At Pine Needles, Annika Sorenstam looks forward to the memories, and a lap of honor
It would be hard to imagine a U.S. Women’s Open at Pine Needles without Annika Sorenstam, who won the first open there in 1996 and contended in the next two. Her presence, as the dominant player in golf at that point, loomed over everything, not to mention her longstanding friendship with the late Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club owner Peggy Kirk Bell.
There will be no imagining a fourth. As Senior Women’s Open Champion, Sorenstam earned an exemption to this year’s Women’s Open in June. And since it’s at Pine Needles, she’s going to use it.
Even at 51, she wouldn’t miss it.
“Peggy Kirk Bell, I got to know her, and then of course winning there in 1996,” Sorenstam told The News & Observer. “I feel like there’s a lot of synergy. And also just being around the game a little bit more helps me with the mentoring I do with my foundation and the players I work with. There are few things that check a lot of boxes.”
At Pine Needles, even almost four months out, there are already signs of the tournament to come. The Women’s Open logo is emblazoned on nearly every door and window, with some of the infrastructure already constructed.
Still, Pine Needles is different now than it was the last time the Women’s Open was there, in 2007. It was renovated before that tournament to be closer to Donald Ross’ original design, then underwent the same natural restoration four years ago as Pinehurst No. 2 and No. 4 and, across the street, at Mid-Pines, with sandy waste areas and wire grass replacing expanses of Bermuda rough in a return to true Sandhills golf.
It’s also a different Sorenstam, whose return to Pine Needles is more about spending time with her husband/caddy and two teenage/tweenage kids, and savoring a cherished place than it is contending again.
“My game is not where it was then,” Sorenstam said. “I have to have a different approach, rely on experience, enjoy the moment. I’m playing for something bigger than maybe I was back then.”
Sorenstam first met Bell, who died in 2016 at 95, as a teenager spending the summer in Pinehurst, coming over from Sweden to play the amateur season. Bell took the youngster under her wing, driving her around town in her limousine. In true Peggy fashion, unable to adequately pronounce Sorenstam’s name, she nicknamed her “Heineken,” even though Sorenstam was neither Dutch nor a beer-drinker.
But in 1996, as Sorenstam walked up the final hole with an eight-shot lead on her way to winning her second straight Women’s Open, she could hear one voice above all the others: “Heineken!”
“I played so well that week,” Sorenstam said. “I was in the zone. I was in the zone a few times in my career but that was like extreme. Things were just going my way. I was hitting shots and got good bounces. It was just my week. You can’t see it, but when I say it, I’m smiling. That’s really what brings back so many great memories and why I want to go there again. If this would have been a course somewhere else I’d never been to, I probably wouldn’t be playing.”
There’s always something sentimental about the Women’s Open returning to Pine Needles, where Bell for decades exerted an outsized influence not only on the women’s game but golf in general. But it has been 15 years now since the last visit, as the USGA has started to take the Women’s Open to venues like Oakmont and Pebble Beach that for a long time were exclusive to the men — or Pinehurst’s fabled No. 2 course.
The women were last in the Sandhills in 2014 at the historic double open, following the men down the road on a different Donald Ross course, and they’ll be back in two years to do it again. The crossover in 2014 was great for women’s golf, and will be again in 2024, but there’s also something to be said for going to smaller, less prestigious venues where the women’s game reigns supreme.
There’s a reason the USGA picked Pine Needles for the inaugural Women’s Senior Open in 2019. Sorenstam wasn’t yet eligible then.
“Pine Needles has the history,” Sorenstam said. “We’ve been there three times. I think that matters. And if you can sprinkle in some of the Pebble and some of the history like this, it’s great.”
This story was originally published March 13, 2022 at 6:27 AM with the headline "At Pine Needles, Annika Sorenstam looks forward to the memories, and a lap of honor."
