Can women’s golf gain from this?
If Annika Sorenstam wants to know, I would be more comfortable watching the Colonial golf tournament in Texas next month if she were not playing in it.
It’s a wussy thing for me to say. I know. I feel the same way when I watch a high school senior heading toward the podium to deliver the valediction in front of all his or her classmates and their families. The mix of pressure, excitement, scrutiny and expectation is enough to make me nauseous, even if I don’t know the kid.
When she tees off at the Colonial, Sorenstam will be the first woman since Babe Zaharias in 1945 to play a PGA Tour event. The young Swede is the best female golfer in the world. She won 19 tournaments in the last two years, setting a variety of LPGA scoring and earning records. She wants to challenge herself against the men.
But some of her colleagues say Sorenstam’s performance can only hurt the LPGA. If she plays well, people will think she’s too good for the lowly LPGA. If she plays poorly, they will think the rest of the LPGA golfers must really stink if she’s the best of the lot.
“We have more to lose as an organization than Annika has to gain as an individual,” LPGA golfer Angela Stanford wrote in Sports Illustrated recently.
I understand Stanford’s point of view. I have argued it myself. I am bothered when female athletes are measured against men. It’s like measuring a bantamweight against a heavyweight in boxing. It is a pointless exercise. Men and women are built differently. So in physical competitions, women are at a disadvantage. No one denigrates male athletes in lower weight classes in boxing or wrestling because they can’t compete against their larger and stronger counterparts. They are appreciated for being the best in their class.
Yet every few years the men versus women debate bubbles to the surface. No matter how indomitable Martina Navratilova was on the women’s tennis tour, people said she wouldn’t crack the top 50 on the men’s tour. Critics say the Women’s National Basketball Association all-stars couldn’t beat a decent college men’s team. And so on.
Now Sorenstam has opened the door again for comparisons in which women will, in the eyes of many, always come up short.
Yet as nervous as I am for Sorenstam — the television cameras will be pitiless in scrutinizing her every step and misstep — I imagine the decision to take this risk came not from righteousness but from that insatiable place that churns inside every great athlete. It pushes them to test the outermost limits of their bodies, skill, intuition, improvisation. Great athletes want to know what they are capable of.
In preparation for the Colonial, Sorenstam has been turning her body into a muscle machine to add power and thus distance to her drives. Though she has insisted that playing against the men is a personal challenge and not a statement about the LPGA, her quest could end up transforming women’s golf. Her example could raise the level of athleticism among women golfers, just as Navratilova raised the level of power and athleticism in women’s tennis (now pushed higher by the remarkable Williams sisters).
“It’s a risk for Sorenstam,” says Anne Cribbs, a former Olympic swimmer who founded the women’s American Basketball League and headed up San Francisco’s recent bid for the Olympics. “But athletes take risks. If this is the way she sets her personal standard of excellence, then she should do it.”
Selfishly, I still wish Sorenstam were not playing in the Colonial. It sends the message that the women’s tour is the minor leagues, that women must measure themselves against men to find legitimacy. But in the end, Sorenstam is an athlete. She wants what every driven athlete, male or female, wants — to say, “I’m here. I made it. I did it.”
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to her e-mail at [email protected].)