Annika Sorenstam is never satisfied, always pushing to be better. It's an unquenchable thirst, a mind-set that separates her from her LPGA peers and has propelled her to the PGA Tour stage at Colonial.
By BOB HARIG
Published May 18, 2003
The notion is seemingly preposterous, if not downright hilarious. But Annika Sorenstam is not laughing about an idea that is more extreme than competing against men in a professional golf tournament.
She is out to birdie every hole.
Perhaps not this coming week at venerable Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, where Sorenstam will make history by playing in the PGA Tour's Bank of America Colonial tournament. Maybe not this year in an event on the LPGA Tour, the women's circuit she has dominated for the past two seasons.
But sometime, somewhere, 18 holes, 18 birdies.
And that goal, as unreachable as it may seem, goes a long way toward explaining Sorenstam's motivation for competing against men. It is a nearly impossible challenge, but one she embraces without fear.
"It's a no-limits kind of thinking," said Stina Sternberg, who grew up in Sorenstam's native Sweden and is the editor of Golf for Women magazine. "We put limits on ourselves when it comes to golf through the par system and the handicap system.
"But if you think you can birdie every hole, you should think that 54 is definitely doable. Annika has very much lived by that in the sense that she is never, ever satisfied by what she is doing. She has to always put up new goals for herself. Those goals have to be high and bigger every time. It's not just a gimmick. She really, truly believes she can reach these new goals."
And that, in essence, is why Sorenstam accepted an invitation to play at the Colonial, becoming the first woman since Babe Didrikson Zaharias in 1945 to compete in a PGA Tour event.
Last year, Sorenstam, 32, won 11 tournaments on the LPGA Tour and two others, in Australia and Sweden, for a total of 13 worldwide. No LPGA player had won that many since Mickey Wright in 1963. Sorenstam finished among the top 10 in 20 of her 23 tournaments.
By the end of this year she will have finished 10 years on tour and fulfilled the last requirement to satisfy the LPGA Tour's Hall of Fame and complete her impeccable credentials.
And consider this: With 27 points needed to qualify for the Hall - based on victories, major titles and awards - Sorenstam has 57, which means she has qualified ... twice.
No wonder she wants to test herself against the men.
"I want to play under very tough conditions and learn something about myself," Sorenstam said.
The genesis for Sorenstam's invitation to the Colonial came when Suzy Whaley, a Connecticut teaching pro, qualified last year for this summer's Greater Hartford Open by winning a PGA of America section event - although she played from the forward tees.
At a golf outing in January, Sorenstam was asked about Whaley. Then came the questions about whether she would be interested in qualifying for a PGA Tour event. Sorenstam said, if invited, she'd accept "in a heartbeat."
Soon offers flowed in, and within a few weeks an invitation to the Colonial had been secured.
Sorenstam figures to have her hands full with a 7,080-yard, par-70 Colonial course that is some 600 yards longer than the ones she typically plays on the LPGA Tour. Last year at the Colonial, in order to make the 36-hole cut players had to shoot 143, 3 over par, or better.
It is a test Sorenstam relishes. When she won eight times on the LPGA Tour in 2001, nobody would have been surprised to see a letdown in 2002. Instead, Sorenstam sought to improve and went on to have one of the greatest years in golf history, winning the last two events of the year to cap her 11-victory season.
"I don't know where she finds the motivation to be pumped up that much every week," LPGA rival Karrie Webb said.
Sorenstam grew up in Bro, Sweden, a small town outside of Stockholm. She played volleyball, badminton and was a nationally ranked junior tennis player. She was such a good downhill skier that the coach of the national team tried to convince her family to move north so she could practice year-round.
Her parents, Tom and Gunilla, were avid golfers, but Annika didn't really take to the game until she was 16, when she realized that golf allowed her to practice on her own, without playing partners. At Bro-Balstra Golf Club she would hit balls for hours each day after school.
Sorenstam became a good player, but her shyness got in the way of success. She admitted throwing tournaments, preferring to finish second instead of giving an acceptance speech as the winner.
