Golf: Fighting Talk Fires Sorenstam

The ninth edition of the Solheim Cup, the biennial match between Europe's best women players and their American counterparts, begins today at Crooked Stick Golf Club in Indiana, which is good news for both golfing purists and for those who prefer their sport liberally spiced with personal animosity and downright bad manners.

The traditions of the royal and ancient game put a premium on sportsmanship, in which case someone around these parts didn't get the memo. In its short history, this event has developed into one of the most compelling on the golfing calendar, as well as one of the nastiest. The highlights (or lowlights, depending on your taste) include one incident in 1994 when Dottie Pepper, a former stalwart and niggler-in-chief, of the American team, yelled "Yeeesss" after Laura Davies missed a short putt and another in 2000, when two American players watched Annika Sorenstam play a chip from just off the 13th green at Loch Lomond then, when she holed it, pointed out she had played out of turn and demanded she replay the shot.

Lest Sorenstam and Davies feel inclined to claim the moral high ground, there was another incident in 1998 when a blow-up dummy nicknamed "Dotty" served as a punch bag for the European players, at least it did until one unidentified member of the team stuck a knife in it.

The preamble to this year's event at Crooked Stick, the course where John Daly came to prominence by winning the 1991 US PGA Championship, has been mercifully free of blow-up dummy stabbings, although there has been the usual sprinkling of what is known on this side of the Atlantic as "trash talking".

Indeed, the judges of the Dottie Pepper Sportsmanship Award, a fictional and entirely sarcastic invention of a couple of journalists in the media tent, have already declared a winner in the shape of Paula Creamer, the youngest player on the American team and the new star of the LPGA tour.

Creamer may have a proclivity for wearing pink on the golf course - her nickname is "the Pink Panther" - but it appears her judgment has been impaired this week by a cloud the colour of raw meat. "The Europeans had better get ready, because they are going to get beat," she declared in her usual butter-wouldn't-melt fashion.

Such bold pronouncements might be expected from an ambitious welterweight on a Las Vegas undercard, but in the context of world-class golf they tend to sound silly, and more pertinently, they tend to be counter-productive. Nancy Lopez, the captain of the American team, clearly understands this, which explains why she has done her best to downplay Creamer's words as the product of youthful excitement.

Nice try, Nancy, but it is unlikely to work. The pairings for this morning's foursomes were not released until late last night, but it was safe to assume that every one of Europe's 12 players was relishing the chance to take their revenge on the Pink Panther, not least the greatest woman player of the modern era.

Sorenstam's days of punching dummies may be behind her but her days of making her fellow competitors on the women's circuit - from America, Europe and elsewhere - look like dummies most certainly are not. It is a brave, or possibly foolish, woman indeed who would step on the first tee of any golf course utterly confident of defeating the imperious Swede. Of course, Sorenstam is far too modest to utter such a thing, but this being Solheim Cup week she came close.

"We don't voice our opinions they way they do," she said when asked about Creamer's remarks. "But hopefully we can let our clubs do the talking."

Draw

Morning foursomes

Times BST. US names first

2pm Beth Daniel and Paula Creamer v Carin Koch and Catrina Matthew

2.10pm Cristie Kerr and Natalie Gulbis v Laura Davies and Maria Hjorth

2.20pm Christina Kim and Pat Hurst v Sophie Gustafson and Trish Johnson

2.30pm Michele Redman and Laura Dias v Annika Sorenstam and Suzann Pettersen