Annika Sorenstam is playing a U.S. Open this week. Here’s how she’s prepping

Bamberger Briefly is sponsored by Charles Schwab, host of the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial.

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If anybody demonstrated the fairways-and-greens spirit of U.S. Open golf as deeply as Ben Hogan and Mickey Wright, it’s Annika Sorenstam, the Swedish legend who won the national open of her adopted homeland on four occasions. Sorenstam, who has lived in Orlando for decades, is 54 and still at it. Memo to us: Catch her while you can. And to them: Good luck trying.

Sorenstam’s first three U.S. Open wins were in 1995, 1996 and 2006. Then, four summers ago, pushed back into competition by her daughter and son (Ava and Will McGee), Sorenstam won the first U.S. Senior Women’s Open in which she played — by eight. That was in 2021. In the three Senior Women’s Opens since then, Sorenstam has finished T5, T4 and 4th. Her husband, Mike McGee, is nearly always nearby when Annika is playing. The kids, too. It’s a family affair.

This week, the lady golfers of a certain age (50+ and proud!) are convening at the San Diego Country Club, where Mickey Wright, winner of four U.S. Opens, logged innumerable rounds growing up. Hogan, who also won four Opens, once said that Wright had the best swing he ever saw, “man or woman.” But he didn’t catch Annika in her prime.

Karrie Webb, the seven-time major winner, is in the field. So is Leta Lindley, the defending champion. Also Juli Inkster (who, at 65, nearly made an LPGA cut last week), Liselotte Neumann and Charlotta Sorenstam, Annika’s younger sister. Talk about turning back the hands of time. You could make the case that this national championship is the most underappreciated event in golf.

Sorenstam has been getting ready for San Diego, of course. But not with the intense eight-hour range sessions for which she was once famous. That doesn’t mean she is winging it. Annika doesn’t wing anything.

Still, she said in a phone interview last week, “I really don’t know what to expect.” (Mike McGee, who manages his wife’s business life, said if Annika says she’s going call you on a certain day at high noon, at the appointed hour — and to the minute — the phone will ring.) Regarding her expectations, or lack thereof, Ms. Sorenstam was being modest. She is the least presumptuous of superstar golfers. We offer the following not as a dressed-up gambling tip sheet but because we have watched this movie before: The chances of Annika Sorenstam not finishing in the top-10 this week are slim to none, and none is napping in the caddie yard.

If you’ve seen Sorenstam swing a club since turning 50, you may have made this observation: Her swing has not changed. “That may be so, but the ball doesn’t go anywhere,” Sorenstam, a former junior tennis player, said, volleying back the compliment. Echt Annika.

More to the point, her length, and that of the other competitors, isn’t so important, not when a course has a proper setup. (A proper, tried-and-true course setup is impossible when players can drive a ball 350 yards.) Last year the women’s U.S. Open was at the Lancaster Country Club, played at 6,700 yards, and the setup was as sound and as appropriate as you could ever hope to see. Augusta National, for the club’s pre-Masters event for amateur women, is played at 6,300 yards, giving the public a chance to see how Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie intended the course to be played. The San Diego Country Club course will measure 6,000 yards, if that, for the senior women. Sane golf — what a concept. Let’s all give a round of applause to the return of the three-shot par-5, a category our forebears valued greatly. It’s a beautiful thing. Annika plotting her way around a U.S. Open course, ditto.

“The USGA has a special place in my heart,” Sorenstam said. The U.S. Open (for senior women) is one of the handful of events she plays in each year. She was a runner-up in the U.S. Women’s Amateur as a University of Arizona golfer in 1992, losing to Vicki Goetze in the final. The winner is now Vicki Goetze-Ackerman and president of the LPGA Players Association. GVA is in the field at San Diego, too. What sport does the long game like golf? Goetze-Ackerman, a golf instructor in Florida, still hits it right on the face, her drives go maybe 220 yards, and she can shoot par most anywhere, as long as she plays the tees that suit her. Her son, Jake Ackerman, plays for Coastal Carolina.

“When you’re a serious competitor, there’s nothing like being in the ropes in a USGA event,” Sorenstam said, speaking in her familiar, measured tone, one that hints at her broad emotional control. “We’re not so serious outside the ropes now. But once you’re inside them, you are.”

