Sorenstam Going Out On Top

An era is coming to an end in professional sports.

Annika Sorenstam ignored her notes and spoke from the heart. One of golf's greatest players was leaving the game, and she handled her retirement announcement the way she would a 10-foot birdie putt with the tournament on the line.

With command and composure.

Calling her decision one she'd "been thinking about for a while," Sorenstam said Tuesday she will retire after the season. The 37-year-old Swede ends an LPGA Tour career in which she has won 72 tournaments to date and delivered a defining moment when she teed it up against the men on the PGA Tour.

Annika Sorenstam has been one of the most dominant and classy professional athletes of the last two decades. While other professional athletes such as Brett Favre had great careers too, golf is a bit different. In almost all other professional sports, you have a team situation. So success or failure on the field is helped or hindered to a large extent by the quality of your teammates. In professional golf, you are on your own, so you have to beat the entire field to win. That means in her 72 career victories to date, Sorenstam beat out approximately 124 other women over multiple days to win. Lost in those statistics is that in many of those wins, Sorenstam was so far ahead on Sunday that her last round of the tournament was mainly a victory lap. The competition was quite often five or more strokes behind.

On top of being a great player, Sorenstam also understood and accepted her role as an ambassador for her sport and a role model. She kept the details of her failed first marriage to herself, and according to everything I've ever heard always carried herself as a lady in public. Never comfortable in front of the cameras, Sorenstam worked hard on her interview skills, willing did the TV interviews and the endless press conferences. Often she would apply makeup just after walking off the 18th tee just so she looked a little better to the public on camera.

What's more, Sorenstam never avoided the reporters after a poor round either, patiently standing there and recounting every clanked 7 iron and yanked putt of the round. In comparison, other sports icons like Tiger Woods have a history of getting lost on the way to the press tent after a bad day, but Sorenstam never took the easy way out. Arnold Palmer had a saying that if you go find the reporters after you shoot a 64, you better also go find them after you shoot a 76. Sorenstam lived up to that standard.

I wish Sorenstam well in her future plans of having a family and apparently being the head chef in a gourmet restaurant. If she brings the same class and dedication to those pursuits as she did to her sports career, I'm sure she will be very successful in both.

Good job, Annika, and thanks for being a classy role model for young women everywhere.