WOMEN'S TOUR:World number one Lorena Ochoa is chasing her second major this weekend, writes LAWRENCE DONEGAN
TIGER WOODS has a rival, but alas for those who yearn for the days of epic contests to match Nicklaus versus Watson, she does not compete on the same circuit as the greatest player of the modern era.
Lorena Ochoa was the 5 to 4 favourite to win the first women's major of the year, the Kraft Nabisco Championship at the Mission Hills Country Club, which began last night in Rancho Mirage, California. And she has started much as she means to go on; a four-under-par 68 had her lying second, just one shot behind England's Karen Stupples, with most of the first-round cards in.
The above odds are short at an event featuring the very best in the game - Woods can be had at the same price for the Masters - but in truth they do not quite capture the extent to which the 26-year-old Mexican has come to rule the women's game - a dominance akin to that of Joe Calzaghe fighting at supermiddleweight and Woods going head to head with Stewart Cink over the back nine on Sunday afternoon.
At the very least she is, in the words of Paula Creamer, who is likely to be one of her main challengers over the weekend, "the player to beat".
Creamer is one of the more feisty competitors to ever swing a club and does not concede superiority easily but she seems happy to extend the compliment to Ochoa, and for reasons that having nothing to do with sisterly courtesy.
Since winning the Women's British Open at St Andrews last summer Ochoa has started 11 events and won seven of them. She has won two of the three tournaments she has played in this year; the first by 11 shots and the second, last week's Safeway International in Phoenix, by seven.
She could only finish in a tie for eighth in Mexico last month, a disappointing result that can largely be explained by the off-the-course commitments she faced on returning to Mexico, where she is a national heroine.
As for the statistical comparisons with Woods - since the start of the 2006 season he has won 18 times, she has won 16 times. Like Woods, she has turned the world ranking into a foregone conclusion for the foreseeable future, having collected more than twice as many ranking points as her closest rival, Sweden's Annika Sorenstam.
The similarities extend beyond the facts and figures into attitudes and personality. Despite his dominance Woods is a restless soul, forever striving to improve. Ochoa is more reserved but appears equally driven. Her reaction to establishing herself at the top of the women's game was to spend the winter working on a putting stroke she deemed flawed.
"I used to have a little bit of an outside backswing and then a little loop and cut the ball a little bit, but we were able to eliminate that loop, and it's a lot easier," she explained this week.
"I'm back to having a pretty straight, square alignment. It looks good. I feel comfortable. There are still times that I go back maybe because on tournaments, I'm not 100 per cent there, but I like the changes."
She then rattled off a distinctly Woodsian checklist of other aspects to her game that could stand improvement: "Travelling, resting, chipping, putting, moving the ball with my irons; everything; the communications I have with my caddie, the strategy - last week I made three or four dumb bogeys. There's always room for improvement.
"I think when that's up, it's time to go home. You need to find something where you can improve, and I'm going to keep looking for that."
As for the comparison between Woods's dominance of the men's game and her current run of form, the women's number one was flattered but unconvinced.
"It's very different where he is and what he's doing. But I do believe that in every tournament I play I'm there to win and I'm 100 per cent ready to do my best and give myself a good chance to win the tournament. I'm doing that, just every week, and try to get as many as possible," she said before addressing the question of what she could learn from Woods.
"I think we all want to know what he has in his head, inside."
It was a typically modest response from an eminently modest individual, but it was rooted in what many view as the flaw in the Mexican's game.
Unlike Woods, Ochoa has long carried a reputation for crumbling under the pressure that comes with trying to win the really big events. Her victory at St Andrews brought to an end her long wait for a major championship and answered some of those doubts, but it did not completely erase them.
A second major would finish off that task, especially if it was achieved at the Mission Hills club, which has been the scene of two of her more notable meltdowns.
In 2006 she carried a three-shot lead going into the final nine holes only to lose in the play-off to Karrie Webb, while last year she was tied for the lead until she took a quadruple-bogey seven at the penultimate hole.
Some players never recover from such crushing disappointments but it says much about Ochoa's state of mind, and her status as the Tiger Woods of women's golf, that she could brush aside previous misfortunes on the eve of this year's tournament and sound every inch the presumptive winner.
"I already erased them," she said when asked about the last two years. "I only feel good things about this course, and good vibes and good memories. Of course, you're going to make mistakes and have a few bad holes, like what happened on 17 last year.
"I struggled on holes 13, 14 and 15. They were holes that I played over par, and I'm going to work on those this year and make sure I play that stretch of holes in a positive way."
