It Might Be Golf’s New Hot Spot

When you think of Sweden, you think of--what? Penguins?

Well, maybe not penguins. Polar bears? Naw. Reindeer, maybe. Or is that Finland?

Anyway, it’s this funny little country up on the roof of the world. Not a land so much as an ice floe.

Summer is one weekend in July. The sun never sets on the British Empire, but it never rises on the Swedish Empire.

It’s a great place to hang meat. Nights in the north last months. When you say you’ll get up “at the crack of dawn,” you mean April 1.

It’s not the Arctic, but you can see it from there.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, How do you get great athletes out of that Godforsaken freezer locker? You do, you know.

The Swedes are the salt of the earth. Slow to anger, slow to pass judgment. They get along with each other--and everyone else. If you’ve got a Swede for a neighbor, you can sleep nights. Even the Swede who invented dynamite spent the rest of his life passing out peace prizes to make up for it.

Still, what’s this got to do with running, jumping, throwing, putting? The first thing you have to do with a Swedish athlete is thaw him or her out. Athletes come from the sun countries of the world--from Florida, California, Australia, not the deep freeze. Swedes belong on skis, not spikes. Zero temperatures are not good for loosening muscles. The weather turns the race so white you can read through them, see what they had for breakfast.

So, what’s with this influx of Svenska players on the international athletic scene? We got used, it seemed, to the occasional high jump silver medalist or the quondam distance runner in the Olympics, but when you talked of Swedish champions, you pretty much meant cross-country skiing. And as Dan Jenkins said, that’s not a sport to Scandinavians, that’s the way they go to the 7-Eleven for coffee.

Oh, we’ve had Swedes in the culture before. Garbo, nee Greta Gustaffson, might have been the biggest movie star ever. Ingemar Johansson was the heavyweight champion of the world.

But the Swedes didn’t make their presence felt in the sports world till the great tennists came down brushing the icicles from their eyebrows to take over the game. Bjorn Borg, Stefan Edberg, Mats Wilander, Mikael Pernfors, Magnus Larsson.

But tennis is a game you can play indoors in a blizzard. Nothing prepared the sports world for the Swedish invasion of golf. I mean, how do you learn golf hitting it out of a snowdrift? What’s the stimp-meter speed on ice? How do you play golf in the dark?

Perhaps you noticed a character with his cap brim turned up at the British Open last year. He should have won it. A couple of duffer mistakes handed the tournament over to Nick Price at the last hole and Jesper Parnevik was just a Swedish meatball. But Parnevik showed he was a player. So did his countryman, Anders Forsbrand.

But it is the women’s tour that has been most hospitable to the lutefisk-and-lingonberries set. In 1988, Liselotte Neumann came over here from her native Finspang to win the (no less) U.S. Women’s Open. Two years ago, Helen Alfredsson, the pride of Goteborg, won the Nabisco Dinah Shore, the women’s “major” most often compared to the men’s Masters in prestige and degree of difficulty.

This year, they are joined by Annika Sorenstam, another player who hopes to make women’s golf more of a smorgasbord.

Like Neumann and Alfredsson in their first year, Annika was LPGA rookie of the year last year. She plays a rather daring game (four woods, no one-, two-, three-irons). She goes for the pin not just the green around it.

But, mostly, she is tired of the notion Swedish golfers come walking out of snowdrifts and have to learn to play with fur mittens on courses where the golf cart is a toboggan and you can walk out on the water hazard and play the shot.

“You have to understand, in the southern part of the country, we do not get snow. If we do, it goes away almost immediately. It is in the north part of the country where the conditions are extreme. We can play golf seven months a year. Some play it all year.

“There are over 350 golf courses in Sweden and 400,000 golfers. Does that sound like there are two weeks a year?”

In a country of 8 1/2 million, she feels, that makes the game practically a national passion. “Some of the golf courses are 60 years old,” she points out.

Annika played tennis till she was 16 but remained a weekend golfer all that time. “When Liselotte won the American Open, I was intrigued. I switched over to golf,” she explains.

Is she glad? “Oh, yes, I love it!” she says. “I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”

Neither could the game. She was an instant success. She made the Swedish national team. She won the world amateur title. It was on a tennis tour to Japan that the University of Arizona coach, Kim Haddow, offered her a scholarship. She promptly won the NCAA title and was college player of the year. She beat a lot of women who never had to hit a snowball in their lives. Sponsors came calling. The Swedish daily newspaper, the Dagbladet, and the Arizona Wigwam resort.

As Swedish as herring, Annika, 24, is one of the youngsters to watch at the Nabisco Dinah Shore at Mission Hills this week.

If she wins, tennis mothers may have to re-think sending their young hopefuls to tennis academies in Tampa or Tempe. Stockholm must have everything you need.