Analysis: Sorenstam outgunned on PGA tour?

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- Annika Sorenstam, the top gun of the Ladies Professional Golf Association, has accepted a sponsor's invitation to play golf with the big boys at the Bank of America Colonial Tournament in late May. This would be the first time a woman teed it up in a PGA tournament since the legendary golfer and Olympic track heroine Babe Didrikson Zaharias made the cut at the war-depleted Los Angeles Open of 1945.

Coming on top of The New York Times' campaign to force the famous Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters tournament, to admit women members, this is sure to generate huge publicity for women's golf.

The LPGA has never really recovered in popularity from the emergence two decades ago of the Senior (now "Champions") Tour for male pros aged 50 and over, which quickly took over from the women the lucrative role of the No. 2 circuit in America. The retirement of the LPGA's most popular player, the maternal Nancy Lopez, a mother of three, has left it without an American player well known to the general public.

Golf never had the equivalent of tennis' 1973 "Battles of the Sexes." The 55-year-old Bobby Riggs hustled a victory over Margaret Court, the No. 1 ranked woman, but then lost to Billie Jean King in a much-hyped match in the Astrodome.

In the tradition of King, it would perhaps make more sense for the 32-year-old Sorenstam to compete instead against the senior men on the Champions Tour. Objectively, her prospects against the big bombers of the regular men's tour appear much worse than some of the optimistic comments being made about her chances would indicate.

The world's No. 3-ranked player, Phil Mickelson, immediately predicted, "I think she'll definitely make the cut." Only players in roughly the top half of the field after the first two rounds are allowed to play on the weekend. Mickelson immediately upped the ante by claiming, "I think she'll finish around 20th." The tournament will have about 120 entrants, so Mickelson is predicting she'll beat five male pros out of six.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I suspect Mickelson is playing mind games with Sorenstam. I would guess that Mickelson is trying to simultaneously get points for political correctness and over inflate the outlook for Sorenstam.

Relations between male and female star golfers are not particularly close. In track and field, in contrast, the top male and female runners attend the same meets, work out together, and often marry. For example, the male and female 100 meter sprint world record holders, Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones, are both training and romantic partners. Men and women touring golfers, however, meet only occasionally at exhibitions. They rarely marry.

Annoyed by the brouhaha generated by feminists over the Masters at Augusta National, some of the PGA players may be setting Sorenstam up to fail by raising expectations unrealistically. When she doesn't live up to these predictions, some of the boys may hope she'll be too humiliated to want to play in their tree house anymore.

This is not good for Sorenstam. Say she plays decently, but misses the cut, finishing 115th out of 120. She should be able to claim she beat five men in a fair fight, rather than lament that she lost to 114.

Clearly, Sorenstam and her agent need to start managing expectations. They should announce that she'd have to play fantastically well to make the cut and that her basic goal is to beat at least one man.

That, in fact, shouldn't be too hard. The Colonial has a smaller and somewhat more select field than the average tournament, but it allows in a few locals and old timers. Further, each week some tour pros are sick, injured, dodging divorce summons, or whatever and post uncharacteristically high scores. Or maybe problem child John Daley will once again be cruising along bombing 330-yard drives and then suddenly blow up and post a 17 on one hole.

On the other hand, if the Swedish superstar gets spooked by bearing the weight of her entire sex on her shoulders, she could shoot 80-80 and finish last by eight strokes.

Unlike most athletes, golfers have to initiate the action themselves. So, they sometimes choke embarrassingly, as British Open winner Mark Calcavechhia admits he did in the 1991 Ryder Cup. He came to the par-3 17th hole at the Kiawah Ocean course needing a par to win the biennial tournament for America. Instead, he foozled it into the middle of the pond, 75 yards short of the hole.

In Sorenstam's first moment in the limelight, the 2001 nationally televised "Battle at Bighorn" exhibition where she partnered with Tiger Woods against David Duval and Karrie Wood, she looked like an amateur. She may feel she owes it to women golfers to make up for the Bighorn disaster, but that's just added pressure.

In 1998 big Laura Davies, the longest hitter in women's history, competed alongside eight men in the Johnnie Walker Super Tour exhibition tournament in Asia. She averaged 77 for four rounds, compared to winner Vijay Singh's 67.25. Even the last male golfer, an obscure Filipino pro, averaged 72.75.

Still, Sorenstam is a much more disciplined and accurate player than Davies. She has an outstanding swing, arguably the best in golf. The problem is that she just doesn't generate the kind of club head speed that even minor league male pros do.

Sorenstam's a terrific athlete, but she's also 5' 6" and slender. She's an attractive young woman, not a hormonal anomaly like the late Didrikson Zaharias, who had a noticeable Adam's apple and didn't start growing female curves until she was in her late 20s.

Sorenstam hits it extremely straight, but doesn't put "You da man!" hurt on the ball. The 7,088-yard Colonial course is short for the men, but it's 29 yards longer per hole than the longest course on the LPGA tour. She'll likely be hitting low lofted long irons or fairway woods all day. That would make it harder to obtain the backspin to keep her shots from rolling over the slick greens.

Sorenstam averages about 266 yards on her drives, which would have been decent a decade ago on the men's tour, but new technology has boosted drive distances considerably. That length would have put her 195th on the PGA tour in 2002.

She's chosen to compete on a narrow, tree-lined course, where her accuracy is at a premium. Also, Colonial has a lot of doglegs that were designed before World War II for the shorter tee shots of that era. Top pros today often have to use an iron off the tee to avoid blasting it through the fairways into the trees. So, that would negate some of their advantage in length.

Surprisingly, she may have an equally large disadvantage in delicacy as well as strength. The most directly comparable short game statistic is "sand saves" (the percentage of time a golfer gets up and down in two strokes from a greenside bunker). Sorenstam's 39 percent figure would have ranked only 195th on the men's tour last year, and they play from deeper bunkers to faster greens.

Back in the 1970s, you used to read in the golf magazines that the women pros had better short games than the men pros. Nobody believes that anymore. This is rather strange because women in general tend to be measurably better at delicate tasks involving fine motor skills.

In the long run, some woman will someday do modestly well against the top men. But it will probably be a woman who had grown up competing against men, and who has a much more formidable frame than Sorenstam. Interestingly, this man-beater of the future may well be of Asian descent. Asian-Americans frequently win girls' junior tournaments in the West. A much higher percentage of Asian than white or black teenage girls play golf, perhaps because they don't find it as terminally uncool as their peers do.

Right now, the most promising female golfer of the future is 5' 11" Michelle Wie, a 13-year-old Korean-American long-hitter from Hawaii. Lacking adequate female competition in her home state, Wie regularly tees it up against adult male club pros. Last weekend she was the only female and the youngest contestant in a field of 192 in a Hawaiian tournament with an $80,000 purse. She finished a remarkable 43rd.