Golf’s Still Main Course

The best female golfer in the world is standing at a grill, on a black rubber mat, a squadron of pots and pans flying in formation on hooks above her head.

Annika Sorenstam feels very much at home as she conducts a tour of the kitchen at the Lake Nona resort, where her thoughts are far removed from her tightly wound world of professional golf.

In the kitchen, it’s not Pak or Webb or Inkster on her mind.

It’s crab cakes, stuffed mushrooms and tiramisu.

That’s why chef Gary Hoffman handed her 60 fillets to sear for a recent evening meal in the club’s dining room, which she did with a smile, even if she burned herself slightly. Sorenstam also knows how to carve a flower out of a wedge of melon, the easiest way to peel potatoes and how to whip up rice pilaf.

The best female golfer in the world is getting pretty darned good at this volunteer cooking business.

Here is a story she enjoys telling. One evening at dinner, a club member enjoyed his meal.

“He said ‘Bring out the chef,’ ” Sorenstam said. “So Gary came out and the member said, ‘No, not that chef, the other one.’ So I came out.”

Hail to the chef?

Three days a week for six weeks in the off-season, from noon until 8 at night and often 9, Sorenstam worked a shift in the kitchen at the fashionable resort where she lives. She didn’t do it because she was hungry or had lost a bet. She did it because she loves cooking, she’s hooked on “The Food Network” and she fantasizes about a post-golf career in the restaurant business.

“I’ve heard that owning a restaurant is tough,” she said. “But I think if you have a passion for it, you do it because you enjoy it. I think I would like to go to school and learn more. This is the greatest lesson. This is like school.

“But somebody said you can only be good at one thing in your life, so I don’t know. I do know I love it.”

If she’s half as good a chef as she is a golfer, they’re going to have to start naming dishes after her, so help me Emeril.

This weekend, Sorenstam has a task that promises to be even more difficult than searing five dozen steaks without burning her thumbs. When she tees it up today in Phoenix for the first time this year on the LPGA Tour, Sorenstam has to try to beat what she did last year.

It won’t be easy. Maybe it won’t even be possible, but never underestimate what this 32-year-old transplanted Swede is capable of cooking up.

Last year, she won 11 tournaments on the LPGA Tour and two more, in Australia and Sweden, for a total of 13 worldwide. No one had won that many since Mickey Wright in 1963. She won her fifth LPGA money title, second only to Kathy Whitworth’s eight, won her fifth player-of-the-year award and fifth Vare Trophy for the lowest scoring average. In fact, Sorenstam’s 68.70 average shattered her LPGA record of 69.42 by more than half a stroke.

She played 23 LPGA tournaments and won 11, which means she won 48% percent of them. She won six of her first 12 and five of her last eight.

Sorenstam finished in 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 Hall of Fame and complete her impeccable credentials.

Here’s one more: With 27 points -- based on victories, major titles and awards -- needed to qualify for the Hall, she now has 56, which means she has qualified twice.

As for Karrie Webb and Se Ri Pak and Juli Inkster and the rest of the top players the LPGA puts on the courses each week, they should be relieved there’s only one Annika Sorenstam.

Now out of the kitchen, her only question isn’t whether she can top last year, but whether she can become an even better player. She thinks she can.

“I think last year was a career year, definitely,” Sorenstam said. “I felt I was just starting to peak in certain areas. I knew I could do better, but sometimes people measure in victories whether it’s a better year. I say, if I’m becoming a better player, then it’s a better year.

“I can’t control Se Ri Pak, I can’t control Karrie Webb, how they play, but if I play better, then I’m doing what I’m supposed to do.”

What happened last year was magical, fantastic, but hardly unrealistic, although Sorenstam says she felt herself transforming into something she never expected on the course.

“I wasn’t afraid to hit the shots when I needed to,” she said.

That’s the simple explanation.

“When I stand on the tee, I don’t see a bunker; I don’t see a hazard,” she said. “I see a flag and then ‘boom!’ It’s almost like, ‘Don’t think too much, just hit.’ I was aggressive and positive in my game. It was an enjoyment. It wasn’t grinding.”

