Ochoa backs public course

BY DAVID AGREN/Special to The Herald Mexico
El Universal
November 14, 2005

In a city park filled with mechanical rides, a go-kart track and fading athletic facilities, Guadalajara golf star Lorena Ochoa and her management team envision their field of dreams. Theirs is a plan that would not only provide a place for aspiring golfers and weekend duffers to practice their chosen sport, but would also help pioneer a new concept in Mexico: the public golf course.

"Lorena Ochoa has as a goal … to make golf more popular," said Rodrigo Suárez Gilly, a partner in Ochoa Sports Management, an organization that represents the golfer's business interests. "The only way to make the sport of golf more popular is to invite people to play."

Golf, a game accessible to the masses north of the border, remains out of reach for the average Mexican. According to Ochoa Sports Management, fewer than 20,000 Mexicans play golf. Besides the high equipment costs, virtually no public courses exist. Some private clubs allow public access during certain hours, but the green fees are often steep. Additionally, potential players usually require an invitation to enter a club.

The Ochoa Sports Management proposal would "make the sport less expensive," Suárez said. "It's having public places so that people go play not necessarily as members."

STAR POWER

To achieve their objective, Ochoa Sports Management expects to leverage the popularity of Ochoa, one of the nation's best-known female athletes, whose sporting success has been making headlines in Guadalajara for more than a decade. She won five world junior titles before receiving a scholarship to the University of Arizona.

Ochoa dominated the college ranks, finishing atop the leader board 12 times in three years. Since turning professional, she has won more than US3 million in prize money. She currently ranks fourth on the LPGA money list.

"All the sports in this country have grown when they had a sports figure," Suárez explained, pointing to Chihuahua native and National Basketball Association journeyman Eduardo Najera as an athlete who enhanced his sport's stature here after achieving success abroad.

"If you don't have a figure, people are not interested."

As an initial target group, Ochoa Sports Management is targeting a younger, sportsminded demographic; people familiar with golf and Lorena Ochoa but who have never picked up a nine iron. And to make the game even more accessible, the group is eyeing Parque Ávila Camacho for their course, an easily-accessible tract of land near the Guadalajara-Zapopan municipal boundary, a chip shot away from the exclusive Guadalajara Country Club, where Ochoa learned to play.

Other plots of land surrounding the Jalisco capital piqued their curiosity, but a long journey to the suburbs would drive up the cost for potential golfers.

"The idea is that someone can play 18 holes for US20," Suárez said.

Guadalajara public officials, however, have so far been cool to the idea. Still, Ochoa Sports Management wants civic involvement.

"It's not a profitable investment for a private company to install a public golf course," Suárez explained. "It might be something profitable in the long term."

A PRIVATE AFFAIR

Private clubs have sprung up all across the country over the past 25 years. Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas have become popular golf destinations. Golf legend Jack Nicklaus has designed 12 courses in Mexico. Many of the new developments don't permit non-members to tee it up or freeze out potential players with high prices.

"Hardly anyone has the chance to play golf," said Gustavo Pérez García, an 18-year-old golfer, who plays at the Chapala Country Club in San Nicolas de Ibarra, Jalisco.

Pérez previously worked as a caddy at the club, which allowed him an opportunity to access the nine-hole course. Nowadays, a group of members sponsor him, providing Pérez the chance to practice and participate in tournaments when not working at the country club.

"It's a lack of money that keeps people from playing," he explained, adding that few of his neighborhood friends, who grew near the golf club, have ever tried the sport.

Published in the Miami Herald, Mexico Edition.

Lorena Ochoa calls it quits

Guadalajara golf star Lorena Ochoa officially announced her retirement on Friday, saying she wanted to focus on other priorities such as family and her charitable work in Mexico.

She plans to play her final competitive tournament early next month at an LPGA tour stop in Morelia.

Ochoa departs as the No. 1 player in the world and perhaps the most dominant female gofer of the past decade – at least the latter half of it. She won 27 times and claimed two majors, although her early career was marked by near misses and a sense of being snake bitten in the big events

But she accomplished the rare feat of becoming one of the country’s best-known athletes even though she competed in a sport with a limited profile and one that offered few opportunities for the masses to easily discover – Mexico has no public golf courses, something Ochoa and her foundation have long wanted to change.

Ochoa was perhaps Mexico’s top female athlete over the past decade, along with former world champion sprinter and 2004 silver medal winner Ana Guevara. She might have been Mexico’s top overall athlete. (Who else? Barcelona defender Rafael Marquez?)

In Guadalajara, where sports coverage begins and ends with the soccer club, Chivas, Ochoa is a living legend. My former editor at the Guadalajara Colony Reporter often recalled covering Ochoa and a young Tiger Woods winning world junior golf championships in the early 1990s.

How much golf has grown in Mexico because of Ochoa’s exploits is uncertain – she was certainly no rags-to-riches story, having learned to play at the pricey Guadalajara Golf and Country Club. But she became an icon and true sporting heroine in a country that often lacks much in the way championships or international exploits.

The good ol' boys roll into Mexico City

The left-hand-turn circuit (Nascar) comes to Mexico City this weekend for a Busch Series race - on a track that doesn't just feature left-hand turns. And based a successful 2005 debut, expectations for this year's event are high - especially with former F1 star Juan Pablo Montoya participating. A number of drivers apparently expressed reservations about running the inaugural race, but according to an ESPN.com story, the only unhappy campers this year were "the merchandise haulers that follow stock car drivers around the Busch and Nextel Cup series [who] aren't quite comfortable making the trip to Mexico City."

A member of Montoya's team jokingly noted that while the Colombian driver's stuff was possibly selling well outside of the race track, "nothing licensed" was being moved. (There's nothing like an army of tianguis vendors hawking pirated merchandise to spoil the party.)

Vendors aside, Mexico City makes an odd stop for auto racing with its elevation (2,200 meters) and distance from Nascar's heartland, but it is the second-largest city in the world and with Nascar increasingly reaching out to a non-good-ol-boy crowd, the Mexican capital is a logical stop.

The race also reflects the growing importance of the Mexican market to U.S. professional sports organizations. The PGA Tours just staged an event near Cancun last week - its first tournament in Mexico. The LPGA, piggybacking on Guadalajara golfer Lorena Ochoa's success, now has two Mexicans stops and the NFL drew more than 100,000 fans to Estadio Azteca for a regular season tilt between two struggling teams in 2005. Look for this trend to continue, although talk of putting an NFL or MLB franchise is just that: talk - at least for now.