LPGA in search of a larger audience

You don't know whether to feel happy for her, or sad.

Over the weekend, Annika Sorenstam put an exclamation point on the grandest stretch of golf the women's tour has seen in more than two decades, and it generated about as much buzz as Tiger Woods' latest commercial.

The problem is hardly her game. Sorenstam came from 10 strokes back to win The Office Depot tournament in Los Angeles, completing the biggest turnaround in LPGA history and tying another record with her fourth win in a row.

Yet her accomplishment failed to steal the golf headlines Saturday — those belonged to the men playing the WorldCom Classic — and it wasn't even close to the biggest story in women's sports, either. That was confirmed by the crowd of 34,148 that gathered at RFK Stadium for the inaugural game of the Women's United Soccer Association.

To get a sense of what Sorenstam and the LPGA, with its limited resources, are up against, consider: The Office Depot event was shortened to three days because the host course, Wilshire Country Club, was not about to cancel its Easter egg hunt. At one point during Thursday's opening round, maintenance workers started mowing one of the greens while some golfers were still playing. And it wasn't until Saturday that enough volunteers could be rustled up to provide standard-bearers for each group of players.

Not that anyone noticed. There are more people willing to get in the way of one of Woods' errant drives at a PGA event than could be found encircling most any green at The Office Depot. But if Sorenstam was discouraged by any of it, she didn't let on.

``It's got be destiny,'' she said. ``I mean, for anyone to come from 10 shots down to win, and to think it was me, it's unbelievable.''

Sorenstam shot 66 in the final round and needed a collapse by veteran Pat Hurst and a playoff to shake eventual runner-up Mi Hyun Kim. But the unbelievable part is that Saturday was probably not her best day during this sublime run of golf.

A month ago, she shot 59 on the way to her second straight win, at the Standard Register Ping in Phoenix. The week after that, Sorenstam hit 35 of 36 greens over the weekend to win the Nabisco Championship, her third consecutive win and her first major since 1996. More unbelievable, perhaps, is that all three accomplishments barely registered a murmur.

The round of 59, a score equaled only three times in PGA history, was quickly nudged toward the bottom of the sports pages by Woods' first victory of the season at Bay Hill. The Nabisco championship, over one of the best leaderboards assembled by the LPGA in years, was trumped just as quickly by Woods' second straight win at The Players Championship.

The women's tour has become accustomed to playing a distant second fiddle to Woods. His play has overshadowed similarly spectacular runs by LPGA star Karrie Webb both in 1996 and last year, as well as any number of impressive wins by other women on the tour. But Woods was off this weekend — either fishing, polishing his trophies or cleaning out the garage — and Sorenstam's remarkable achievements are still begging for respect.

She's won four times in six starts and finished second in the other two. She is now pointing toward next week's Longs Drugs Challenge in Sacramento, Calif., a tournament where Sorenstam has finished first once and third two times. A win there would equal the five in a row recorded by Nancy Lopez in 1978, a magical season that captured the sporting public's imagination like none that the LPGA has rolled out since.

Lopez was a 21-year-old rookie with a father who was both caddie and chaperone, a Mexican-American made up of equal parts carbon steel and charm. She engaged the galleries with her personality and scared the daylights out of competitors with her golf. She won three straight tournaments her first year, skipped a week, then won two more.

Lopez won nine times by season's end, building an audience and becoming the only player to win the LPGA player of the year, rookie of the year and Vare Trophy for lowest scoring average. It was Tigermania before Tiger, the crush of media and fans that promised to take the game to another level.

``Nancy had that fire to her and that great smile,'' former golfing great and current broadcaster Judy Rankin recalled some 20 years later. ``I think it changed women's golf for good.''

In this sense, perhaps: It showed a whole generation of young girls what was possible. Sorenstam and Webb and Se Ri Pak, all stellar players and 30 or younger, may yet become Lopez' equal at golf. It may not seem fair, but unless they become her equal at charm, their successes will continue in search of a larger audience.

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