As a junior golfer in Sweden, Sorenstam was exposed to the 54 Vision - the idea of birdieing every hole - by Pia Nilsson, a former LPGA player and Swedish National golf coach, who honed the approach and used it with her players.
"We needed a goal, something for our girls to grab on to, so we just started creating this vision - we believe 54 is in you, it's there. Are you ready to go on the rise to see how close we can get to it? It broke away from the other paradigms we had. How do you need to practice? How do you need to plan? How fit do you need to be?
"It created a process I really like - creating excellence and daring to be as good as you can be. Annika caught on to it right away. She liked that way of thinking. Even today she has a knitted yellow headcover with a 54 on it."
During the winter, when it was impossible to play golf outdoors, Nilsson coached in the classroom. She taught juniors to visualize themselves making birdies on all 18 holes of their home clubs. She encouraged them to learn to love something about golf other than results, so there would not be frustration over poor scores.
"Annika learned to love the game itself, the challenges, the practice," Nilsson said. "She learned to love it independent of winning."
But there is more to her existence than golf. Sorenstam has come a long way from her shy, introverted days at the University of Arizona, where she arrived at age 20. She said she has become more Americanized while still holding on to what is dear to her about her native Sweden.
Sorenstam is a big music fan, and last year she took off to catch one of her favorites, Madonna, at a concert in Chicago. Her top pastime is cooking, and she does imitations of renown chef Wolfgang Puck on the Food Network.
Her parents still live in Sweden, but they also are members at Lake Nona Golf Club in Orlando, where Sorenstam lives with her husband, David Esch, and their two cats, Molly and Nelson. Henri Reiss, her longtime coach, visits eight times a year for about a week each.
Esch, who met Sorenstam while working as a manufacturer's representative for a golf company, handles Sorenstam's travel arrangements and sometimes caddies for his wife. "I live for golf, and luckily I am married to a guy who accepts that and supports me," Sorenstam said.
Those close to Sorenstam say she is different behind closed doors, that her stoic demeanor on the course yields to a person who enjoys life and a myriad of interests. Sorenstam hinted this year there may come a time in the not-too-distant future when she'll walk away from the game to start a family. After all, what more is there to achieve?
"She's a naturally shy person," Sternberg said. "But she's also a complete goofball in many ways. She's really a very funny person. She doesn't let people see that when she's playing tournaments.
"What sets her apart from the rest of the players on the LPGA Tour is her extreme ability to focus and concentrate on what she is doing. Nancy Lopez had the ability to do that and be smiling, waving, chatting with the crowd. Annika is not that way. But neither is somebody like Tiger Woods. She's caught a lot of bad press for not being more personable, but between rounds she's just really a humble person. She doesn't like attention. It's not because she's stuck up or cold. She's shy."
When Sorenstam won the fourth of her five LPGA player of the year awards in 2001, she wasn't satisfied. She saw how Woods' efforts in the gym had paid off, and she sought to strengthen herself and her game. Sorenstam and Esch hired Kai Fusser, a personal trainer who works at the Lake Nona YMCA. Once rail thin, Sorenstam has added bulk and can hit the ball 20 yards longer. She routinely hits 290-yard tee shots and averages about 275 yards.
"She has an absolute purpose," Fusser said. "We went after that. There was no veering off from her side, which was good for me. That's a good client to have. Whatever she does, she does with a purpose."
The gym time, Sorenstam said, is the reason she is playing at Colonial.
"If I hadn't won 13 last year, I wouldn't have gotten this chance," she said. "I'd never have tried it two years ago, but I believe I've taken my game to a different level. Two years ago I was hitting it 250, and I just wasn't strong enough."
Sorenstam said she is treating the Colonial as her "fifth major." She played a practice round on the course in March with former Colonial champion David Frost and has played the back tees at numerous courses in order to get a feel for the length and type of shots she will face. She even went to Isleworth in Orlando to play with Woods.
