A MAJOR WEEK FOR LPGA, PGA.

Byline: DAVE SHELBURNE

Following a season opener that produced the lowest 72-hole score in LPGA history and back-to-back weeks that yielded scores of 60 on the LPGA and Champions tours, the pros turn up the heat considerably this week with one major and one should-be major.

Davis Love III leads the charge on the PGA Tour's stepped-up schedule, opening a title defense Thursday in the non-major but competitive, rich and storied Players Championship at TPC of Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., where the field will include 48 of the top 50 players in the world rankings.

The same day, Annika Sorenstam opens her bid to sweep the four LPGA majors when she tees off in the Kraft Nabisco Championship at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, where she has won two of her six majors.

She is taking on history as well as the strongest LPGA field of the young 2004 season, since no player on her tour ever has won all four majors in the same year. But Sorenstam, 33, also has a history - of rising to the occasion.

She shot 59 in one tour event, came from 10 strokes back in the final round to win another, won 11 LPGA tournaments in 2002 and has 49 overall in less than 10 full seasons.

Her first LPGA victory came in the U.S. Women's Open, in 1995, and she won it again the next year. She also has back-to-back wins in the Kraft Nabisco, in 2001 and 2002. Last year, she won two more majors - the LPGA Championship and Women's British Open - to complete a career grand slam, and she held the lead in the final round at the Kraft Nabisco and U.S. Women's Open.

So, history or not, difficulty or not, she already has been close to a Soren-slam. And here she comes again, fresh from a four-stroke victory in the Safeway International, played last week on a course longer than any the LPGA faced in 2003.

``This is the kind of start of the season that I was looking for,'' she said after that 18-under-par performance on the Jack Nicklaus-designed Prospector Course at Superstition Mountain Golf Club in Arizona.

--Playing for history: Love's final-round 64 to cement a six-stroke victory at the 2003 Players Championship tied the final-round Players record set by Fred Couples in his winning effort in 1996 and put Love on a winner's list that looks like a Who's Who of the PGA Tour's past quarter-century.

Jack Nicklaus won this tournament three times, including the inaugural event in 1974, when it was known as the Tournament Players Championship, a title it held until 1988.

Other multiple winners include major champions Couples, who won in 1984 and '96 and set the tournament course record of 63 in 1992, when Love won his first of two titles; Steve Elkington, in 1991 and '97; and Hal Sutton, in 1983 and again 17 years later in 2000.

Twelve of the past 13 winners also have won majors, including Greg Norman, who tied Couples' 18-hole record in 1994 on his way to a 72-hole Players record of 264. That finish was made memorable by runner-up Fuzzy Zoeller, toweling off a red-hot Norman in a reversal of Norman's towel-waving mock surrender to Zoeller's brilliant shot-making in their playoff in the 1984 U.S. Open.

Among the highlights at Sawgrass was Couples hitting into the water that abuts the signature par-3 peninsula green, then hitting his second shot into the cup for par, subsequently making the cut by a stroke and rallying to make the leaderboard by the final round.

Al Geiberger and David Duval, two of only three players to shoot 59 in a PGA Tour event, have won the Players Championship. Chip Beck, the other man to shoot 59, lost the Players by a stroke in 1989 to Tom Kite, another major champion.

No. 1 in the world Tiger Woods also is in the Players champions' ranks. He won by a stroke in a stirring duel with Vijay Singh one year after losing by a stroke in an equally dramatic stretch run with then-41-year-old Sutton in 2000 - when Woods went on to win three majors and six other tour events in one of the greatest seasons ever.

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PURTZER

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ON THE GREEN