The Week: Grand Plan

Limiting her '04 schedule to focus on the majors, Annika could go out with a bang

By Jim Gorant

While playing in the ANZ Ladies Masters in Gold Coast, Australia, Annika Sorenstam took a trip to Sea World to ride on a dolphin. "When he was pulling me along in the water," Sorenstam said, "he was so fast that I had to hold my bottoms on!" Yes, Annika kept her clothes on, but that doesn't mean her outbursts on and off the course weren't revealing.

The normally reserved Sorenstam was open and carefree as she coasted in Australia. Steve Holland

After shooting back-to-back 65s on Saturday and Sunday to win the tournament by four strokes with a 19-under 269, the normally reserved Hall of Famer and her sister, fellow LPGA player Charlotta, hoisted a bottle of champagne on the 18th green. Earlier in the week Annika uncharacteristically schmoozed sponsors and even debuted a sassy line of self-designed golf clothes (on which she admittedly forgot to include pockets). It was perhaps the most open and carefree the world has seen her.

After the victory Ms. 59 was equally forthcoming in discussing her plans for this season. She'll play in 15 events on the LPGA tour, the minimum needed to maintain her membership, and only three in Europe, the minimum to be eligible for the Solheim Cup.

The idea is to be primed and rested for the four majors -- the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the McDonald's LPGA Championship and the Women's U.S. and British Opens -- because her goal this year is to win them all, an unprecedented feat on any tour. It's a quest that's Tigeresque in scope. Woods, like Jack Nicklaus before him, plays only 18 to 21 events a year with an eye toward maximizing his performance in the majors, and he's come closest to the Slam, winning all four in a row, though not in a single year.

For Sorenstam, however, the possibility seems more realistic. She has already won 48 LPGA events (including 11 in 2002 and six last year), achieved a career Grand Slam and last year held her own in the PGA Tour's Colonial. In short, Sorenstam has accomplished everything she has set out to do, so there's no reason to doubt that she can pull off the Grand Slam too. (Last year she won two majors and held at least a share of the final-round lead in the other two.)

Just as intriguing as her desire to sweep the majors is the subtext of her stated intentions. "I'm going to focus on the events that really matter," she said in Australia, "and enjoy time at home and with my family."

The 33-year-old has made no secret of her plans to hang up her golf spikes and start a family. So when, in the same breath, she mentions both her grand goal and "home" and "family," one is left to wonder: If Annika wins the Grand Slam, will she stop making birdies and start making babies sooner than we think?

Heard on the Range

The experiment failed. When Congressional Country Club hosted the 1997 U.S. Open, it was the first time since 1909 that an Open ended on a par-3. Since then the course has been lengthened some 40 yards, and in hopes of getting another Open, the club will make the 190-yard 18th the 10th hole while the backbreaking, 466-yard 17th will become the finishing hole.... On March 6, David Duval will marry Susan Persichitte, an interior designer from Denver, at his beach house near Jacksonville. Childless, Duval will inherit three kids (ages 7, 10 and 13) from Persichitte's previous marriage.... It wasn't booze or women that knocked John Daly from the leader board at the Chrysler Classic in Tucson. It was whoever swiped his ball after a 335-yard drive on the 18th hole during the second round. The drive, which easily covered the 290-yard carry over a pond, was ruled a lost ball, and Daly made a double-bogey 6. "Someone got a nice souvenir," Peter Van Derriet, Daly's caddie, told the Arizona Republic.... Augusta National has added 36 pines, all of them 15-feet high, along the right side of the fairway on the 490-yard 11th hole, forcing players to stay left off the tee and then hit mid- to long-irons to a green protected by a pond on the front left and Rae's Creek behind. Amen.... Talk about long drivers, the Prince of Tucson RV Park hosted several player-owned motor homes last week, including those of Jay Don Blake, Deane Pappas and Dennis Paulson. A full tank of gas in Pappas's $340,000, 40-foot Holiday Rambler Navigator requires 140 gallons of diesel fuel, but it still "beats a hotel and plane," says the 36-year-old South African, who hires a professional driver for trips longer than eight hours.

-- J.G., Farrell Evans

Issue date: March 8, 2004