Tuesday, April 20, 2010

“Golf world number one Ochoa announces retirement” plus 3 more

“Golf world number one Ochoa announces retirement” plus 3 more

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Golf world number one Ochoa announces retirement

Posted: 20 Apr 2010 11:31 AM PDT

Lorena Ochoa, LPGA's No. 1, announces retirement from golf

Posted: 20 Apr 2010 11:42 AM PDT

The 28-year-old Mexican announced her decision on her website and will discuss her plans Friday. Ochoa, who has been No. 1 in the world the last three years and won 27 times over the last six years, may well be the best-known athlete in her country who is not a soccer player.

"Lorena Ochoa confirms her retirement from the LPGA, as news reports in some media have said today," her statement said. "The reasons and more details on the matter will be given by Lorena personally in a press conference on Friday in Mexico City. Lorena will share this news of a new stage in her life with her sponsors, family members and friends."

The LPGA told the Associated Press it would not comment until Friday's news conference.

Ochoa is scheduled to play next week in the Tres Marias event in Morelia, west of Mexico City. It was not clear if she would indeed play there or if this month's Kraft Nabisco Championship in California, where she finished fourth in the year's first major, was her finale.

"I'm just crushed," Judy Rankin, a Hall of Famer and television analyst, said upon hearing the news. "We won't get to see her play golf. Mostly, we won't get to see her."

Annika Sorenstam was 37 when she announced her retirement in May 2008, saying she wanted to pursue other interests and start a family. She now has a daughter.

The newspaper Reforma first reported the retirement and said she wanted to concentrate on her family and charities. She was married in December to Andres Conesa, the chief executive of Aeromexico airline. He has three children from a previous marriage.

"I must admit that I was surprised, but not shocked, when I heard the news yesterday that Lorena is going to retire," Sorenstam said on her blog. "She has always said she would play for maybe 10 years and then leave the game to start a family. She just got married and obviously feels that she is ready for that next chapter in her life."

Ochoa has also talked openly about wanting to have children of her own. Last year she began traveling more, playing less, and had more off-course obligations, which include her charity foundation.

"Personally, it's more important the things that I do outside the golf course," Ochoa said last year before a tournament she hosts in her hometown of Guadalajara. "And that's been my main focus right now."

Her retirement is blow to the LPGA, which has been struggling in a tough economy and has seen its number of tournaments decline in recent years.

Sorenstam was a commanding player, and Ochoa was expected to assume that role although she never quite draw the crowds the way the Swede did.

Ochoa was defined as much by her dominance as her graciousness. Mindful of her heritage, she often would go to the maintenance barn during LPGA Tour events and speak with the workers, many of them from Mexico.

She rose to No. 1 in the world in 2006 by winning six times, and she captured her first major at St. Andrews a year later by winning the Women's British Open. Ochoa's other major was the 2008 Kraft Nabisco Championship, where she took the traditional jump into the pond with her family as a mariachi band serenaded her.

She won her fourth consecutive LPGA Tour player of the year award in 2009, narrowly holding off Jiyai Shin.

In 2006, 2007 and 2008, Ochoa produced 21 titles, but last season she won only three times. She still was honored as the tour player of the year for a fourth consecutive year.

This year she has played four events, with no victories and one finish in the top 10. Ochoa has missed the cut only four times in 172 events as a member of the LPGA, and not since 2005.

Jiyai Shin of South Korea, last year's rookie of the year on the U.S. tour, was No. 2 in the world rankings and Yani Tseng of Taiwan, this year's Kraft Nabisco winner, was No. 3.

Sorenstam predicted a few years ago that Tseng would be a world No. 1 within a few seasons. Tseng has won only three U.S. LPGA events, but two have been majors.

Lorena Ochoa, golf's top-ranked woman, retires at 28

Posted: 20 Apr 2010 10:48 AM PDT

Lorena Ochoa, 28, announced Tuesday that she was stepping away from competitive golf, ending her reign as the LPGA's top player and, arguably, the most dominant female athlete on the planet.

