Red Alert

These days, of course, some little girls aren't content to watch tournaments on TV. This year's Kraft Nabisco featured a Nickelodeon-style rerun: The Aree and Naree Show, starring the Wongluekiet twins of Bradenton, Fla.

Would you believe d�j� vu times two? Other 15-year-olds stand against the door jamb to have their heights checked; these girls drive balls down the Mission Hills fairways every spring to measure their growth as golfers. Aree, for example, could drive the ball 250 yards in calm conditions when she tied for 10th two years ago. Last Thursday, needing a par on the par-5 18th hole to join seven other players in red numbers for the first round, she smacked her final drive 258 yards into a two-club wind. That was 20 yards past the palm trees at water's edge and a good 30 yards past the tee shots of her playing partners, Raquel Carriedo and five-time European Solheim Cupper Catrin Nilsmark. The twins' coach, Jonathan Yarwood, shook his head in wonder. "Water on the left, into the wind, trouble everywhere, and she whips out the driver and hits it with abandon. Youthful innocence, is it? Or just no fear?"

No fear, that's for sure. Sizing up her second shot, about 260 yards from the hole, with a water hazard fronting the green, Aree turned to her caddie, Tom Hanson, and said, "You want to go for it?" Hanson laughed and handed her a three-wood to lay up. "I've caddied for 13 years," Hanson said later, "and I've never carried for a better ball striker." Aree's sister, Naree, said that she'd also improved in the past year, but the gains were hard to measure—more imaginative shotmaking, a better short game, an improved awareness of shot trajectory and spin. "I feel comfortable hitting a fade or a draw now, and I can scramble a lot better," she said. Aree was low twin, closing at three over par and in 30th position, while Naree scrambled to an 11-over, 58th-place finish. Asked when they were going to turn pro, Aree joked, "When I get my braces off."

None of these players—not Jones, Ochoa or the twins; not Neumann, who hadn't tasted victory since the 1998 Chick-fil-A Charity Championship; not Webb, who would make only one birdie on Sunday and fall to seventh; not Cristie Kerr, who tied for third with a final-round 68, or Akiko Fuku-shima and Carin Koch, who fired tournament-best 66s on Sunday to share fifth—expected Sorenstam to turn the final round into a golf version of The Red Shoes. But then, they all had their own pedestrian problems, particularly Neumann, whose driver swing deserted her in the third round. To recap: Her tee shot on the 1st hole sailed into the trees on the right; her tee shot on the 2nd hole also sailed into the trees on the right, passing Rush Limbaugh on the way; her tee shot on the 3rd hole (Marshal, could you move that nest of starlings?) sailed in the same direction. "I was spending more time with the crowd than inside the ropes," she said. "I couldn't figure out what was going wrong."

So there was Neumann, late Saturday afternoon, on the deserted left side of the Mission Hills practice tee. With clubs laid on the ground to check her alignment, she teed up a ball at driver height and then stuck another tee in the ground a few inches closer to her target and just outside the target line. ("I felt as if I wasn't getting through the ball very well," she explained. "The club face was open and going off to the right.") If the clubhead didn't clip the 2nd tee on her follow-through, Neumann could be reasonably certain that her ball would launch in the right direction. But only reasonably certain. Last year she finished 124th on the tour in driving distance and 136th in driving accuracy—lousy for a player with 12 LPGA wins and six Solheim Cup appearances.

The range drill helped Neumann, and a call later that evening to her swing coach, Glenn Dougherty, helped even more. "He thought I looked really tense," she said, "and he advised me to hold the club with a lighter grip." Neumann's heart was still in her throat when she teed off the next morning under a warm desert sun, but she breathed a little easier when she found the fairway on the 1st hole, and again on the 2nd hole and again on the 3rd, where she made birdie and took a short-lived lead at five under.

But Sorenstam—well, she had the red shoes, not to mention the little black anklet socks, which lent her wardrobe a certain Red Baron insouciance. She birdied the 5th and 6th holes to take sole possession of first. After that it was up to the others to catch her. None could. Neumann had a 15-foot birdie putt from the fringe on the final hole to force a playoff, but her ball slid two feet by. "She kept pushing me, which is what I needed today," said Sorenstam, who had already two-putted from 18 feet for her par and a total of 280.

The bogey-free final round gave Sorenstam her 33rd LPGA win, all since 1995, and a $1 million lead over Webb on the career money list. If Sorenstam, whose winnings now total $8.8 million, was to be faulted, it was only for her anemic version of the traditional victory plunge at 18. Instead of diving, as she did last year, Sorenstam gingerly went into the water as if she were stepping into a hot tub, accompanied by her caddie, Terry McNamara, and his four-year-old daughter, Reilly.

The shoes? They got very wet, but Sorenstam kept them on as she wandered around in the champion's white bathrobe. They looked like big cherry Life Savers with leather soles.