OCHOA: The top female player in the world has the power to transcend the game.
photo credit:LPGA

The success of Lorena Ochoa, the world’s top female player, inspires an entire nation. But the city that spawned her remains a golf backwater. 

To get to the heart of Mexican golf, you must travel well beyond the sparkling zonas turistas, with their gleaming high-rise hotels, immaculate, high-dollar fairways and postcard seaside settings. Instead, you must fittingly journey inward, to old Mexico, a land few Americans manage to see. Today, the heart—el corazón—of Mexican golf beats in the slight frame of Lorena Ochoa.

Publicly, Ochoa is at once engaging and enigmatic. Her shy smile earns millions for her corporate sponsors in Mexico and around the world, but it is when she speaks of helping the children of her homeland, most of whom will never touch a golf club, that it seems most genuine. She comes from a background of privilege, growing up in a home just off the first fairway of the exclusive Guadalajara Country Club. Yet she regularly joins Mexican crews during lunches at LPGA tournament sites. Somehow, she belongs to all. Her shy smile brings millions from Mexican and international corporations, yet its intensity deepens when she gives it away for free to the children of her homeland, many of whom may take up golf because of her.

Intrigued by Ochoa, her background and her possible impact on the game, I set out to find the Mexico that has yielded this young champion and humanitarian. It takes only a short flight to reach Guadalajara—a city few American tourists know, a place with a history and culture as exotic as its name.

Guadalajara sits at the foot of the Sierra Madre. From the air, it appears as if the city has been splattered across the landscape—random cornfields, subdivisions and shopping centers—an enormous Jackson Pollock canvas. There are no golf courses in sight. Neither are there any golf clubs in the baggage claim, save for mine, and they attract a few stares. Some cities are born for golf; Guadalajara, it seems, has had golf thrust upon it.

“Do you know of Lorena Ochoa?” I ask the  taxi driver as he looks at my clubs and wonders how to fit them into the trunk.

He nods. “Sí. She is the golf champion.”

Ochoa exploded onto the LPGA Tour when she turned pro in 2003. Last season, she won eight times, raking in a record $4.3 million and raising her career victory total to 17. She recorded 21 top-10 finishes in 25 starts and captured her first major title—the Ricoh British Women’s Open. In addition, she tied for second in the U.S. Women’s Open. Throughout her ascent, she has impressed players, officials and fans with both her play and her sportsmanship. Colorado fans may remember Ochoa from the 2005 U.S. Women’s Open at Cherry Hills, when, with just one hole to play during a spectacular final-round charge, she hit her tee shot into the water and made quadruple-bogey. She noted her disappointment, but said it would make her a better golfer. Apparently it did.

Today, Lorena Ochoa is the unquestioned number one in women’s golf. She shares the game characteristics of her dominating male counterpart, Tiger Woods, leading the LPGA in victories, money, scoring average and birdies. She hits it long and is a creative shot-maker, having honed her skills by hitting shots over, under and around trees at Guadalajara Country Club as a young girl. She is a fearless putter. As a competitor, she doesn’t blink. She grew up competing against boys nearly twice her age. Even now, she runs competitively and is a strong swimmer.

Off the course, she also draws comparisons to Woods. Her Lorena Ochoa Foundation is one of Mexico’s most successful philanthropic programs. She has won Mexico’s National Sports Award four times since 2001, was named 2007 Sportswoman of the Year by the U.S.-based Women’s Sports Foundation and was listed on lists of Women of the Year by both Glamour and Newsweek.

In other words, like Woods, Ochoa is succeeding beyond the arena of golf.

The physical manifestation of this phenomenon—a BanaMex billboard from which Lorena gazes into the haze over Guadalajara—greets us from the roadside.

It’s the first and only sign of golf we’ve seen during the drive from the airport, which features a gauntlet of taquerias, strip joints, barrios and mechanic shops, all strung together with an endless thread of graffiti. The skyline is low and vast, with no towering landmarks to provide orientation. An occasional park interrupts the commercial monotony.

“Are many people playing golf now because of her?” I ask in broken Spanish.

He shakes his head, answering with certainty, “No. Must be very rich.”

Guadalajara itself is not exactly poor. The metro area, second-largest in Mexico, is home to more than three million Tapatíos—as Guadalajarans call themselves. As capital of the state of Jalisco, Guadalajara is a center for regional and nation trade and politics. Tourism is an economic force, but not a driving one. The occasional American who ventures this way finds a Mexico that is a far cry from Cabo or Cancún.

For Ochoa, Guadalajara and Mexico as a whole are hardly places to leave behind. Instead, she views it as part of her mission to open the eyes of people around the world to the beauty and the needs of her homeland.

“You are coming to Guadalajara? That is so good. It’s a wonderful city,” Ochoa says in a phone interview. “You will see so much there.”

