Tapatia Lorena Ochoa quit professional golf seven years ago at the peak of her career, just two years shy of her 30th birthday.
That decision shocked the golfing community. Ochoa was arguably on course to become one of the greatest ever female players. In just seven seasons on the LPGA Tour, she had won 27 LPGA titles and two major championships, was ranked No 1 in the world for a record 158 consecutive weeks (the longest streak in women’s golf) and had been voted player of the year four straight times from 2006-2009. She missed the cut in just six of the 183 LPGA events in which she played, while posting top-three finishes in 63 (34.4 percent) and top-10s in 113 (61.7 percent)
These achievements were all duly noted Tuesday at a ceremony in which Ochoa was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame – the first Latin American to obtain this honor.
Along with fellow inductees Meg Mallon, David Love III and Ian Woosnam, Ochoa took to the stage to talk abut her career in golf and surprising decision to walk away from the tour.
“I announced my retirement at the perfect time,” Ochoa said. She is now happily married to Aeromexico chief executive Andres Conesa, and lives a more than comfortable life in Mexico City with her three children, Pedro, Julia and Diego. “I wouldn’t change it for the world,” she said.
Unlike Woosnam or Mallon, who both emerged in the golfing world from more humble and unrelated backgrounds, Ochoa had a head start – living in a house bordering the fairways of the Guadalajara Country Club, although she says her family was far from wealthy when she was a child.
Ochoa’s talent was evident from an early age: she won the first of five straight Junior Worlds age group titles at age eight in 1990.
At university in Arizona, she played in 20 college events and competed against more than 2,000 individual golfers, with only 16 beating her. She won 12 titles, finished second six times, third once and tied ninth in her only start outside the top three.
Her two major wins came in the 2007 Ricoh Women’s British Open and 2008 Kraft Nabisco Championship.
With her earnings piling up during her rapid rise to the top of the female golfing rankings, Ochoa decided to give something back to her homeland and the sport she had embraced. She set up a foundation and school in Guadalajara for underprivileged children, and in 2008 launched an LPGA Tour event, the Lorena Ochoa Invitational, which was held for six years at her home club, the Guadalajara Country Club, before moving to Mexico City. Proceeds from the tournament help support the Lorena Ochoa Foundation. She has also opened golfing academies in Mexico to help grow the game here.