As a mother, wife, businessperson and philanthropist, Sorenstam is in perpetual motion. The Annika Foundation runs a series of junior and collegiate amateur events for women. She’s the president of the International Golf Federation, which oversees golf in the Olympics. At the 2028 Olympic golf event at Riviera, in addition to the men’s competition and the women’s competition, there will be a mixed team event for the first time. Sorenstam was a big supporter of the added competition. These days, competitive golf is way low on her to-do list. (“I would never choose golf over family now,” she said.) Asked how she was preparing for the Senior Open, she said, “I go to the range and look for my rhythm.”

What a concept! Rhythm was once a central element of any serious golf-swing conversation. But how often do you hear the TV commentators at PGA Tour events even using the r-word these days? Hardly ever.

Rhythm has always been a core golfing value for Annika, and her stock-in-trade has always been a repeatable swing. If you want to see golf history in action, and a swing at the peak of its rhythmic beauty, watch the clips of Sorenstam playing in the one PGA Tour event in which she appeared, at the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, in 2003. It was the Bank of America Colonial then, now the tournament is called the Charles Schwab Challenge — and it’s always been the annual Tour stop most associated with Ben Hogan, who grew up in Fort Worth.

The 2003 Colonial was modern golf’s Bobby Riggs-Billie Jean King moment, the 1973 tennis spectacle at the Astrodome in Houston, billed as The Battle of the Sexes. The world was watching Billie Jean doing her thing in Texas then, and it was watching Annika 30 years later. Tiger was watching, on TV. (Woods and Annika were both represented by Mark Steinberg then, and practiced some together.) Years after the event, Woods recalled Annika’s play in stunning detail, right down to the weather and the course conditions.

As she prepared to play her first shot in the first round, Sorentsam was a bundle of nerves, a first-time, no-net rope walker. The rhythm of her first swing, with a fairway wood, was out of a symphonic score sheet. The knee-buckling sailor’s walk as she left the tee box told the rest of the story. She shot a first-round 71 without missing a shot, really. She ran out of fuel somewhere in her second-round 74. She missed the cut and won the week.

“If you’re trying to reach your full potential, you have to put yourself in a place where you really feel uncomfortable,” Sorenstam said. She was talking about the enduring lessons from her week on the PGA Tour, from those two rounds at the Colonial Country Club, with scores of cameras trained on her as she played with the men, the first woman golfer to do so since the end of World War II. (Babe Zaharias, who is criminally underappreciated, in 1945.) “If you want to change something in life, you can’t just continue to do the same thing or you’re going to get the same result,” Sorenstam said.

In recent years, Sorenstam has joined Augusta National and Pine Valley, two clubs that were, for many decades, bastions of men’s golf. Through the years, the vast bureaucracy holding up the Olympic movement has been overwhelmingly male. Over the past three years, Annika and her son, Will, have been headliners at the PNC Championship, an event that until 2019 was called the Father/Son Challenge. (Annika says her southpaw son is a more intuitive and creative golfer than she is.) The LPGA has had only two female commissioners. Golf’s male-female divide is a real thing, but for Sorenstam it has never been an obstacle.

“Growing up in Sweden, I played with 20 boys and one girl,” Sorenstam said. The other girl was Charlotta. The Tour players at Colonial in 2003, and the men who ran the event then, made her feel welcome. “They invited me,” she said. Augusta and Pine Valley, the same. (“To get to play these bucket-list courses, pretty much whenever I want, is amazing,” she said.) The PNC event has only become bigger and better since it has opened its doors to a broader field. There are now grandfathers playing with grandsons in the field. Grandmothers with granddaughters will come along someday, you’d have to think. Some pair will be the first to do it.

“Life is about opportunities,” Sorenstam said. “You can take them or pass on them. At Colonial, I stepped out of the box. I am quite shy by nature, but I did it. I got out of my comfort zone.”

She got out of her comfort zone, and into a whole new world. In ways that defy measurement, her Augusta National membership and her IGF presidency and her fourth U.S. Open win all came out of her Colonial experience. We say that because Colonial helped open a door marked POSSIBILITIES. Those two days at the Colonial Country Club proved a lot of things, and one of them is this: the power of saying yes, of pushing yourself, of trying something new. This week, Annika Sorenstam will try to become the first two-time winner of the Senior Women’s Open. She seems to be telling us this: If you keep your eyes and mind open, there’s always something new out there.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com