IT CAN'T GET ANY SWEDER THAN THIS.

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

You expect Sweden's sports stars to have names like Bjorn and Ingemar and Gustav and Gunnar and cavort on courts and slopes and ice and pools. The last thing you would figure on is this icebox of a country producing a professional golfer - or a few dozen.

And yet this Scandinavian country of 8.8 million keeps manufacturing them, one after another, as efficiently as a deluxe freezer does ice cubes. Robert Karlsson is the latest Swede to come to the U.S. and defrost his game.

He followed a first round of 71 with a 5-under-par 66 Friday to almost certainly cinch his biggest payday in six PGA Tour starts. Unless he's buried by an avalanche of bogeys over the weekend, Karlsson will surpass the $5,750 he earned for finishing in a tie for 65th at last year's PGA Championship outside of Seattle.

A greenskeeper's son, Karlsson is one of 11 players looming four shots behind Bob Estes. By all accounts, Karlsson should have keeled over from jet lag by now. Since the start of the year he has traveled from Florida to California to Great Britain to Thailand to Australia to Malaysia to the United Arab Emirates to Hong Kong and back to California.

Karlsson, an esteemed member of the European PGA Tour, is chasing the fame and fortune that his compatriots Jesper Parnevik, Annika Sorenstam, Liselotte Neumann, Catrin Nilsmark and Helen Alfredsson already have cornered. Or were you so flummoxed by Dennis Rodman's ongoing flirtation with the Lakers you failed to notice that Swedes finished first, second, third and sixth at the LPGA event in Glendale last week?

On the men's side, Gabriel Hjertstedt is widely credited with becoming the first Swede to notch a PGA Tour win, at the 1997 B.C. Open. While it's true Hjertstedt was born in Sweden, he moved to Australia when he was 11 and took up golf after that. Which leaves Parnevik, the winner of the 1998 Phoenix Open, as the true pioneer.

Indeed, had he remained in his birthplace of Umea, Hjertstedt, 27, said Friday he doubted he would have become a golfer. It's understandable. Why would he have wanted to embrace a game that was about as popular among kids back then as cooties?

When Karlsson took up the game as a youngster in the late 1970s after dabbling in soccer, ``I was looked at funny,'' he said. ``People said, `Why would you want to do that?' It was like you weren't really an athlete.''

His own father, Bjorn, tends the greens of the Katrineholm course where Karlsson honed his game, but the father has never putted on them. Bjorn is not a golfer. Never was, Karlsson said. He was, rather, a car mechanic who decided a change of scenery would do him and his family good.

That's how Karlsson came to the game. If a soccer pitch had been his backyard and not a golf course, he probably would have tried to follow in the cleats of Gustav Wetterstrim, who once scored four goals in an 8-0 World Cup win over Cuba.

Instead, Karlsson forged his own path. When he was 16, he joined the Swedish national team, which enjoys the kind of corporate support lavished on colleges and pro leagues here, and the world became one endless fairway. At 19 he turned pro and he has been bouncing around Europe ever since.

NHL stars Peter Forsberg and Mats Sundin, former Olympic and World Cup skiing great Ingemar Stenmark and Olympic speedskating champions such as Tomas Gustafson continue to hold the Swedish sporting public in sway.

But thanks to the success of Parnevik and Sorenstam and Co., golfing is gaining popularity. Pia Nilsson, the first Swede to attend a U.S. college on a golf scholarship, has played no small role in the transformation of the sport from its geek stature some 20 years ago to its cachet of cool today. Under her direction, the Swedish junior golf program has become just about the hippest club around.

You can't help but marvel at the results. A country with 250,000 golfers and some 300 golf courses has more players on the European PGA Tour than any country save England, Karlsson said.

Then there's Sorenstam, Alfredsson, Neumann and Nilsmark, who have 33 LPGA victories (including four majors) among them. Their success has fueled the popular perception that the Swedish women are a few strides ahead of their male counterparts. (Scandinavian Airlines last year fueled the debate by sponsoring a showdown of the sexes, a sort of Bobby Riggs-Billie Jean King for the 1990s. The match between the two threesomes ended in a draw, Karlsson said).

If the women appear to be outperforming the men, it could be that there's more reason for the women to commit to playing a full schedule in the U.S. than the men. The men's European Tour is more established than the women's equivalent, the result being that Swedes such as Karlsson are able to make a comfortable living and keep improving their games - ``the most important thing,'' Karlsson stressed - without leaving the continent.

The women, as Karlsson explained it, ``are sort of forced to come here,'' so considerable is the difference in the competition and the cash prizes in Europe and in the U.S. Too, it helps that the LPGA Tour includes events in Japan, Australia and England, whereas the PGA Tour is confined to these shores.

No matter, one thing is as clear as all those Scandinavian complexions: The Swedes no longer are content to follow, they're out to take the lead.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--2) Robert Karlsson, top, shot a 5-under-par 66 on Friday. Gabriel Hjertstedt, left, was the first Swede to notch a PGA Tour win.

John McCoy/Daily News