Annika Sorenstam’s organisational skills are as highly rated as her golf game, so when it comes to next year’s Solheim Cup match, the European team have everything covered.
Cool and collected Annika Sorenstam’s organisational skills are as highly rated as her golf game, so when it comes to next year’s Solheim Cup match in Iowa, USA, the European team captain will have everything covered.
Annika Sorenstam has always pulled up on the follow through sooner than most. There would have been coaches who would have told her to keep her head down for rather longer but they would have been wrong. She always stayed down for entirely long enough to deliver one perfectly timed shot after another.
Everything about the Swede’s career has revolved around good timing. Shortly after she had won her ten majors, she knew when it was time to stop and have a family. Again, she waited until she had served three times as a Solheim Cup vice-captain - twice to Alison Nicholas and then to Carin Koch - before she agreed to lead the European team in 2017. It was typical of Annika; she did not want to take on the job until she felt 100% ready to make a good fist of it.
Annika’s organisational skills played a major role in her career in which she was in four winning Solheim Cup sides and was second only to Laura Davies in terms of points scored. She would feed all her statistics into a computer - putts, driving distance, fairways hit etc - and she never had any problem in identifying what she had to do to improve. With regard to her forthcoming captaincy, you can guarantee that she will be approaching things much the same. She will be keeping records of results, facts, figures, together with a bundle of notes from what she learned from the matches of 2011, 2013 and 2015.
For much of her playing career, Annika was acutely shy. There was an early conversation shortly after she had started out at the University of Arizona and had been given one of the amateur slots in the draw for the Standard Register PING tournament at Moon Valley in Phoenix. On a day when the car park attendant at the club had turned her away on the grounds that she did not look old enough to be playing in the event, she returned a 67 to bed down among the leaders.
And, since she was new to the scene, the journalists wanted to know about her golfing ambitions. She said, very quietly, that she had plans to score in the 50s.
What the writers were hearing sounded so improbable that they asked if she could repeat herself, which she did. Then, sensing her audience was still at sea, she explained what she had learned from Karl Enhager, the psychologist who worked with the Swedish amateur squad. He believed that golfers everywhere were being ridiculously easy on themselves in allowing for two putts on every green. In his opinion, one putt per green was enough.
It would have been ten years later, when she returned to play at that same Moon Valley course, that Annika handed in the 59 which has had her hailed ever since as “Miss 59.” She has made hundreds of speeches across her amateur and professional days and got better at them all the time.
Yet never did she show more of what she was made of than when she was chosen to address the congregation at the funeral of Arnold Palmer, a close friend since she moved to Orlando. She spoke of the support he had offered from the time they first met and how, whenever she won a tournament, he would send a note of congratulations.
She talked, too, of the way he interacted with everyone:
“He was known as the King but he treated everyone as if they were royalty - and always had a sparkle in his eye. He was a champion at every level.”
She was also hugely admiring of what he did for charity, with particular reference to the Winnie Palmer Hospital he built in honour of his first wife.
Annika’s first child, Ava, was born in that establishment without a hitch but in March 2011, her husband Mike McGee, had to rush her into the emergency department with complications concerning their second child. William was born 16 hours later, only he weighed less than two pounds and took up no more than eight inches on the tape measure.
He would remain in hospital for 57 days, during which time Annika said that the loving care they received at Arnold’s hospital was something they will never forget. She insisted that it had nothing to do with her golfing career; it was how the hospital staff looked after everyone.
Arnold would meet the new baby on three occasions and made a cheerful promise that the infant would one day receive an invitation to play in his Arnold Palmer tournament.
Above is an extract from the latest Women & Golf magazine, out Friday. Never miss an issue, subscribe to Women & Golf or treat a friend this Christmas with a subscription.
