- Publish date:
The Week April 10-16
Passing Nancy Fancy
Five straight would be nice, but Annika Sorenstam is after
bigger fish: Mickey Wright's record of 13 wins in a season.
Putt Ugly
You make the call: Have two pros with strokes homelier than Jose
Coceres's and Billy Mayfair's ever gone head-to-head in a playoff?
Class Conscious
Weren't Kite, Wadkins and Watson supposed to head the class of
2000? Doug Tewell has one win fewer (four) than all three
combined.
LPGA Sorenstam, who joined Kathy Whitworth and Mickey Wright as
the only players to win four scheduled LPGA events in a row, is
two short of Byron Nelson's all-tour record, set in 1945, for
victories in consecutive tournaments.... Sorenstam made up a
record 10 strokes in the final round at Los Angeles's Wilshire
Country Club. She closed with a six-under 66 to overtake
second-round leader Pat Hurst, then beat Mi Hyun Kim on the first
hole of a playoff to improve her career mark in overtime to
9-3.... Sorenstam's 68.43 scoring average is a stroke better than
the season record, established by Karrie Webb last year.
PGA Coceres, a 37-year-old Argentine who has played on the
European tour since 1990, beat Mayfair on the fifth hole of
sudden death to win the WorldCom Classic on Hilton Head Island,
S.C.... Coceres has risen from 185th to 29th in the World
Ranking since '98.... Roberto De Vicenzo is the only other
Argentinian to have won a Tour event.... The top seven players
after 54 holes were a combined 11 over in the final round, and
just one of them, Scott Verplank, broke par.... John Daly, 49th
at the WorldCom, is 75th on the money list, his best position
since finishing 57th in '95.
SENIOR Tewell made eight birdies and an eagle during his
final-round 62 at the Tradition, which he led wire to wire, at
Desert Mountain in Scottsdale, Ariz.... Jack Nicklaus, who
finished 29th, has gone four straight majors without a top 10
finish, the longest such streak of his Senior career.... The
Tradition's TV rating of 1.1 on the weekend was the lowest in
the tournament's 12-year history.... Tom Watson and Gary McCord,
the only two players from the top 40 on the money list who
skipped the Tradition, were both at the WorldCom Classic. McCord
worked for CBS while Watson missed the cut by four.
ALSO England's Ian Poulter, 25, won his second European tour
title in the last six months, by two strokes at the Moroccan
Open in Rabat, and rose from ninth to sixth in the European
Ryder Cup standings.
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPH BY GREG CAVA Hidden treasure The best-kept secret in golf? It's Cascata, a course outside Las Vegas reserved for high rollers (page G14).
UP and Down
Annika Sorenstam Karrie Webb
Nancy Lopez Annika Sorenstam
Doug Tewell Tom Watson
Tradition The Tradition
Jose Coceres Angel Cabrera