Typical of Ochoa's understated sensibilities, the stunning news was delivered by way of a short press release, with Ochoa nowhere in sight. A news conference has been scheduled for Friday in Mexico City; there is already some speculation that Ochoa will enjoy a farewell appearance at next week's LPGA event in Morelia, Mexico, which is about 40 miles from Guadalajara, where she grew up.

Ochoa's list of accomplishments includes 27 career victories, two major championship triumphs and the last four LPGA player of the year awards. But in the last 15 months she has struggled with her consistency and on-course emotions as she has tried to juggle golf and a new marriage that brought three stepchildren. Ochoa was off to a listless start in 2010, and three weeks ago at the Kraft Nabisco Championship her frustration boiled over as she hurled her ball down onto a putting green, making a divot that required repair.

This fit of pique was at odds with a career that has always been defined by grace, class and humility, even as Ochoa smashed numerous records along the way. Born to a well-to-do family, Ochoa grew up in a house on Guadalajara Country Club, and by age 12 had already told her swing coach, Rafael Alarcon, that her goal was to be the world's best golfer. She was imbued with a sense of the limitless by her older brothers, who forced the teenaged Lorena to compete with them in eco-thons, rugged outdoor endurance races.

Ochoa's golf swing was not textbook, but on the course she was a picture of athleticism, a size 0 who routinely smashed 290-yard drives. After an unprecedented career at the University of Arizona, Ochoa arrived on the LPGA in 2003. After three good-but-not-great seasons she came into her own in '06, winning six tournaments. She won 15 more over the next two years, including a career-defining performance at the 2007 Women's British Open, where she joined Bobby Jones, Sam Snead, Jack Nicklaus, Seve Ballesteros and Tiger Woods as another golf genius who has conquered the Old Course at St. Andrews.

For all of Ochoa's lofty accomplishments, she became a cross-cultural icon because of her humanitarian works and because all of her success never changed her shy, sweet nature. Ochoa was famous for popping into the cart barns at tournament venues to offer encouragement in Spanish to the greenskeepers, and at the 2008 Kraft Nabisco she even helped cook them breakfast. Even as she was on her way to earning nearly $15 million (third on the LPGA's alltime money list) she lived with her parents in Guadalajara, where a wild night out meant a dinner party with friends topped by her only vice, chocolate cake. Ochoa always remained deferential to her father, happy to fulfill her traditional role in a patriarchal society; when Javier visited her tournaments it was not uncommon for him to hold his daughter's hand as they walked to the first tee and then send her off with a kiss on the cheek and the sign of the cross on her forehead.

Ochoa's simple life grew richer but more complicated when she was courted by Andres Conesa, a top executive at Aeromexico, one of Ochoa's sponsors. They became one of Mexico's most scrutinized couples, and she resettled in Mexico City, removed from her lifelong teacher and the course she grew up playing. They were married in December 2009 in a small, private ceremony, a life change that clearly forced Ochoa to rethink her commitment to golf.

In the past she often spoke about her desire to have children and devote more time to her eponymous foundation, which was created in 2004 to foster educational opportunities in Mexico. Ochoa's passion has long been La Barranca, a school for children ages 6 and up in Guadalajara, which Ochoa has built and continues to fund. In the planning stages is another school that would educate kids and adults. As conceived, the Lorena Ochoa School would have computer workshops and art classes, sports facilities and gardens, social workers and psychologists.

Ochoa's spectacular talent and starpower will be sorely missed by the LPGA, but her retirement will not end her public life. She means too much to too many.

"I love golf, I love competing, I love winning," Ochoa told me in 2008. "I have worked very hard to get to this point and I am definitely enjoying it. But there will be a time to stop, to concentrate on other things that matter. I look forward to that. I look forward to a life that is a little more simple. I like that word. Yes, simple. That is what I look forward to."

