Who will reign in 2008?
If this year’s performances are to be taken as any sort of a benchmark, 2008 will see a right ding-dong battle for the ladies’ world No.1 spot between Mexican Lorena Ochoa and Suzann Pettersen of Norway – and there can be only one winner.
Lorena is the player with the reputation to maintain. This year, she knocked Annika Sorenstam from the world No.1 ranking and has become the dominant figure among the new generation. She won eight times on the LPGA Tour and topped the money list with a record $4,364,994. She claimed her first ‘Major’ at the Ricoh Women’s British Open at St Andrews and won the Rolex Player of the Year Award for the second year in a row. Over the Old Course, she triumphed in style. She led from start to finish and waltzed to a four-shot victory. She has now won 17
titles in her five seasons on the LPGA Tour and is the one that everyone has to beat.
Suzann, meanwhile, is a player
on the up and up and, arguably,
was the stand-out performer on
the 2007 LPGA Tour.
Indeed, this season, she has nudged out the other challengers
to Lorena’s crown, finishing
second on the LPGA money list
with
$1,802,400.
The Norwegian won her first LPGA title at the Michelob
ULTRA Open in May – and that opened the floodgates.
She followed it up with her
first ‘Major’ at the McDonald’s LPGA Championship in June
and then had a glorious October, winning the Long Drugs
Challenge, the Hank Bank-KOLON Championship in South Korea
and the Honda LPGA Thailand.
Not content with just winning
on the LPGA Tour, she also scored a runaway nine-shot victory in the SAS Masters in her native home city of Oslo on the Ladies’ European Tour.
That notwithstanding, however, at the start of 2008, Lorena will
still be sitting head and shoulders above the rest. In fact, she drummed home her position with
a victory in the end-of-season
ADT Championship in Florida.
In the unusual play-off format,
she pretty much cruised to the $1million top prize.
But Suzann is a real threat. Indeed, she has come from almost nowhere at the start of 2007 to
the world No.4 slot on the Rolex World Rankings. And, at present, only the two ‘old hands’ of Karrie Webb and Annika Sorenstam stand between her and Ochoa. So let’s now assess the two in more detail...
