New Comfort Levels Lpga Star Sorenstam Has Come To Grips With Her Short Game, Golf Fame

The smile comes a little quicker now, the laughter flows a little easier and the shots are noticeably bolder.

A year ago, Annika Sorenstam was a little uncomfortable with fame. This week, she goes after an unprecedented third consecutive U.S. Women’s Open title at Pumpkin Ridge near Portland, Ore., with the confidence of a champion at the peak of her game.

If there were any weaknesses when Sorenstam ran away with the U.S. Open by six strokes at Pine Needles in North Carolina last year, they are gone now.

“I used to be afraid of chipping and putting,” she said. “But I worked on that a lot in the last year. Now I feel really comfortable. If I miss the green, I know I can make it up-and-down.”

Sorenstam has raised her game to the level where a bad day at work means a par round. That ability to shoot a good score without your best game is what separates the great players from the good players.

“Her short game is so much improved,” her caddie Colin Cann said. “Now she has no weaknesses.”

Sorenstam displayed that at the Shoprite Classic two weeks ago. She finished second when Michelle McGann blew past her with a 64 on Sunday. But her final-round 71 could easily have been a 75 or higher.

“I was proud of some of the pars I made out there,” Sorenstam said after making five scrambling par saves, the most sensational coming after she played a shot left-handed out of the trees on the fifth hole.

“I didn’t have my best game and I was still able to shoot a 71,” she said. “A year ago that would have been a 75.”

Adding a deadly up-and-down game to the accuracy she displayed in hitting 51 of 56 fairways in last year’s Open has made Sorenstam a contender virtually every time she’s played this year.

She has won four times in 13 tournaments and has finished in the top three nine times.

Since her breakthrough victory at the 1995 U.S. Open, Sorenstam has won 10 of her last 40 LPGA events - a better percentage even than Babe Zaharias, who won 31 of the 128 LPGA events she played from 1948-55.

The other big change in Sorenstam - and a huge reason why she might succeed where five other women have failed and win a third consecutive U.S. Open - is how comfortable she has grown with her success.

When Sorenstam won the 1995 U.S. Open at age 24, she was so drained by the attention that she didn’t play again for a month.

“I had to take time off,” she explained. “I had never experienced everything that came after the Women’s Open. All the attention and phone calls. It got to be too much. It made me sick, emotionally drained.”

That attitude carried into 1996 and Sorenstam didn’t play in her first event until the third week of March, skipping even the Tournament of Champions.

“I was so beat from last year,” she said at the time. “I felt like I needed a break.”

She also got another break when Karrie Webb dominated the tour and became the first woman to win $1 million in a season.

“It’s great to see that there are other players out there,” Sorenstam said. “That gives me a break a little bit.”

Now, Sorenstam seems willing to embrace the distractions that come with success. She wants to do whatever it takes to win.

“She is much more comfortable with the attention she is getting,” Cann, her caddie, said.

That is as much a factor in sustaining greatness as performance on the golf course.

“It’s how they deal with the pressure of being pulled at,” Nancy Lopez said. “Some people aren’t comfortable winning. I loved it. I loved the attention.”

Sorenstam may never love it, but she has learned to live with it.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: A LOOK AHEAD Annika Sorenstam will put her golfing talents on display at the Spokane Country Club on Monday, Sept. 15, when she joins PGA Tour standouts Tom Lehman and Peter Jacobsen and Senior PGA Tour professional Tom Weiskopf in the Junior League of Spokane’s 1997 Golf Exhibition. Tickets are on sale at all Hamer’s clothing store outlets in the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene area. Ticket prices are $155 for the 18-hole exhibition and golf clinic the visiting pros will stage, and $75 for the exhibition only.