Not a Grand Start, but 71 OK for Sorenstam

When she looked down the first fairway, Annika Sorenstam was jumpy, but at least it was a familiar feeling, the same nervous flutter she felt two years ago as she stood on the first tee at the PGA Tour’s Colonial tournament.

There was still one difference.

“I could breathe today,” she said.

Here’s another one: Sorenstam hit it down the middle of the fairway on the first hole at Colonial, but Thursday at Cherry Hills Country Club, she drove it into the right rough to start the U.S. Women’s Open.

And so Sorenstam’s mission to complete the third leg of a Grand Slam began with a bogey instead of a bang. In fact, she bogeyed her first hole and her last, wound up at even-par 71 and said, all things considered, it wasn’t such a bad beginning after all.

“I think if somebody would have told me on the first tee, ‘We’ll give you level par,’ I would have taken it.”

She didn’t sound as if she was kidding. That’s the right attitude if you take into consideration that she hit only 10 greens and missed a handful of putts between six and eight feet.

The larger picture, of course, is about the burden that she carries on her shoulders this week.

This is the third LPGA major this year and Sorenstam won the first two, which has taken her into uncharted territory. No one has won all four of the LPGA’s major championships and that means the self-proclaimed “little girl from Sweden” has a chance to keep her rendezvous with history if she manages another victory this week.

After an incomplete first round cut short because of thunderstorms with 48 players still on the course, Sorenstam is two shots behind Angela Stanford and amateur Brittany Lang, a sophomore at Duke, who shot two-under 69. Michelle Wie was one under through 15 holes when play was halted.

Sorenstam thought it was obvious why she was a little nervous Thursday.

“U.S. Open, a lot of people, tough golf course, a lot on my mind,” she said. “A lot of things.”

There is still a long way to go, she said. “It’s a marathon.”

It also could be a mind-bending, psyche-shattering week. Yet that’s the kind of pressure that Sorenstam seems prepared to handle, according to the person who works most closely with her, caddie Terry McNamara.

“No one knows better than her what’s at stake here,” he said. “That’s what makes her so unbelievable. She carries all that stuff on her shoulders, challenges herself and then faces right up to it. She’s something.

“Somehow, she focuses better than anybody and knows how to channel it better than most people.”

As far as goals go, Sorenstam’s is a chart-topper. The prospects of winning each of the major championships in one year is part of the game’s lore and only Bobby Jones, the most revered name in golf, accomplished the feat when in 1930 he won all four of what were then considered the major tournaments -- the U.S. Open, British Open, U.S. Amateur and British Amateur.

Sorenstam may find herself in a particularly grueling arena this week. She has nine major championships, but only two U.S. Opens in 11 tries and none since she won back-to-back titles in 1995 and 1996.

In the 1995 U.S. Open at the Broadmoor in nearby Colorado Springs, Sorenstam opened with a 67. Since then, she has never shot a first-round score lower than 70 in a U.S. Open.

To tackle Cherry Hills, Sorenstam has been forced into a strategy that doesn’t take into account her advantage off the tee. She leads the LPGA Tour in driving distance with an average of 274 yards, but on this 6,749-yard course -- by 200 yards the longest women’s Open course in history -- she can reach only one of the three par-five holes in two shots, the 522-yard 11th.

The most difficult hole, the uphill, 459-yard par-four 18th, was a four-wood off the tee for Sorenstam on Thursday, leaving 203 yards to the front of the green. She hit a seven-wood short of the green, pitched to eight feet and missed her putt for par.

McNamara said Sorenstam would hit driver at the potentially reachable 346-yard No. 1 only if necessary, depending on her position Sunday.

Sorenstam kept her round going Thursday with three consecutive par-saving putts on the front side, renewing her commitment to keep her head down after contact. She said she is never tempted to watch where the ball rolls.

“I’d rather hear it go in,” she said.