On a cool Friday morning in mid-December, Paula Creamer is hitting balls at her alma mater, IMG Academies, the prestigious sports complex for young athletes in Bradenton, Fla. She is hard to miss: tall and leggy, her trademark pony tail poking from her cap and Pink Panther headcovers peering out of her pink TaylorMade bag. Other players at the practice area seem galvanized, even awed, by her presence. The young ones wait respectfully for an opening—a pause between shots, a sip of water—before approaching her for an autograph and to take her picture. About 100 yards away, a group of teenage boys loiter, watching her from afar, until one of them, a slim kid with bushy hair, gets up the nerve to stroll over and ask her to sign a club cover. ("What'd she say?" his compadres ask when he returns with his prize.) Creamer graciously obliges her fans' requests and, after exhorting them in her baby-doll voice to "Play well!" returns to hitting one deliberate shot after another, which arc effortlessly into the hazy sky. After about 20 minutes of this, she goes inside the golf school headquarters. Positioning herself next to a large mirror on the wall of a small, cluttered room, she practices her takeaway, keeping a close eye on her technique, not unlike the way those boys outside had kept their eyes on her.
Minutes later, her coach, David Whelan, director of IMG's David Leadbetter Golf Academy, arrives to confer. Whelan, a former European Tour player from England, has been her coach for four years, and they have the easygoing rapport of old friends. The steady stream of fans doesn't surprise him. "We may have to practice elsewhere," he says. "There are too many distractions here. A year ago, she was just another student."
Whelan doesn't have to say what Creamer is now: a star. Her record—two LPGA wins (plus two more wins in Japan), the Louise Suggs Rolex Rookie of the Year award, a No. 2 ranking behind Annika Sorenstam—accounts only in part for her popularity. She is a born performer, mediagenic, articulate and preternaturally poised. Above all, she is fearless. At the final LPGA event of the season, the ADT Challenge, she and Sorenstam butted heads twice over the rules, first over a ball mark on the 16th green, and then on the 18th. Sorenstam's tee shot had ended up in a bunker inside a marked lateral water hazard, and she wanted to take an advantageous drop. Creamer insisted she re-tee. An official finally made a compromise decision, but Creamer had served notice that she will not be intimidated—by anyone.
The encounter was a teaser of showdowns to come, and one reason that the 2006 LPGA season is one of the most anticipated in history. If Creamer and the new crop of like-minded young players—notably Morgan Pressel, Michelle Wie and Japan's Ai Miyazato—play to their potential, they could usher in a golden age of women's professional golf.
Both Creamer and the LPGA are in the right place at the right time. In 1972 Congress passed Title IX, the federal law that guarantees schoolgirls equal access to educational opportunities, including sports. By the time Creamer reached middle school in the late 1990s, she had her pick of sports: soccer, swimming, gymnastics, acrobatic dance, T-ball, tennis. At 10, she discovered the game she was born to play, and eight years later, she was winning professional events on golf courses from New York to Tokyo, snagging sponsorship deals and posing with large cardboard checks.
"Paula Creamer is Title IX exploding on the golf course," says Christine Brennan, the USA Today sports columnist. "This law told girls it was okay to play sports, to be tough, to play like the boys and still look like a girl. If Billie Jean King had had a master plan of what women's sports would look like in 2006, it would be Paula: Play all these sports, love them all and then pick one that, by the way, can make you a millionaire a few months after graduating from high school."
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