She e-mails me with sights and tips. Armed with this local knowledge, I venture out. Guadalajara is the kind of city that separates the traveling wheat from the chaff. It has all the inconveniences of a major foreign city—a baffling layout, inconceivable traffic, noise and smog. At its core, however, is a beautiful colonial center that rivals the finest European cities. The area around the Metropolitan Cathedral and Liberation Plaza serve as a gathering place for both natives and visitors. School buses park in front of the many museums in the downtown area. Street-vendor calls mix with the squeals of children. Old and young alike gather on the steps of the Municipal Palace to play chess in the evenings. Mariachi bands—Guadalajara is the birthplace of the distinctly Mexican music performed by these groups—give free concerts in the square at the Plaza de Armas. Duck down the narrow alleys and streets that feed off the squares to find restaurants, clubs and shops offering colorful textiles and pottery.

After working up an appetite walking around the expansive plaza, I follow my curiosity through the streets and into a gated building surrounding a large courtyard. This turns out to be La Fonda de San Miguel, housed in an authentic colonial building that was dedicated as a convent in 1694. Nuns and various Mexican military groups fought over the property for centuries. Today it is one of Guadalajara’s definitive dining experiences. I expand my knowledge of Mexican food with a huge bowl of molcajete a stew with fried chicken and vegetables.

Perhaps no one knows more about the rich stew of Mexican golf than Sandra Fullmer. She is the daughter of Percy Clifford, who helped re-establish golf in Mexico a couple of decades after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) cut the budding sport off at the knees and who built many of Mexico’s first-generation golf resorts, including the course at the world-renowned Acapulco Princess. Fullmer frequently won Mexican women’s championships in the 1950s, often competing against a similarly strong player from Guadalajara, Wiffie Smith. She emphasizes that Mexican golf is much older than the 24-year-old Lorena.

“Listen,” Fullmer says. “Lorena Ochoa is a wonderful young player, but she’s not the first woman from Mexico who could play golf. People don’t understand that before the revolution, golf was growing in Mexico just as it was in the U.S. Many Scots from the same families who were bringing golf to the States also established shops and courses in Mexico. Alex Smith (who contended in the 1913 U.S. Open eventually won by Francis Ouimet and who later died when the clubhouse at his Mexico City club was attacked by Zapatistas) taught my father how to play golf.”

But until Ochoa, the country had never produced a player of international stature. A product of Guadalajara Country Club, a club so insular and private that they turned down repeated requests—including those by the Mexican Tourism Board—for access during development of this story, Ochoa dreams of the day when more of the children her achievements inspire will have a way to take up the game. She is involved in a new project—El Rio—on the outskirts of Guadalajara, and she is in the process of launching the Ochoa Golf Academy with former PGA Tour player Rafael Alarćon, her longtime instructor.

But golf has a long way to go in Guadalajara. I find that out during my day at Atlas Country Club. Perched on the side of a hill overlooking the city, Atlas has a burgeoning membership of more than 700 golfers who test themselves on a demanding 7,100-yard Joe Finger/Ken Dye design.

My host for the round is an affable young Mexican professional, Juan Sanchez Rosas. He is a long-hitter, a fast talker and something of a jokester on the course, on which he grew up. He has known Lorena Ochoa since both were eight years old.

“Yes,” he says, “you could see then that she was the one. She went to the Junior World Championships and won in every category. There were not many opportunities for young golfers. She took advantage of the ones she had.”

As for Juan, he has never tested his game outside of Mexico. Without connections or scholarships, it’s tough to take the game to the next level.

“The golf associations here could be better,” Juan says. “They are going to have to learn to work for the people, not [for] just a few, if they want the game to grow.”

Chad Jones, perhaps more than anyone else, understands the future of Mexican golf. A gringo recruited from his position at the International Junior Golf Academy in Hilton Head by a handful of wealthy Guadalajara parents, Jones directs youth instruction programs at both the Guadalajara and Atlas country clubs.

“People are proud of Lorena Ochoa,” Jones says. “The junior programs are three times what they were a few years ago. She is definitely having an impact, but the question is what to do with the interest? There just aren’t enough courses. She is trying to help grow the game, but a lot of kids will try it at a driving range and then go on back to soccer or baseball when they realize they can’t get out and play.”

I watch him lead a half-dozen well-dressed Mexican boys from the range down through the eucalyptus trees to the putting green and then on to the first tee. They are enthusiastic, preparing for the club matches against Lorena’s home course.

“The problem,” Jones says, as he barks instructions at his charges, “is that, in the end, you still have to buy your way onto golf courses here. It’s not easy for kids to really move through golf even in America. But here…,” he shakes his head. “Here there is just nowhere to go.”

 “We want golf to grow in Mexico, of course,” Lorena says. “But that is a slow process. Children are growing up, golf or not, and that is what is most important to me, and that is why I started the foundation.”

The Lorena Ochoa Foundation has already overseen the construction of La Barranca, an arts-based elementary school that sits on the lip of a sweeping gorge high above Guadalajara. Most of the 235 children who attend do so on foundation scholarships. Ochoa is now leading the push to build a high school alongside the elementary school.

“The most important thing anyone can do is to remind young people of the possibilities in their lives. I am so grateful to golf for giving me this opportunity.”

It is unlikely that golf will ever be the national pastime of Mexico. But golf sometimes transcends itself, and that seems to be what has happened with Guadalajara and Lorena Ochoa. Her sport may remain a curiosity. But her achievements do not. Here she is winning more than golf tournaments.

She is winning hearts.

Tom Ferrell is a contributing editor.