Have a question for Alan Shipnuck? Submit it here and come back Friday to read his weekly Mailbag.

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A loss for Brian Davis -- but a big win for golf

Posted: 20 Apr 2010 04:04 AM PDT

LAS VEGAS (AP)—What happened in the junk off the 18th green at the Harbour Town Golf Links could have all been avoided if Brian Davis had only taken the easy way out.

That, however, was never really an option. Davis was going to play the shot out of the hazard instead of taking a penalty drop because it was probably the only chance he had to finally win a golf tournament.

And for that, golf can be grateful.

If this was some kind of fairy tale story, Davis would have won the tournament he so desperately wanted to win. It's not, and Jim Furyk's name is on both the winner's trophy and the $1.026 million check.

Don't expect Davis to be happy about that. He's tried too long and too hard to win a PGA tournament, and this one was almost in his hands.

"You're not playing for second, but playing to win," Davis said. "But I can hold my head up high."

Indeed he can. And, in the end, that may be more important than the win that got away.

Because after months of being mired in the slime of Tiger Woods, golf needed Brian Davis worse than Davis needed to win his first tournament on the PGA Tour.

"It's not exactly what I was thinking about," Davis said. "But anything good for our sport is good, I guess."

In case you missed it—and the anemic television ratings would indicate all but the most die-hard golf fans did—Davis was in the hazard next to the final green with a wedge in his hand, needing to somehow get up-and-down in two to keep his overtime playoff against Furyk going.

After much deliberation with his caddie, he splashed out from a crummy lie to about 30 feet, giving him a chance to make it to stay alive. But something felt wrong, and he immediately called over a PGA official to tell him why.

"I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye," Davis said Monday in a telephone interview. "I didn't feel anything, but I thought I might have seen something."

What Davis saw was his club almost imperceptibly grazing a reed in the hazard. Under rule 13.4—moving a loose impediment during a takeaway—that meant a 2-stroke penalty, even if the offense was only visible in super slow motion replays.

And that meant the golf tournament for Davis.

For six years the Englishman turned Florida resident has been trying to win one on this side of the pond. He could have pretended he never saw the club graze the reed, and taken the chance no one else saw it either.

But he didn't. He's a golfer.

And golfers don't cheat. Not on the course, at least.

"That's what makes our sport so special," Davis said. "It was just one of those things. I had to call it and I did."

The golf community understood. They patted Davis on the back, and two prominent players on the senior tour called and thanked him for restoring some sense of integrity to the game.

But what shocked Davis more was the reaction from people who don't know the difference between a putter and a 6-iron.

The e-mails and phone calls flooded in Monday from around the country. Teachers even had their students write.

"It was mostly 'I just wanted to send you a note to say we need more people like you in sports,"' Davis said. "People saw it as an example to the younger generation to make the right choices."

In this case the right choice was the only choice for Davis. He may not play golf like Woods but, unlike Woods, he plays a gentleman's game like a gentleman.

And instead of capitalizing on his newfound fame to sell shoes, he's using it to sell awareness. Davis, who has had three bouts of skin cancer, is a spokesman for the Skin Cancer Foundation.

"If you see the damage it's done to someone, it wakes people up," Davis said. "Coming from England we didn't worry much about it because we seldom saw the sun, and by the time I became aware of it, it had already done a lot of damage."

Davis hopes to get people slathering on the sunscreen like he does twice a day. He hopes even more fervently to win on the PGA Tour some day, and believes his time will come.

It almost did Sunday in South Carolina, where he had to make an 18-footer on the final hole just to get in the playoff. He's sure he would have made that last 30-footer, too, had it meant anything.

Instead, he halfheartedly hit it by the hole, knowing his big chance was gone. It was a bitter disappointment, but Davis was buoyed by the response to what he did.

"For me now it's nothing but positive looking forward," Davis said. "It's going to be a good year for me."

It could be a good year for golf, too.

And for that, some thanks should go to an Englishman who acted like a gentleman.

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg(at)ap.org

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