Streak Could Use Six Appeal

When Annika Sorenstam decided two years ago that she wanted to test her game against the best players in the world -- even though she was well aware that Vijay Singh wouldn’t show up -- she entered the Colonial tournament on the PGA Tour.

It’s hard to explain just how that experiment turned out. True, Sorenstam missed the cut, but she also won the battle, saying all the right things and reaffirming later that her real place was as a member of the LPGA Tour.

As usual, there was no consensus on the Sorenstam issue among the male pros, probably because no Hall of Fame LPGA player at the height of her career had ever had the nerve to fling her visor into the ring at the men’s club.

Some hoped she would fail, others thought she took up a spot a PGA Tour pro should rightfully have, a few wished she would get locked in the clubhouse and others were squarely in her corner.

The whole week was media frenzy. They could have assigned two reporters to every player in the field and still had some left over, but that was not the story that week. As it turned out, most everyone there was following Sorenstam’s gender-bending foray into the world of men’s professional golf.

Coverage was not just tee to green, but clubhouse to range, parking lot to clubhouse and wall to wall.

Opinions varied on whether Sorenstam’s appearance at Colonial was a success, but in retrospect, her week at Colonial eventually showed up in the general accounting as something good for golf, the reasoning being that anything that raised the public’s awareness about golf wasn’t bad.

Soon after, LPGA Commissioner Ty Votaw took a slightly different approach. While acknowledging Sorenstam’s grit, Votaw said he could only sit back and wait for the day when Sorenstam’s accomplishments on her own tour would approach the same level of attention that she received for playing one tournament on the PGA Tour.

Well, we’re still waiting, but this time, it has nothing to do with Colonial.

In two weeks, Sorenstam will play the Michelob Ultra Open at Kingsmill, in Williamsburg, Va., where she has a chance to win a record sixth consecutive LPGA tournament.

Hey, anybody want to watch celebrity poker?

It’s not really fair. Last month in the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the LPGA’s first major of the year, Sorenstam ran off with her fifth consecutive victory.

It was as impressive a performance as Sorenstam has produced -- an eight-shot victory, a 15-under-par total, 10 under for the weekend, outdriving her nearest competitor, Rosie Jones, by an average of 40 yards and hitting 17 of 18 greens in the closing round.

Then she said she felt as if she was getting close to hitting her peak.

Take a peek at her statistics. Since the start of 2004, Sorenstam has played 21 times and won 11, besides finishing second four times. In her five-tournament streak, she’s a combined 68 under par. Going further back, Sorenstam has won seven of her last nine tournaments.

At Kingsmill, a sixth consecutive victory would put Sorenstam into the record books by herself -- five in a row equals the mark Nancy Lopez set in 1978.

At Kingsmill, a sixth consecutive victory would give Sorenstam a run of publicity like she’s never seen. Well, that’s not going to happen, is it?

No matter, Sorenstam will always have Colonial, which isn’t bad, but it does show that Votaw had it right.

Sorenstam’s rousing victory at Mission Hills, no matter how impressive, was only one of several sports stories in the running for major news that weekend, including the regional finals of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and the PGA Tour’s Players Championship. It also indicates the LPGA has a way to go before emerging from its position as a niche sport.

Plus, there really hasn’t been any follow-up. Whatever momentum in news value Sorenstam forced, it didn’t take long to dissipate. Kingsmill will be her first tournament since her last putt fell into the hole at Mission Hills on March 27.

But having a shot at six in a row, that should be huge.

It certainly was for Tiger Woods, who was covered like indoor carpeting by the media as he bagged six in a row from the NEC Invitational in August 1999 through the AT&T; Pebble Beach National Pro-Am in February 2000. That streak matched Ben Hogan’s mark from 1948, second only to Byron Nelson’s 11 in a row in 1945.

The fact is that in this brand of streak business, no one is in front of Sorenstam, who has an appointment with the history books, if not a date with the headlines.