head in golf. Way better than Phil's. Better than Tiger's. She has a head for golf that brings to mind Nicklaus in his prime, or Ben Hogan , who won five times at Colonial, in his.

"She makes almost no mistakes," says Meg Mallon , an LPGA stalwart who won the U.S. Women's Open when it was played at Colonial in 1991. "Part of what makes Tiger exciting is that he misses fairways, he misses greens, then he plays recovery shots that are just mind-boggling. Annika's not like that. She drives it in the fairway, knocks it on the green, then either makes the putt or doesn't." It isn't thrilling, but it's deadly. Nick Faldo , when he was winning majors, played precisely the same way.

Sorenstam is a modest 32-year-old Swede—married, no children—who lives in a gated golf-course development in Orlando , in the shadows of Disney World and Tiger Woods . Woods cannot go to the popcorn stand at the neighborhood multiplex without causing a ruckus. Sorenstam, a knapsack on her back, makes her rounds to the local gourmet shops (she wears the apron in her house) mostly unnoticed. Woods and Sorenstam share an agent and are friendly, but their demeanor on the course can be very different. Woods could flatten his caddie with one of his fist pumps. When Sorenstam makes a great shot, you might see her raise her right hand almost to shoulder height and wave mildly. She's a golfing machine who grew up with Bj�rn Borg as a sporting hero. Like the Swedish tennis star of yesteryear, she has deep reserves of reserve. "I like to let my clubs do the talking," she says. At one word per shot, that would have been 68.7 words per round last year (an LPGA scoring record), none of them fighting words. Sorenstam has nothing resembling a rivalry with her closest pursuers, Karrie Webb , Se Ri Pak and Juli Inkster . That's one of the reasons the LPGA is treading in a sporting backwater.

You'd struggle to find a dominating athlete who has done more and been less celebrated for it than Sorenstam, which has something to do with why she is playing the Colonial. She's not looking for attention; she's looking for a new challenge. But her chief advisers—husband David Esch , who follows his wife's every shot, and Mark Steinberg , her IMG agent—are eager for a larger audience to see her stuff. "There are plenty more people on the planet who know about Annika now than there were a month ago," Steinberg said last week. "After Colonial there will be countless more. It's bittersweet that it took her accepting an invitation to play in a PGA Tour event for people to take notice of her. Her 42 LPGA victories should have been more than enough."

How many people know that in 2001 and '02 Sorenstam was the most dominant golfer in the world? The editors at Golf for Women magazine; the players on the insular LPGA tour, including Sorenstam's younger sister, Charlotta; Sorenstam's parents in Sweden , Gunilla and Tom. And that's pretty much it. Sorenstam played in 49 LPGA events in those two years and won 19 of them. Woods played in 38 PGA Tour events in that same period and won 10. In 1996, when she won her second consecutive U.S. Women's Open, Sorenstam looked like a schoolgirl, with number 2 pencils for arms and straight, fine sun-bleached hair spilling out playfully over the top of her visor. She says that as recently as two years ago she would not have been ready to play in a PGA Tour event. But over the past 26 months she has reconfigured her body through a grueling weightlifting, running and stretching regimen that includes as many as 1,000 sit-ups a day. She's a different player today, longer (some 20 yards on average off the tee than she was in 1999) and more aggressive when she needs to be. Now she looks built for battle, with industrial-strength arms, the thighs of a sprinter and wraparound shades that keep out TV cameras and opponents.

Over the years she has developed a simple philosophy. She will not show up at a tournament unless she thinks she can win it. She has devoted her life to winning golf tournaments and has at times frustrated LPGA commissioner Ty Votaw and spurned tournament sponsors by so resolutely adhering to that credo. She will take it to the Colonial, in an event played May 22-25 on an old-fashioned par-70 finesse course measuring a pitch shot over 7,000 yards (box, opposite), just as it did in Hogan's day. She calculates that there are only a handful of courses on the PGA Tour schedule where she could compete. The Colonial Country Club course was on her shortlist, even though it's about 10% longer than the courses she typically plays on the LPGA tour. "I'm going to approach the tournament the way I always do," she said last week. "I stay in the present. I don't think much about what the other players are doing. If I play well, things will fall into place."

She regards the Colonial as the "fifth major" on her '03 schedule. The other women's majors are the Kraft Nabisco Championship, which Sorenstam has won twice; the Open, which she won in '95 and '96; and the LPGA Championship and the British Open, neither of which she has won. Last year the only cut she missed was at the British, the tournament she most wanted to win. Sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—when she wants something too much, she tries to be too perfect and gets tight. In other words, she's human. Sooner or later all golfers crack. It's what makes the game so interesting. Woods shot a third-round 81 in a driving rain at the British Open last year, thwarting his Grand Slam hopes. It happened to Sorenstam at the '97 Open, where she missed the cut trying to win her third straight national championship.

The PGA Tour has never been known as a den of liberalism, and until recently many people didn't realize women were allowed to play in Tour events. But in 1945 Babe Zaharias competed in the Los Angeles Open, shooting rounds of 76 and 81 to make the 36-hole cut. She shot a 79 in the third round but missed the 54-hole cut in a tournament won by Sam Snead . The Colonial, like most PGA Tour events, has only one cut, after two rounds. Last year the cut was 143, three over par. Nick Price , at 45, not long with the driver but still a fabulous shotmaker, won by five strokes with a score of 13-under 267. He earned $774,000. (Twice last year Sorenstam took home a career-high check for $315,000.) When Meg Mallon won at Colonial in '91, she shot one-under 283 on a course that measured 6,340 yards but with thicker rough and narrower fairways and harder greens than what Sorenstam and 125 or so of her golfing brethren are likely to find in May. After her win Mallon never thought about what she might be able to do against the guys at Colonial. But these are different times for the ladies. Suddenly, and for the first time since the Nancy Lopez glory days of a quarter century ago, women's golf is on the front page, and not just of the sports section.

First came Hootie Johnson , the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club , home of the Masters. In July he issued his bizarre public missive defending his club for having nothing but fellas on its membership roll. He said change would not come to Augusta National "at the point of a bayonet," and all of a sudden people were talking about Sandra Day O'Connor 's golf game and whether the U.S. Supreme Court justice would be a suitable first woman member at the club.

Next came Suzy Whaley , a Connecticut teaching professional who qualified for the '03 Greater Hartford Open, on the men's Tour, by winning a PGA of America section championship in September. In that event, and in accordance with the rules then in place, she played from tees that made the course 10% shorter than the one the men played. Since then the PGA of America has adopted a rule stating that women must play from the same tees as the men if they seek to qualify for a PGA Tour event. Still, Whaley played her way into a Tour event—Sorenstam received a sponsor's exemption—and she plans to play.