Her agent, Mark Steinberg of IMG, says he simply followed the results and measured her wake.

“I mean, 13 wins,” he said. “She’s just such a completely dominant player. And with her style. I wouldn’t characterize Annika’s play as ‘flashes of brilliance.’ More like ‘consistent thumping.’ ”

Chances are there won’t be many breaks in the thumping. To that end, Sorenstam pushes herself hard in her training regimen. She worked five days a week with her fitness guru at Lake Nona, Kia Fusser, who had Sorenstam bench-pressing 150 pounds and squat-lifting 300. After a week with Fusser, Sorenstam says, she increased her driving distance eight yards.

The range at Lake Nona is often crowded with such people as Lou Holtz, Emilee Klein, Ernie Els, Sergio Garcia, Retief Goosen, Frank Nobilo, Jim Courier and Eddie Cheever, who own homes here. If she’s not on the range, you can probably find Sorenstam in the training room.

She doesn’t just lift weights, she also works on quickness and explosiveness, tossing the medicine ball. She says she thinks about how much better she might have played the last nine years if she had trained before.

“She is a perfect client,” Fusser says. “She works. She is not easy to break.”

Having talent alone is insufficient, says Sorenstam, because it is only the first of three steps to success. Practice and fitness round out the trio.

After her 2001 campaign, Sorenstam said, she had a conversation with Fusser.

“I said, ‘Last year I won eight tournaments. If I don’t win more than eight, you’re kind of fired.’ I was kidding him. He said ‘How am I going to do that?’ ”

They worked it out. As for physical training, Sorenstam swears by it and points to Tiger Woods as a source of inspiration.

“He was so powerful, so dominating and one of the reasons is he was so fit. I thought, ‘Here’s my chance.’ If you look at our tour, nobody really works out. Well, there’s more now, but two years ago, there were maybe five. So here was my chance. The door was open.

“I look at Tiger as a role model. Why pave the way when it’s already paved? I admire the guy a lot. I watch him play. It’s exciting. So I can’t blame people for giving him all the attention.”

Being in better physical condition improved her stamina last year, Sorenstam says, when she won at Portland, Ore., for her 10th victory and decided to shoot for Wright’s record. Then she won the Samsung, didn’t play well in Alabama and then left for two tournaments in Japan. Jet lag doesn’t bother her anymore, so that wasn’t a problem, but she lost her first-round match in the Cisco match-play event and worried that she had overscheduled herself in pursuit of Wright’s record.

“I looked like a train wreck,” she said.

It was a temporary derailment. Sorenstam was quickly back on track, winning the Mizuno Classic and then the ADT Championship to close out a season like no other.

And now, another one is beginning and Sorenstam is running out of time to reflect on what it all meant to her. She will admit that she has come a long way from Stockholm, even from Tucson, which is where she went at 20 to attend the University of Arizona. If she was shy and introverted then, she isn’t anymore. In fact, she says, she’s more Americanized every day while still keeping what’s dear to her about her native Sweden in her heart.

“I’m kind of in between,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Am I in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?’ ”

It would be fitting for Sorenstam, whose favorite movie is “Titanic.” She stays afloat quite nicely and has a balance in her life she says she is just now discovering. Her parents, Tom and Gunilla, live in Sweden, but they are also members at Lake Nona and visit regularly. Henri Reiss, Sorenstam’s longtime coach, visits eight times a year for about a week each.

She and her husband, David Esch, own homes at Lake Nona as well as Incline Village in Nevada, but they’re selling another house at Bighorn in Palm Desert. Esch handles Sorenstam’s travel arrangements and is a constant companion on the road during tournaments. At home, he plays guitar for Sorenstam and their cats, Molly and Nelson.

Sorenstam cranks up her IBM ThinkPad when she has time and surfs for news from Sweden, checks the stock market and enters her statistics, something she has been doing since 1987. Her father used to work for IBM and sent her to computer classes to learn to write programs when she was 10, but Sorenstam says she’s not on the computer as often as people think.

“It’s not like I’m Bill Gates,” she said.

