Attention Deficit

The current best female golfer in the world walks the fairways of the LPGA Tour in relative solitude. In these times of fan frenzy and media overkill, Lorena Ochoa is the queen of the overlooked.

Her golf is spectacular, her press clippings sparse. She is the anti-Terrell Owens. She seeks no spotlights, and few find her.

“I am 100% happy like this,” she says. “I don’t like that much attention on myself.”

She ranks second in the world, behind Annika Sorenstam, in a rating formula that is new and still being refined. In just about everything else, she is No. 1.

Going into this weekend’s Samsung tournament at Bighorn in Palm Desert, she led in money won, scoring average and greens hit in regulation. Her $2,124,122 makes her only the second LPGA player to have topped $2 million in a season. Sorenstam has done it five times.

Ochoa has won four times this year, finished second five times and, perhaps most impressive, has finished in the top five in 15 of her 21 starts.

Sadly, all that and the mention of her name will get you a blank stare.

Ochoa, two shots off the lead after two rounds in the Samsung, is 24 and began playing golf in her hometown of Guadalajara when she was 5. By 6, she was playing local tournaments, by 7 national events and by 8 international events. At 19, she was a star at the University of Arizona, where she won 10 events in two seasons, eight of them consecutively. And by 21, she was a pro on the LPGA Tour, where it has taken all of three years for her to challenge Sorenstam as the best.

Her success is fascinating beyond the statistics and the speed with which it has been achieved.

There are six golf courses in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city. To play at all, you have to be a member at one of them, and Ochoa’s family is.

She does not come from huge wealth, although she is generating that herself now. Her father owns land, her mother is an artist and sculptor. She has two brothers and a sister.

“We weren’t rich,” she says. “Just normal.”

No one in her family pushed her to play. She just started, liked it, got help and advice from the local club pro and had the guts to leave home for Arizona, even though she spoke little English.

“The first year was hard,” she says.

Her English, while good now, has yet to catch up to her game. But she has nicely managed a quiet assimilation, her way, into mainstream American sports.

This week, at a sponsor’s dinner before the Samsung event, held in a plush restaurant overlooking the lights of the desert and its accompanying affluence, Ochoa mingled easily and comfortably.

On the highways and streets in the area, the billboards promoting this event featured Sorenstam (understandable as defending champion) and wild-card entry Michelle Wie (not as easily understandable). Ochoa, asked about that, says she has no objections.

“They are great players,” she says.

In the gathering are some of the young stars around whom the tour is building an unspoken campaign that could be labeled: “We Have Many Attractive Young Women Who Also Play Great Golf and We Hope You Buy Tickets for Either Reason.”

At the party, several dress the part. Ochoa resists.

She has her black hair pulled back and wears dark slacks, a pink sweater and heels about four inches lower than some of her fellow players.

When asked whether she sometimes feels out of the mainstream of LPGA hype, she says she understands.

“They are Americans, and this is an American tour,” she says.

Last week, the American tour was in Mexico and, at least there, the spotlight found Ochoa.

The event, in Morelia, was her fourth try at winning in her home country, and when she did so, by five shots, she got a taste of what her life could become if she keeps playing this way.

Carolyn Bivens, LPGA commissioner, recognizes how much Morelia meant to Ochoa.

“I don’t think her feet have touched the ground yet,” she says.

Ochoa has yet to win an LPGA major. She says that if that doesn’t happen, Morelia will suffice for her career.

“On the 18th hole, when I got the ball on the green in regulation and I had a five-shot lead, I don’t think I’ve ever felt better,” she says.

“The whole tournament was crazy, like a circus. People make it like a picnic. They don’t know golf. They know soccer. In the end, it didn’t get as wild as I thought it might. It was just so nice to win for them, for my country.”

She always celebrates her roots. At a tournament in March in Phoenix, she gathered all the groundskeepers, most of them Spanish-speaking, and took them out to breakfast.

At Morelia, she walked the last 120 yards surrounded by Mexican fans, who swarmed around her. Afterward, she signed autographs, did interviews, greeted friends and finally drove three hours in the late evening to her home in Guadalajara.

A day later, she was back in the United States, preparing for the Samsung event and resuming the life of anonymous stardom.