Let's start with the old business about Annika Sorenstam, before we get to the new business, which is all about her actually getting invited to join an all-men's club, this one the regular PGA Tour.
I wrote a column for this magazine a few months ago about the top-eighteen players of all time. Annika was not on the list. Neither were Mickey Wright or Kathy Whitworth or Nancy Lopez or even Gabrielle Reece, who could have enabled us to combine my list with a swimsuit issue. This upset a lot of people who wanted to know why there were no women on my list.
Here's why: No women who ever played could have beaten any of the men on my list. Well, that's not exactly correct. Maybe Annika could beat Arnold now.
And she might be able to beat Lee Trevino, although if it turned into a Riggs versus King deal, Trevino versus Annika from the red tees, made for TV, and you had to bet one way or another, my money would still probably be on Trevino.
This isn't about a lack of respect for women's golf, or women athletes. I respect both. I wrote a novel a few years ago about a dazzling female point guard making the NBA, and even though a lot of the book was done for laughs, the main character was designed to make readers stand up and cheer at the end. I grew up playing golf at Nashua Country Club in New Hampshire with the great Pat Bradley. She was the first one at our little club to crack the gender line, being invited to play with all us superior males in a late Sunday afternoon free-for-all called a "hatred." You probably have a different name for it at your club. Lots of foursomes, a skins game, a million side bets, good money on the line. Nobody wanted Pat to play at first. Then our pro, the late John Wirbal, the one who helped teach her the game, said let her in or maybe he'd start giving out tee times at four on Sunday. We let her in. She'd go out, even at fourteen years old, and hit fourteen greens and make putts, and it took about two weeks, and then everybody wanted her. She was good, she was cool about the whole thing and she also did something that was completely foreign to us, at least back in the late sixties:
She practiced.
And that was the last time Pat Bradley had to worry about measuring up against a bunch of guys. She went off to play the women's tour after that, became Nashua Country Club's gift to the tour, and we all rooted for her and watched her become an immortal. And she didn't have anything to prove to us.
"Guys worry about stuff that girls never worry about," she told me one time. "I wasn't trying to prove anything. I just wanted to play."
Pat Bradley didn't make my list, either, and she was my friend. She worked her side of the street, and worked it beautifully, and ended up in the Hall of Fame, where she belonged. When I make up a list of the top-eighteen women of all time, you better believe Pat Bradley will be on it.
She never felt the urge to try to qualify for a men's tournament by playing the women's tees, as a club pro named Suzy Whaley did in Connecticut last year. This was supposed to be some epic moment in what is now being called the Battle of the Sexes in golf, Suzy playing well enough on a much shorter golf course to play her way into the Greater Hartford Open. The whole thing was a sham. If she had tried to qualify from the men's tees, she would have had to buy a grounds pass to get into the tournament. But suddenly, because golf is always desperate for any kind of color or controversy that doesn't involve Martha Burk and Hootie Johnson (don't worry, I'm getting to them, they're like a reality television series now, a combination of The Osbournes and a new version of Survivor set at Augusta National), Suzy from Connecticut was doing interviews all over television, as she tried to decide whether to play Hartford.
Where she will shoot eighty-five.
Now Annika Sorenstam, one of the great women golfers of all time, decides to play the Colonial, and that is a whole new ball game. Because this is a tough young woman with a world of game going up against the best men in the world, putting herself on the line that way. And right away, before she ever gets near the first tee, people make this some kind of referendum on how the best women would stack up against the best men, and also what it means for women's golf.
I don't think it has anything to do with that. I think Annika Sorenstam is brave to do what she's doing, and the whole world will be watching her, but this isn't about women's golf, it is about one woman golfer: her. I think what she's really doing is pushing product here, and the product is herself. All power to her. It's the same thing Roy Jones Jr. did recently by moving up in class from light-heavy to heavyweight. It wasn't because Jones has spent the last decade, during which he's been the best prizefighter in the world, wondering how he would match up against the big boys. It's because he got tired of being the best prizefighter in his weight class and not having nearly enough people watch him, or know him.
