In the February edition of Golf Digest, the American magazine that is the biggest and best-selling of its kind in the world, a piece appeared entitled ”The Amazing What’s Her Name”.
It was written by Dan Jenkins, the biggest and best-selling golf writer in the world, and it began: ”Erica Summerstamp — I may have her name wrong — can take heart in the fact that her achievement of winning 11 times on the LPGA tour is not the first streak to be ignored by the public and press.
”Among other things were my three wins in a row over Cecil the Parachute, John the Band-Aid and Moron Tom one week at Goat Hills…”
There was more in the same tongue-in-cheek vein and Jenkins, in his inimitable way, was making the point that in spite of her remarkable achievements, no one knew Annika Sorenstam, and worse, no one really cared.
Well, they do now. In the space of three months she has gone from anonymity to arguably the best-known female athlete in the world. The reaction of the world’s media to her participation in the Colonial Invitational in Fort Worth has been extraordinary: she will never be Erica again.
More than 600 journalists were accredited, television stations both in the United Kingdom and in the United States cleared their schedules and, as the event sponsor, the Bank of America rejoiced in the amazing publicity, while other golf tournaments around the world had to grit their teeth.
The Volvo PGA Championship at Wentworth, for instance, was missing the top golf writers for several national daily newspapers who had defected to Texas and those who remained spent hours over their computers, monitoring Sorenstam’s progress.
And there was much grinning in a press tent that was seemingly on Sorenstam’s side to a man and woman, as she exceeded most expectations and made churls of some ungracious tour players.
But the playing is over now and it is time, too, for the hysteria to stop. Sorenstam has achieved what she wanted, to compete against the men and prove that she could, and in the process she has raised her profile from ”Erica” to the tag applied by Jesper Parnevik, namely ”Superwoman”.
She avoided her biggest fear, which was that she would make a fool of herself, but has said, wisely, that she will not be doing it again.
For there are some facts to consider here that have largely been lost in the hoopla, facts of which Sorenstam herself is well aware.
She is, of course, the best woman golfer in the world, and by miles. She is physically extremely strong, employing a regime so rigorous that the other golfing fitness fanatic, Tiger Woods, has refused challenges from her to do more sit-ups than she can.
Amazingly she is even stronger mentally, which last week, given the immense pressures, was just as well. A less well-equipped person might have been driven demented by the incessant attention.
Those two factors enabled her to go out on Thursday and, by her own
admission, play absolutely as well as she could. The world’s best woman played her best game — and it resulted in a one-over-par 71. Moreover, she did this on a course that she hand-picked for the purpose. Before the tournament began Sorenstam admitted that she could not compete against the men on 95% of the courses used by the US tour, they being too long or too open, or both.
Only on a course that demanded her speciality, accuracy, could she prosper and last week that prosperity amounted to missing the cut. That she did so narrowly, by four shots, was enough to satisfy Sorenstam and many of her detractors, who had resisted the idea of her playing. But it should not, and in Sorenstam’s case will not, result in more women playing on the men’s tour.
If Sorenstam could not cut it, then no woman playing the game now could get even close. The time will come when women play alongside men in tour events. But that time is not yet. Erica, Annika, Superwoman, should rest content. —