How she will do is a guess even Sorenstam is unwilling to make. After all, that's the point of the whole experience.
"I believe the more you play on tougher courses, the better you get," she said. "The challenges that I'm up for, and maybe just not the golf course, but everything around it, is a total different atmosphere, shocking the body. And I believe that the more you do that, the better I get at adjusting to different situations."
ANNIKA SORENSTAM
BORN: Oct. 9, 1970.
BIRTHPLACE: Stockholm, Sweden.
RESIDENCE: Orlando.
INTERESTS: Sports, cooking, music.
COLLEGE: University of Arizona.
AMATEUR CAREER: A member of Swedish national team from 1987 to 1992; in 1992, runner-up at U.S. women's Amateur and second lowest amateur at U.S. Women's Open; won seven collegiate titles at Arizona and was 1991 NCAA co-college player of the year (with Kelly Robbins); 1991 NCAA individual champion and runner-up the following year.
TURNED PRO: 1992.
LPGA VICTORIES: 43.
WORLDWIDE VICTORIES: 52.
MAJOR CHAMPIONSHIPS: 4.
CAREER-LOW ROUND: 59 (the lowest score in LPGA history and one of only four golfers - male or female - to shoot the score in a official event).
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS:
Won more LPGA tournaments than any other LPGA Tour player in the 1990s (18).
LPGA awards: Rolex player of the year, 5; Vare Trophy (lowest scoring average), 5; Rolex rookie of the year.
1994: Rolex rookie of the year. 1995: Rolex player of the year, Vare Trophy. 1996: Vare Trophy. 1997: Rolex player of the year. 1998: Rolex player of the year, Vare Trophy. 2001: Rolex player of the Year, Vare Trophy. 2002: Rolex Player of the Year, Vare Trophy. 2002: Rolex player of the year, Vare Trophy, Crowne Plaza Achievement Award.
Won four major championships: U.S. Women's Open in 1995 and 1996, and the Kraft Nabisco Championship in 2001 and 2002.
Made cut in 194 of 203 events, including 43 wins, 32 seconds, 19 thirds, and 136 top 10s.
Annika Sorenstam's 2002 season highlights
Won 11 titles, joining Mickey Wright as the only players to win 11 tournaments in one season (Wright won 11 times in 1964; she also won an LPGA-record 13 tournaments in 1963.) Sorenstam won two other worldwide events.
Shattered the scoring record with a 68.70 average, marking the first time an LPGA player has finished a season below 69.00.
Earned LPGA record $2,863,904, $1,141,623 more than second-place Se Ri Pak.
Who Will Be Paired With Annika?
Pairings for the first two rounds of a PGA Tour event are done randomly by a computer at tour headquarters. Sorenstam falls into the lowest level, Category 3, and can only be paired with other Category 3 players who have the least standing on the PGA Tour.
At present, there are eight players other than Sorenstam who are in the Colonial field and considered Category 3 players.
AARON BARBER: a PGA Tour rookie, Barber, 30, played the past five years on the Canadian Tour.
ROD CURL: the 1974 Colonial champion, Curl, 60, is no longer active on the PGA Tour.
JAMES McLEAN: a PGA Tour rookie, McLean, 24, is an Aussie who won the NCAA individual title at Minnesota in 1998.
AARON OBERHOLSER: a PGA Tour rookie, Oberholser, 28, won twice last year on the Nationwide Tour.
BRENDEN PAPPAS: a second-year PGA Tour player, Pappas, 33, a South African, has amassed more than $500,000 in earnings this year.
CARL PETTERSSON: a second-year PGA Tour player, Pettersson would be the perfect pairing. Like Sorenstam, he is from Sweden.
JOHN SENDEN: a second-year PGA Tour player, Senden, 32, is an Aussie who won the 1996 Indonesian PGA Championship.
DEAN WILSON: a PGA Tour rookie, Wilson, 33, has earned more than $400,000 this year.
Official pairings likely will be announced Tuesday.
