Chris Carlson / AP

Annika Sorenstam, right, jumps into the lake with her sister, Charlotta, after Annika won the Kraft Nabisco Championship golf tournament Sunday. Annika obliterated the field, didn’t make a bogey in her last 39 holes and won by eight shots, but hardly anyone noticed, writes columnist Tim Dahlberg.

A survey last year by New York-based Scarborough Research showed that only 6 percent of those asked said they followed the LPGA tour at all, compared to 17 percent for the men’s tour. Surprisingly enough, more men identified themselves as LPGA fans than women, while more women said they were fans of the men’s tour than the women’s.

Sorenstam herself had to tee it up in the Colonial on the men’s tour to get the kind of publicity her 59 wins haven’t come close to matching.

Sorenstam’s problem doesn’t end with gender. She plays on a tour that has some decent players, but they live in an insular world all their own and rarely try to reach out to mainstream sports fans.

A 12-year-old plays in one major, a 13-year-old in another. Michelle Wie is the most exciting thing to happen to women’s golf, but she has yet to win one tournament, much less 59 of them.

Since not enough fans care, neither do the networks. Women’s golf struggles to get ratings, and ABC devoted just a few hours of weekend coverage to the Nabisco. Even that was an improvement over the first few tournaments of the year which were on the little-watched Golf Channel.

Sorenstam has done all she can to bring attention to herself and her sport. She played against men, shot a 59, hits the ball long and wins almost every time she tees it up.

Sorenstam has also in the last few years managed to shed her innate Swedish shyness. She smiles on the golf course, tries to interact with fans and didn’t hesitate to take her sister and mother with her in the traditional plunge into the pond on the 18th hole Sunday.

Like Woods, Sorenstam is arguably the greatest player ever of her gender. Like Woods, she had gotten rich playing a game she loves.

Unlike Woods, she will likely end her career before ever getting the acclaim for her deeds. She won’t even fully get it then because she’s a woman in a sports world dominated by men.

Unfortunately for Sorenstam, that’s just cold reality.

But it doesn’t necessarily make it fair.