TITLE IX BABIES.(Ivan Lendl's golfing daughters and athletic discipline)

Dayna Ohotnicky is one of the top female golfers at the Torrington Country Club, in northwestern Connecticut. Her parents were both good amateur players, and she learned the game as a child, in the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties. In 2004, she made it to the final match in the women's club championship, a tournament she had won twice in the past. On the seventeenth hole, a long par three, her opponent hit a soaring five-wood shot, which ended up a few inches from the cup. "That shot just blew me off the course," Ohotnicky told me recently. She lost the match, one down.

Ohotnicky's opponent was Daniela Lendl, who was eleven years old and was playing with scaled-down golf clubs, manufactured by a company called U.S. Kids. Daniela is the second youngest of the five daughters of Ivan Lendl, the former tennis star, who owns a ten-bedroom house on several hundred acres not far from the club. She prefers to be called Crash, a nickname that she acquired as a young child because she was always charging into things, and she's a little like Ramona, the engagingly self-possessed heroine of the series of children's books by Beverly Cleary. When Crash was eight, she told her father that she wanted to play ice hockey, and he let her stay up one night to watch a televised women's game, in the Olympics. Early in the first period, two players were pressed against the boards, trying to control the puck, and Crash asked, "Why didn't she just smash her into the glass?" Ivan said, "There's no checking in women's hockey," and Crash said, "You're kidding." She watched for a few more minutes, then, disgusted, went up to bed.

Crash--who recently set the women's course record, 68, at Shingle Creek Golf Club, in Orlando, Florida--isn't the only gifted golfer in the Lendl family. Marika, who just turned sixteen and is the eldest of the sisters, and Isabelle, who is fourteen, are both ranked well ahead of her, nationally, and have both won important junior tournaments. Marika and Isabelle have also played in adult events, including the Connecticut Women's Open. Marika played well in a tournament on the Futures Tour, which is the Ladies Professional Golf Association's equivalent of the minor leagues, and in 2004 Isabelle was the youngest player, at thirteen, to qualify for match play in the U.S. Women's Amateur. The youngest sister, Nikola, known as Nikki, is eight years old and is just beginning to play. The only non-golfer among the girls is Caroline, who is Isabelle's fraternal twin; like her mother, she rides horses, and she hopes to compete in the Olympics someday.

The golf-playing Lendl girls are part of a major revolution in their sport which, over the next few years, will transform the L.P.G.A. Tour. Annika Sorenstam, who is thirty-five years old and has been the No. 1 player on the tour for the past five years, is probably the best female player of all time, the women's counterpart of Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods, but after her and a group of other top players the level of play drops off considerably. Heather Daly-Donofrio, who has won two L.P.G.A. events, told me that when she joined the tour, in 1998 (she graduated from Yale in 1991 with a degree in history and turned pro two years later), it was unusual to find more than a few other women on a driving range, and lifting weights was unheard-of. The new young players have more in common, athletically, with Babe Didrikson Zaharias, who dominated women's golf in the late nineteen-forties and early fifties and was a co-founder of the L.P.G.A., in 1950. Zaharias was unafraid to compete against men, and played with an intensity and power that, in her time, were viewed as sinisterly masculine. Ron Sirak, the executive editor of Golf World, told me, "These kids are the first generation of Title IX babies. Their mothers were the first beneficiaries of that legislation, which said that colleges had to give equal money to women's sports, and they grew up in families where it was O.K. to play games. It wasn't like in my generation, where athletic girls were viewed as sort of odd." Stina Sternberg, a senior editor at Golf for Women, said, "There are many ...