Tired of hearing about Lorena Ochoa? Read the L.A. Times

I sometimes like to peruse reader comments left on various stories and blogs here at WorldGolf.com. It gives me a great opportunity to mock and humiliate the reader for hours on end, thus insuring the reader will never visit our sites again and develop a seething hatred of me.

Hey, we all have hobbies.

So when I saw that reader Michelle had made a comment to Chris Baldwin’s June 2007 commentary “Lorena Ochoa stays positive while getting surprisingly little attention” I figured the time was ripe for a little reader mockathon.

Here’s what Michelle had to say: “Lorena is a great golf player, but the Los Angeles Times refuses to cover her at all. According to them, Lorena and her achievements do not exist.”

So I quickly jumped into my mockmobile and surfed right on over to the L.A. Times Web site, determined to prove Michelle wrong. After all, Lorena Ochoa is a goddess in Mexico, how could a paper in Los Angeles of all places ignore her.

Well, it turns out that reader Michelle is dead on.

First I checked the L.A. Times Sports Golf Section.

There were links to 93 articles. None of them on Lorena Ochoa. There were obviously a bunch on Tiger Woods. Several on Phil Mickelson. One on Annika Sorenstam. One on Fred Couples. One on Sergio Garcia and several on John Daly.

Lorena Ochoa, two-time defending LPGA Player of the year? Nada.

So I figured I’d look a little deeper and searched “Lorena Ochoa” on the Times site. I got 10 hits. To put that into perspective, Tiger Woods had 629 hits. Michelle Wie got 25. John Daly, 24. Or if you want to look outside of golf, Britney Spears was mentioned or featured in more than 7,000 stories. Paris Hilton more than 4,000.

Of those 12 hits, only one was a story about Ochoa. And it was a Q&A, which is journalism slang for “how about you just say some things to me over the phone or e-mail and I’ll run it as a story.” That story ran 634 words.

Every other mention of Ochoa is in a round up, sans a brief mention in a story on the Mexican Women’s soccer team. Those add up to 214 words.

I figured this had to be some error in the Times search function, so I checked Google. And found 56 mentions of Ochoa, again, mostly of the sports roundup variety. Tiger Woods? 1,380 hits. Michelle Wie? 79 hits. Lindsay Lohan? 2,910 hits.

Now, I realize that Ochoa has just returned to action, but she is the World’s No. 1 female golfer and a prominent Mexican in a city with a massive Mexican population. For her to get this limited amount of coverage from the L.A. Times is just pathetic, and yet another sign of how the all-boys’ clubs that permeate sports sections across the nation leaves readers with a very one-sided view of the sports world.

–WKW