There's no stopping Ochoa

GUADALAJARA, Mexico -- The house where Lorena Ochoa grew up overlooks the swimming pool at Guadalajara Country Club, a playground paradise for a tiny, wiry girl with big dreams.

She would scamper to the tops of magnolia and ceiba trees that crowd the golf course. She would swim and play tennis and hold putting contests for a peso until it was too dark to see the hole.

"Lorena liked to play fantasy games -- hit it over the tree, between the branches, over the rocks," said Shanti Granada, who began playing golf with Ochoa at age 7. "She always stayed to hit practice shots, always with an extra imagination to make practice fun."

From these beginnings rose the best female golfer in the world.

Ochoa, 26, already has met the performance criteria for the Hall of Fame. She has won five times in six LPGA Tour events this year, crushing the competition by a combined 37 shots, and this week in Oklahoma she will try to win her fifth straight tournament and tie a record held by Annika Sorenstam and Nancy Lopez.

A month later, she will be a heavy favorite to capture her third straight major.

Heady stuff for a kid from a soccer-loving country where there are fewer than 300 golf courses. Rafael Alarcon, though, might have seen this coming.

Ochoa was drawn to Alarcon, a local PGA golfer, when she was about 8. She would stand behind him as he hit balls, peppering him with questions and following him around the course, until he one day invited her to play.

As the trophies piled up -- Ochoa won her age division at the Junior World Championships five years in a row -- Alarcon asked her once on the practice green why she wanted to know so much about the game.

"I want to learn to beat you," he recalls her telling him. "I know if I beat you, I can be the best player in the world."

The day before she left Mexico for the University of Arizona, she did just that, by 2 strokes on the back nine.

Now in her sixth full season on the LPGA Tour, there appears to be no stopping her.

"Lorena is an amazing golfer and an even more impressive person," said Lopez, whom Ochoa considers a role model. "She has become a true superstar ... so well liked on the tour and so successful at the same time."

This is the essence of Ochoa. She has risen to the top of a sport still dominated by the wealthy in her native Mexico, where green fees often cost five times the average daily wage. Yet she is loyal to the working class who care for the golf course and to impoverished children who have never seen the game played.

"She has always been sincere and friendly," said Francisco Javier Lopez, who has worked on the Guadalajara golf course for 18 years. "Now that she's winning and winning, she's just the same as before, very humble."

Hometown papers call her "La Reina" -- the queen -- and praise her as much for her humility as her 280-yard tee shots.

She already has her own charity, sponsoring a school for needy children in the Guadalajara area. On the road, she often takes time to meet with Latino groundskeepers, even helping them cook breakfast just before this season's first major championship.

And she has vowed to quit the LPGA Tour after 10 years to start a family, always the most important part of her life.

"My family is the one that keeps me happy. It's my motivation," she said in March. "They make me feel normal, and I love that."

Ochoa's parents -- her father is a real estate developer, her mother an artist -- raised their four kids in a small house overlooking the country club, just 15 minutes from the cathedral and colonial plazas of Mexico's second-largest, sprawling city.

She was 5 when her father put a golf club in her hand, and success soon followed -- a state championship at age 6, a national title at age 7, and the first of five straight world championships a year later.

None of that was an accident.

Granada recalls how she and Ochoa were the only girls in a weekly golf class with 15 boys. The two played together everyday after school for the next 10 years, following a detailed practice schedule that Ochoa sketched on notebook paper and carried with her clubs.

A Catholic, Ochoa prays daily and crosses herself before every round, often on the first tee. Friends say that faith feeds her confidence, keeping her calm and balancing her other interests in life.

"The best thing about Lorena isn't what she does on the golf course," Allen says. "The way she cares about people and wants to make their lives better, that's who Lorena really is."

At La Barranca, the Guadalajara elementary school she sponsors, low-income students race to hug her when she visits.

Interest in Ochoa is exploding across Mexico, as thousands of kids and adults crowd courses in ribbons and baseball hats, chanting "Lo-re!" and running from hole to hole alongside her. This fall, she will become the youngest player to host her own LPGA event there, the Lorena Ochoa Invitational.

Ochoa and her brother already have opened two academies to train instructors and hope to help build public courses, an effort to make golf more accessible.

"The country looks to Lorena because they've identified with her career and what's important to her," Alejandro Ochoa says. "She's an inspiration to keep going, never quit and, despite the circumstances, stay humble and tied to your goals."