Annika Sorenstam Is the Only Woman to Shoot 59 in a Professional Tournament

Annika Sorenstam shot 59 in an official LPGA event in 2001, and no other woman has broken 60 in professional competition before or since. She won 72 LPGA titles and 10 majors, and in 2003 became the first woman in 58 years to play a PGA Tour event.

The 59 earned her the nickname Ms. 59 and it is the single cleanest piece of evidence in her file, because it is a number rather than an opinion. More than twenty years later the list of women who have matched it is still empty. Across her career she won more than 90 professional titles worldwide and completed the career Grand Slam in 2003.

The Colonial appearance is the other. She entered a PGA Tour event at Colonial Country Club in 2003, the first woman to do so since Babe Zaharias in 1945, on a course set up for men and against a field that mostly outdrove her by thirty yards. She missed the cut by four shots and hit 25 of 28 fairways over two rounds, out-driving nobody and out-striking almost everybody.

That is the shape of her whole game. She was not long and she was not a shotmaker in the improvisational sense. She was relentlessly, mechanically accurate, and she paired it with putting good enough that she led the tour in scoring average eight times. Between 2001 and 2005 she won 43 tournaments, which is a rate of dominance the women's game had not seen since the 1960s.

The counterarguments are serious and they attack the trophy count directly. Kathy Whitworth won 88 LPGA events, more than any golfer of any gender has won on a single tour. Mickey Wright won 82 and, more importantly, took 13 major championships to Sorenstam's 10. Patty Berg has 15 majors. On the two most common measures, most wins and most majors, Sorenstam finishes behind other women.

Her case rests on era and on peak. Wright and Whitworth competed in far shallower fields, before the game went global; Sorenstam won hers against Korean, Mexican and Australian players who did not exist in the LPGA of 1963. She also has the 59 and the Colonial, and nobody else has either.

The verdict: Sorenstam for the modern era. Mickey Wright for the majors. Whitworth for career wins.