She wouldn’t mind being Wolfgang Puck, though. The famous chef recently sent her a gift that Sorenstam treasures -- a complete set of pots and pans and utensils and knives. Just add one Swedish golfer/would-be chef and shove it in the oven.

“Now, I have no excuse,” she said.

Eric Elaine, the club manager at Lake Nona, says Sorenstam is a natural in the kitchen.

“From the beginning, she didn’t want to be babied or pampered,” Elaine said. “Of course, I had to pay her $13,000 an hour.”

Actually, Sorenstam worked for nothing. The real play-for-pay begins today at Moon Valley Country Club, then continues next week at the Kraft Nabisco Championship at Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage. In May, Sorenstam takes on a new challenge when she plays with the male pros at the Colonial tournament on the PGA Tour. She played a practice round Sunday at Colonial Country Club, said she had a couple of birdies but didn’t keep score.

She’d also played with Woods the day before in a practice round at nearby Isleworth. She shot over par, Woods guessed, although no one kept score. Woods said he and pitcher John Smoltz of the Atlanta Braves outplayed Sorenstam from the back tees at Isleworth, which is 7,179 yards. Colonial, a par 70, measures 7,080 yards.

On the LPGA Tour this year, she figures to add to her 42 victories and $11.2 million in prize money and she will remember the story her father reminded her of recently, about a question she asked as a child.

“I asked him how much money I needed to be able to live the rest of my life,” Sorenstam said. “He said I needed a million dollars. I had no idea why I asked that question and I don’t even know why I even thought about that. When he brought it up, I said, ‘I have more than a million, am I all right?’ ”

Presumably so. When the year is over and they finish counting all her victories, Sorenstam can get back in the kitchen. But first, maybe she should remember that she just qualified for the Hall of Fame.

Just the thought of it turns her insides the texture of tiramisu. Even at 32, she says, mere talk of the Hall of Fame is unreal.

“I think of me at home, growing up, when I’m on the putting green. There’s a picture of me. I’m standing there and it’s raining. We had golf shoes that were actually rain boots with little spikes. I can see myself in this photograph. It’s so not like today. I’m standing there putting. It’s so strange. To see me now going into the Hall of Fame and I see myself standing there putting on a rainy day.”

Somebody should tell her. It’s simply an early photograph in a Hall of Fame career. Picture that.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Sorenstam Year by Year on LPGA Tour

Annika Sorenstam’s results (* LPGA Tour record)

*--* Year Events CM 1 2 3 Top 10 Best Money Rank SA 1992 1 1 0 0 0 0 T64 N/A N/A 77.00 1993 3 3 0 0 0 2 4 $47,319 N/A 71.09 1994 18 14 0 1 0 3 T2 $127,451 39 71.90 1995 19 19 3 3 1 12 1 $666,533 1 71.00 1996 20 20 3 2 1 14 1 $808,311 3 70.47 1997 22 20 6 5 3 16 1 $1,236,789 1 70.04 1998 21 21 4 4 2 17 1 $1,092,748 1 69.99 1999 22 21 2 4 3 12 1 $863,816 4 70.40 2000 22 22 5 2 4 15 1 $1,404,948 2 70.47 2001 26 26 8 6 1 20 1 $2,105,868 1 69.42 2002 23 22 11 3 3 20 1 $2,863,904* 1 68.70*

*--*

CM-Cuts made; SA-Score average

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 (5), Rolex rookie of the year (1). 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 189 of 197 events, including 42 wins, 30 seconds, 18 thirds, and 131 top 10s

*

Sorenstam in 2002

2002 tour statistics for Annika Sorenstam including LPGA rank (* Number in 76 rounds):

*--* Category Stat Rank Rounds under par *60 1 Rounds in the 60s *45 1 Birdies 341 3 Eagles 10 3 Greens in regulation 79.7% 1 Driving accuracy 80.3% 5 Sand saves 38.8% 56 Putting average 29.66 39 Driving average 265.6 4 Victories 11 1 Score average 68.7 1 Earnings $2.86M 1

*--*

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.