You come off a vacation week of five rounds of golf in seven days and taking more swings than you’d care to take, and your first assignment back is five days of watching others play golf.

Could be worse, right?

So today I’m at the rained-out morning portion of the HSBC Women’s World Match Play Championship pro-am.

My first order of business was to talk to Annika Sorenstam. Last year she was asked a pre-Sybase Classic question about Michelle Wie’s quest to qualify for the men’s U.S. Open. Her answer was a quick, “I wish her well.” I heard that and wrote that Sorenstam sounded cold when she said it. This hurt her, and she sent word to me about that.

I had always found Annika warm and charming, and at the very least accessible, especially for a true superstar of sports. And when I found out that my comment hurt her, that bothered me. Normally I take my shots and move on. But this bothered me. I spoke to some writers who cover her regularly, and to her caddie, and they told me that Sorenstam was simply tired of the Wie questions at that point, and that she answered the question honestly without getting too involved in a topic she’d wanted to avoid. And that she wasn’t being cold.

So today I finally has the opportunity to speak to her about it. She remembered it. Wow! And she was so nice about it that I apologized for misreading her answer. She simply said, “Let’s put it behind us.”

In this business, you don’t normally have favorites. I’ll admit, Sorenstam has always been one of my favorites. Now she is even more so.