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Annika Sorenstam embarasses males during Skins Game

Golf's Silly Season officially arrived, as it has for the last two decades, with a Skins Game that lately has been aging about as well as some week-old Thanksgiving leftovers.

As it turned out, there wasn't anything silly about Annika Sorenstam beating up on the men.

The Skins Game was in desperate need of a spark, what with Tiger Woods taking the week to enjoy his new engagement instead of playing for the US$1 million chump change offered up in the made-for-TV event.

Sorenstam provided it, holing a spectacular 39-yard eagle shot from the sand on the ninth hole for US$175,000 that made her the biggest winner of the day and left network television executives chortling with glee.

The only thing better would have been if Vijay Singh was the victim, not poor Phil Mickelson, who can't seem to do anything right on the golf course these days.

"I thought it was pretty cool," said Mickelson, who went 0-5 in the Presidents Cup last week. "It would have been even more cool if it were me."

Vijay was invited to play, but he had other plans that didn't include Sorenstam. In South Africa, they were offering guaranteed money just to show up at the Nedbank Challenge, where there were no women around to embarrass a guy.

Sorenstam wasn't out to embarrass anyone, of course. She just wanted to hit the ball down the middle, maybe make a putt or two and, hopefully, not get embarrassed herself.

She did even better than that, showing that in this format at least, the gap between the best woman's player in the world and some of the men isn't as big as you might think.

"I'm pretty much in shock, I must say," Sorenstam said.

Sorenstam hadn't won anything until she holed her eagle shot on the final hole of the day. But she played well enough to hold her own, denying Mickelson a skin on the fourth hole with a birdie putt and being the only player in the group to stick it on the green in two on the par-5 seventh hole.

She also got the first two kisses of the Skins Game, from Mark O'Meara and Fred Couples, after sinking her sand shot.

Without Tiger around, it was about as good as contrived television could get, as long as you could get past the baffling decision to include O'Meara and Couples in the foursome along with Mickelson and Sorenstam.

O'Meara was the defending champion, though it seems the only reason he got in last year was he is Tiger's good friend. Couples is past his prime, but he looks good on television and that was enough to get him in his 10th Skins Game.

It wasn't exactly like 1983, when the Skins Game chartered new offseason territory for golf with a lineup that included Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson and Gary Player.

In those days -- before golf purses skyrocketed -- the players would get excited over being able to win US$10,000, or even US$25,000, on one hole.
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