Annika Sorenstam Ready to Tee It Up One More Time at a Pine Needles U.S. Women's Open

The Hall of Famer won at Pine Needles 25 years ago and earned a spot by virtue of her U.S. Senior Open rout last year. So why not give it a go at age 51?

SOUTHERN PINES, N.C. — Annika Sorenstam has shocked the golf world many times before. Why not again in 2022?

The Hall of Famer came out of a 13-year retirement last year to not only win the U.S. Senior Women’s Open but by a whopping eight shots with a 12-under-par wire-to-wire thrashing of her contemporaries with husband Mike McGee on the bag.

The win was somewhat unexpected, so Sorenstam wasn’t necessarily concerned at the time with a few of the perks that came along with the 50-year-old and over USGA championship triumph. The victory gave arguably the game’s greatest female golfer an exemption into the 2022 U.S. Women’s Open, a stage in which a quarter century ago was a springboard to her enormous resume.

Surely, Sorenstam wasn’t interested in the unique opportunity, or was she?

In 99 percent of the circumstances it would have been a “thank you, but no thanks” response, but this year’s U.S. Women’s Open will be staged at Pine Needles Resort, the site of Sorenstam’s 1996 victory in which she defended her title, and the location at which she formed a lasting bond with the late and great Peggy Kirk Bell.

The legendary Bell passed away in 2016 at the age of 95, but Sorenstam said she felt she owed it to the Bell family — and to the USGA — to tee it up one more time for the game’s greatest prize.

Sorenstam tells a funny story of her initial few encounters with Bell, who became the first woman voted into the World Golf Teachers Hall of Fame in 2002, and who owned Pine Needles Resort for decades.

“Peggy couldn’t pronounce my name, so she called me 'Heineken' for some reason,” Sorenstam said during a visit to Pine Needles this week to help promote the early-June major championship. “I had to explain to her that I wasn’t from Germany and I don’t drink beer. That was our internal joke the whole time I knew Peggy.”

“Mrs. Bell would drive up in a cart and she would park next to me and watch me hit balls and have a smart comment, and then she would leave and come back and I would meet her for lunch and she took me into her office,” Sorenstam recalled. “I didn’t know that much about her the first time I met her but she was showing me all these photos on the wall and she would fly around in a plane and I thought to myself ‘she’s one tough cookie.'"

Maybe so, but few in the game have ever been more competitive than Sorenstam, which is one reason why the thought of her teeing it up again against the game’s best today, players half her age, is intriguing in itself.

And few — male or female — have accomplished more. She is the only woman to shoot 59, and in 2003 she became the first female in almost 60 years to play in a PGA Tour event against men. She even holed out for an eagle on what was believed to be her last hole in a U.S. Women’s Open.

“The last 14 years I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to inspire the next generation of girls and I figured if I tell them to get out of the box and try different things, and explore and live your dream, then I have to do that to,” Sorenstam said about playing in this year’s U.S. Women’s Open as a 51-year-old mother of two. “You can’t just say and not do. So I decided to let’s do this. My purpose is a little different than it was in 1996. I’m trying to get ready as much as I can but I don’t have eight hours a day like I used to. I try to execute quality practices now.”

Sorenstam, who has won 10 majors, is one of 1,874 entries into a championship with a $10 million purse — both records for U.S. Women’s Opens.

The 1927 Donald Ross designed layout will play to 6,638 yards, or 26 yards shorter than in 2007 when Cristie Kerr won the Women’s Open in the North Carolina Sandhills. The course, in which the greens and bunkering were renovated by Kyle Franz in 2016-17, will play with no rough, much like Pinehurst No. 2 did in 2014. The wider-than-normal fairways spill directly into hardpan sandy areas recently dotted with more than 30,000 species of native grasses.

Native grasses are ready to claim shots that veer off the fairway at Pine Needles / Photo by David Droschak

That may play into Sorenstam’s game, which through the years has relied on pinpoint accuracy.

“These women are a little bit more active than me and it’s their main focus,” Sorenstam said of the tall task of even making the cut. “It does matter in certain areas, like I don’t hit the ball as far, and my accuracy is not there because I don’t have the time to practice as much. But I am going to try to see what I can do, enjoy the experience. This is not my bread-and-butter anymore, it’s just about going out there and having a good time and I don’t feel any pressure.

"Hopefully I’ll enjoy every moment and the memories will come back and that’s what life is about. When you get a little bit older you think more about the journey more than the destination. I am going to play my game, how about that?

“But I am very competitive, but let’s say I play really, really well and it’s just not good enough then I’ll be happy,” she added. “I’ve put in some time (practicing) but I’m not sure how many 59s are in me anymore.”

In her prime, Sorenstam said she would carry her drives around 250 yards, but that distance has now dropped to 230 yards.

“That’s almost two clubs a hole,” she said. “So, let’s say you go from an 8-iron to a 6-iron, which means it’s a little more difficult to be more aggressive, especially if the greens are firmer, so I have to be a little bit more in the center of the greens. My approach has changed and I really don’t reach the par 5s in two anymore. I’m learning to adjust. I’m not happy mentally about it but it’s reality. I’ll keep on plugging away and hopefully I’ll get some good feel around the greens and I’ll get it back.”

Sorenstam looks to be in excellent shape and with no major lingering injuries from her lengthy golf career, so her entry into this talented field of female golfers from around the world isn’t any sort of gimmick or sideshow. She will show up in June really to roll.

“It looks like the center of the fairway is the best place to be,” Sorenstam said with a laugh. “We all know how hard the greens are so just play smart. That’s the thing when people play majors — you don’t win tournaments Thursday, you have to be patient and take it one shot at a time. I have become more of a grinder because I know that’s what I have to do.”

Sorenstam’s first U.S. Women’s Open was in 1992 at Oakmont, where she qualified as a 21-year-old amateur.

“I remember hitting balls next to the champions, the Hall of Famers,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave the range because it was so fun hitting next to Juli Inkster or Patty Sheehan or Pat Bradley or Meg Mallon. They were the role models I had. I made the cut on the number because it was quite a course but I knew it wasn’t going to be my last one.”

But this one may very well be Sorenstam’s final bow. 

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