On a cool, sunny fall morning in lower Manhattan, Natalie Gulbis boards a ferry for the short hop across the East River to Governors Island, home to a historic Coast Guard station that was shut down in 1995. There, on a long-dormant military course, she will compete in the Manhattan Golf Classic, a charity skins game. Wearing black Adidas warm-ups, the tall, slim blonde strides up the gangplank, followed by two of her three agents, two television producers and a camera crew for her reality show on the Golf Channel, and two friends from Atlanta who have come to keep Gulbis company during her stay in New York. Her entourage numbers in the double-digits. At 24, Natalie Gulbis is "an LPGA sensation," which is why she can command a substantial fee for three days of clinics, a dinner cruise and the tournament, all captured on video. Juggling BlackBerries and cameras and sound equipment, the group trails her through the ferry's passenger section, down a narrow aisle between two long wooden benches, exiting through a low doorway that opens onto the bow. Along the way, they pass an athletic woman in khakis and an acid-green vest sitting quietly on the bench by the door. She is Annika Sorenstam, Gulbis' teammate for the event, which pits them against Tom Watson and Donald Trump in an ersatz "battle of the sexes." Sorenstam, the world's top-ranked woman player, has an entourage too, albeit smaller: an assistant, her sister, a family friend and her parents.
Gulbis begins to sign autographs as the cameras roll. Her long, platinum ponytail cascades out of the back of her baseball cap and catches the morning light. Her blue-green eyes are rimmed with black liner and mascara, and her lips glisten with gloss the color of Bazooka bubblegum. "That's Natalie Gulbis," one man whispers to his young son. "She's a good golfer, but she models for swimsuit calendars too."
"Golfer" and "swimsuit model" are two occupations not usually mentioned in the same sentence. But then, Natalie Gulbis is not your typical LPGA Tour player. At 5-foot-9 and 135 pounds, she has a gym-honed physique and the willingness to reveal it in four annual calendars and two pictorials in FHM, a now-defunct lad magazine that named her one of the world's 100 sexiest women in 2005. (She was No. 97.) And yes, she is a very good golfer. A First-Team All-American at the University of Arizona, Gulbis narrowly lost the LPGA Tour's 2002 Rookie of the Year title. In six seasons on tour, she has finished in the top 10 25 times—including a heartbreaking playoff loss to Mi Hyun Kim at the 2006 Jamie Farr Owens Corning Classic—and earned almost $2.5?million. Her string of nine consecutive top-20 finishes in majors include four in the top 10. In 2005 she helped lead the U.S. Solheim Cup team to victory and finished tied for sixth on the LPGA Tour money list, the first LPGA Tour player to earn more than $1 million without a win. That's also the year her reality show first aired on the Golf Channel. In it she floats through her busy life, from fashion shows to shopping trips to swimsuit shoots. Lots of footage of swimsuit shoots.
But here's the problem with reality shows: They're fundamentally inauthentic, hybrids of true and contrived events. Actually, Gulbis' life is far more layered than the show lets on. It avoids anything controversial or complex, such as her fierce competitiveness, her ambivalence about being a sex symbol and the intense pressure on her to win her first tournament. In trying to capture Gulbis' off-course life, The Natalie Gulbis Show misses the dramatic tension that propels her as she juggles her quest for greatness on the course with her quest for fame off it. This duality typifies today's image-driven sports environment, where an athlete's Q rating has become as important as her putting average. "To be a sports superstar, you have to have both: the talent and the looks," says Jan Stephenson, the Australian LPGA Tour player who predates Gulbis as golf's pinup girl. Stephenson's sexy advertisements for Dunlop in the early 1980s were criticized at the time, when women's sports had a strong feminist subtext. "In my day, we were fighting for the fact that we were professional athletes," adds Stephenson. "Nowadays, if you've got it all, you need to flaunt it to make money."
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