By Max Adler
Photos By Hunter Martin/Getty Images
May 9, 2008
When Paula Creamer asked her caddie to hold her head on the fourth tee in Sunday's round, it wasn't because she was suddenly feeling nauseous about the possibility of letting another tournament slip away. That feeling probably came later, at the 72nd hole, when her 12-foot attempt for par burned the edge and she found herself heading into a second playoff in as many weeks. No, in this instance, "Hold my head" was the call for caddie Colin Cann to anchor the butt of a club like a fulcrum on the brim of her pink cap, then stand back while she made practice swings, a drill that prevents her from straightening her right leg.
"It's one of my tendencies I go back to under pressure ... [the drill] helps me keep my chest high and my head high so I can have better width in my golf swing," Creamer explained later, sitting contentedly next to the glass SemGroup Championship Trophy she secured by marching down the second playoff hole and making birdie against Juli Inkster's par.
From that fourth tee all the way to the clubhouse, Creamer kept asking Cann to hold her head, which he obliged. Despite a slew of terrific approach shots on the back nine and the charged atmosphere of a large final-pairing gallery, the duo just kept plodding, keeping tireless attention to mechanics. And if that illustrated anything, it was that Paula Creamer tried hard, so hard, to win.
"I grinded out there all day long," Creamer said, her cheeks flushed from four days of work in the Oklahoma wind and sun. "I was not going to lose this week. ... I had one goal in mind this week and that was to win this golf tournament."
The tenacious 21-year-old not only captured her sixth career victory and her second of the season but also halted Lorena Ochoa's consecutive win streak at four. If Creamer came into this week with a little fire in her belly from the nervy playoff slip to Annika Sorenstam at the Stanford International Pro-Am, Ochoa had the opposite mindset. All Ochoa had to do was keep doing what she was doing, keep riding the wave. Typically, the most mid-round analysis you will ever catch from Ochoa is a casual wave of her left wrist as she walks, as if releasing a club.
In bullfighting, and also in flamenco music, there is a term known as duende. It resists definition, rather being simply recognized in performers who appear to possess it, however fleetingly. It has been described as something akin to a mysterious power, and when a performer is able to summon duende, he or she can pull off the most impossible tasks effortlessly, almost mindlessly, as if in a trance. Looked at another way, duende is the ability to get out of one's own way, or to self-forget.
Considering the psychological gauntlet they go through each week, professional golfers would seem perfect applicants to join toreros and singers as recipients of the term. And given Ochoa's heritage, it feels even more appropriate that it be used to shed light on the magic of the winning streak that commenced at the Safeway International the last week of March. But duende, like all streaks in all things, eventually comes to an end.
If you're a realist who doesn't cotton to such fanciful words, and are simply looking for a physical reality to explain Ochoa's loss, look no further than the wind. As one Tulsan said as he watched a spectator chase down the miniature Mexican flag that had ripped free from her hat, "It always blows like heck here in Oklahoma."
The wind buffeted the course from different directions during the first three days, making any big movements up the leader board virtually unthinkable. For the fans who came expecting to watch history be matched (Nancy Lopez won five in a row in 1978, and Annika Sorenstam matched the feat in late 2004-early 2005), they never saw the world's No. 1 woman play herself into the tournament -- but never really saw her play herself out of it either. Like a baseball player on a hit streak, each round felt like an at-bat for Ochoa. She never got a hit.
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