ABSTRACT
Lorena Ochoa competed on the US-LPGA Tour from 2003 to 2010, and earned her first Major victory at the Ricoh British Women’s Open in 2007, where she also became the first woman ever to earn a tournament title at the Old Course at St. Andrews. Ochoa would hold the Rolex World Number One ranking from that point onward until her surprisingly early retirement in 2010. Throughout this essay, we rely on theorizing by Jose Esteban Muñoz (1999) to read a variety of cultural texts including English-language newspapers, magazines, and online golf periodicals as substantive and representative sources generated by key word searches on Ochoa’s ‘rookie season’, ‘British Open win’, and ‘retirement’. These texts became sites for reading Ochoa’s global sport encounters through a lens of ‘disidentification’. We consider our reading of these three career moments as our own practice in becoming attuned to a brown commons. Drawing on this analysis, we outline three core components of such an attunement: a) respecting brown communities and members as holders/agents of knowledge; b) learning to see agitative affect beyond practices of resistance; and c) re-calibrating the worldly possibilities for sport and physical activity in struggles for social and spatial justice.
