"With talent, confidence and class, she's a champion in golf and in life." —Billie Jean King, Sports legend, a 2006 Woman of the Year
By Shaun Dreisbach
When Lorena Ochoa was five years old, she fell 15 feet out of a tree house in her backyard in Guadalajara, Mexico, and broke both of her wrists. She was a fledgling golfer at the time and might have seen this as a crushing setback. But not little Lorena. After the casts came off, she got back on the green and went on to win her first state event—and sweetly told her doctor she believed he had given her "magic wrists." Now at 26, Ochoa is the number-one-ranked female golfer in the world. "The more pressure she's under, the stronger she gets," Ochoa's brother and manager, Alejandro, has said of her.
Her history-making performance at the Ricoh Women's British Open this August proved how well he knows his sister. With a very pretty putt at the Old Course at St Andrews Links golf course, she scored a huge success for herself and all women: Until then, no woman had ever played—let alone won—a pro tournament at the oldest and most famous golf course in the world. "I'm glad I lived long enough to see this triumph," says LPGA cofounder Louise Suggs, 84, who claims that back in the day she once saw a sign outside a clubhouse at St Andrews that read "no dogs or women allowed." [A representative from The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews denies such a sign existed.] It's a victory Ochoa felt in her gut was hers before the event had even started. "Before the tournament I stood on the eighteenth green and I knew it was my trophy," she says. "Then I enjoyed playing, and just let it happen." At press time, she had already won six LPGA events in the 2007 season—one more and she'll tie Tiger Woods. To quote one LPGA insider: "The woman is on fire this year."
And at a time when so many superstar athletes have made headlines for less-than-sporting behavior (women included), Ochoa is widely viewed by peers and competitors alike as a true role model. She is famously humble—at tournaments, she likes to visit with the courses' greenskeepers. And in 2004, she started the Lorena Ochoa Foundation, which enables 240 disadvantaged children in her hometown to get an education. She's also opened two golf academies with the goal of making the sport accessible to all kids—boys and girls. This, Ochoa says, is the real legacy she wants to leave behind: "To see the effect I can have on a child's life means so much more to me than winning."
