WHAT ANNIKA'S FOES ARE REALLY AFRAID OF.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

She seems to be having fun. That's what all the pictures show. That's how all the quotes read.

How dare Annika Sorenstam?

If she's going to play the PGA Tour, she should know its unwritten first law, which is that players must not under any circumstance look as if they're enjoying themselves, lest someone get the impression their assault on par is any less solemn a venture than the Liberation of Baghdad. She should know a professional golfer is supposed to trudge across 7,000 yards of manicured lawn looking as cheerful as a hitchhiker in Antarctica. She has to learn she's supposed to scowl through the day as if her spikes had been screwed onto her shoes from the inside.

Instead, Annika has been caught smiling and joking in the days leading up to this morning's opening round of The Colonial, the tournament in Fort Worth, Texas, that marks the first appearance by a woman in a men's tour event since Babe Didrikson Zaharias played the Los Angeles Open 58 years ago.

No wonder some of her male opponents don't want her there.

The woman is threatening to shatter the illusion PGA Tour has worked so hard to create. If she's allowed to continue this way, there's a danger she'll reveal pro golf for what it is: A sport, a game, entertainment.

Imagine if Sorenstam somehow made it to Augusta National one day - not as a member of the country club, obviously, but as a contender in The Masters. She'd probably get caught giggling on the first tee. Jim Nantz of CBS would choke on his ecclesiastical tones.

Next thing you know, she'll want to go skateboarding on the floor of the Senate.

Ever since a Colonial sponsor's invitation to play was extended in February and Sorenstam accepted, I've tried to figure out how anybody could object to the LPGA Tour's dominant figure testing herself on the PGA Tour.

``She doesn't belong!'' said Vijay Singh, who wants to keep women golfers in their place.

``It reeks of publicity!'' said Nick Price, because, as you know, until this pro golf would never have stooped so low as to seek the benefit of newspaper or television exposure.

Now, looking at the reports out of Fort Worth, I see why the guys are so upset.

Annika skips into town on a free pass, getting into a tour event without sweating the life-and-death trial of a qualifying tournament.

She surmises that she has a chance to make the second-round cut, which, in the odds-defying event it happens, means she'll have shown up dozens of opponents who always believed stopping a 5-iron on a firm green is the ultimate proof of masculine courage.

And she does it with the most cherubic little smile you've ever seen on a golfer, as if striking a stationary ball with the best tool technology can produce is not the hardest human deed this side of performing open- heart surgery.

Pro golf's promoters are always reminding us that a day on the links is a sterner challenge than life itself. As if we need to be reminded how hard it is. We've all missed a two-foot putt.

So how would it look if a 5-foot-6 woman outplayed some of the best men in the world?

Price's charge that Sorenstam is playing some kind of ``publicity'' stunt is what shows how deluded these guys are.

It wasn't too many years ago - before Tiger Woods and the golfing boom - that the PGA Tour would have begged for publicity of the sort Sorenstam is delivering to them.

Golf was still seen as the reserve of people born with silver spoons in their mouths and sand wedges in their hands. It was a lot of shapeless blond kids taking turns being The Next Jack Nicklaus. People watching paint dry would say, ``This is like watching golf!''

Surrounded as they are today by awe-struck galleries and soft-edged golf writers, PGA Tour players have forgotten those leaner years and have come to think the sports world revolves around them. They don't realize what a tournament like The Colonial, without Tiger on the entry list, looks like to 99 percent of the public. A blank square on the calendar.

Unless the woman who rules the LPGA the way Woods rules the PGA (and then some) is on the entry list.

Then the public cares.

I set the alarm for 6:58 this morning so I can watch Annika Sorenstam tee off on TV. Not because her success or failure in a PGA Tour event will prove anything about anybody. Not because what she's doing will have any impact on the world beyond the out-of-bounds markers.

Because it's just a little game of golf and she's the only one who seems to know it.

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Photo:

Annika Sorenstam, celebrating after chipping in on the fourth hole during pro-am competition Wednesday, hopes she has more happy moments beginning today.

David J. Phillip/Associated Press