Have you noticed who's sitting on top of the women's professional golf world? It's not Annika Sorenstam, a rejuvenated Karrie Webb, or Michelle Wie. No, it's the pride of Mexico, Lorena Ochoa, the youngest recipient and only golfer to ever receive Mexico's highest athletic accolade, the National Sports Award.

After winning the Samsung World Championship, her tour-leading fifth title this year, Ochoa appears to be a lock to end Sorenstam's five-year reign as the LPGA's top player. Interestingly enough, both Ochoa and Sorenstam played collegiately at the University of Arizona, where Lorena was known to put in a 10K run even before golf team conditioning began at 6:30 a.m.

Ochoa, a third-year pro, is a versatile athlete who has competed in triathlons, half-marathons, and even something called an ecothon, where entrants vie in mountain biking, trekking, swimming, kayaking, and rappelling.

What makes her story appealing is that it breaks the mold. Not only is she just the second Mexican to earn a spot on the LPGA tour, she represents a small golfing minority of just 18,000 players in a country of over 100 million people. Her success has opened the eyes of many girls and young women in a culture that traditionally hasn't encouraged their pursuit of sports.

• One of my favorite features in the "ESPN College Football Encyclopedia" is a section that shows how the helmet at each major college has changed during the past 50 years. Some of the traditional powers, such as Penn State and Nebraska, have changed the design of their helmets hardly at all. Notre Dame has pretty much stuck with its solid gold helmets, but to my surprise I learned that from 1959 to 1962 they were adorned with a green shamrock, while in 1963 they bore each player's number. In fact, at about that time, numerals on helmets were very "in." Now, they've pretty much disappeared. Why? I'm guessing there are two main reasons: The numbers were never that visible from the stands, and maybe more important, teams like to use logos that brand their teams and help sell licensed merchandise.

• Since Fenway Park is still standing, I might want to know a little more about the website that is selling wooden pens made from Fenway seats before buying one of the pens for $220, plus shipping and handling.

•Even if Joe Gibbs doesn't take the Washington Redskins to another NFL championship, he's already the only NFL coach to win three Super Bowls with three different quarterbacks: Joe Theismann, Doug Williams, and Mark Rypien. None of the QBs are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

•To be a college or pro football referee these days means you've got to be good at making announcements. It must be a daunting task to stand on the field, before a full stadium and possibly millions of TV viewers, and make penalty calls while providing succinct explanations of various rulings.

• I keep thinking that one of these days I'll wake up and find that Major League Soccer is more than an afterthought on American sports pages.

• Watching the long-suffering Arizona Cardinals lose to the undefeated Chicago Bears when it appeared to be Arizona's night was agonizing. The Cardinals were playing  in front of a national Monday Night Football audience, had a capacity crowd in a spectacular new stadium, and held a 20-0 halftime lead. A win clearly had the potential to be a turning point for the franchise. What was particularly hard to swallow is that the Cardinals held the Bears without an offensive touchdown and still lost, 24-23, after Chicago roared back with a field goal, two fumble-recovery runbacks, and a game-winning 83-yard punt return for a touchdown. Arizona still could have won, but their ever-dependable placekicker Neil Rackers missed a very makeable 40-yard attempt in the last minute. The collapse so frustrated Cardinals coach Dennis Green that he fired the team's offensive coordinator, Keith Rowen, after the game. After such a morale-deflating loss, Arizona must quickly regroup and find a way to beat the league's only winless team, the Oakland Raiders, six days after losing to maybe the NFL's best team.

• Perhaps Buzz Bissinger is nocturnal. He has authored two books about sports played at night. The more famous of the two is the bestseller "Friday Night Lights," the story of Texas high school football that is the basis of a new critically acclaimed TV series. The lesser known is "3 Nights in August." The latter is an in-depth look "inside the mind" of St. Louis Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa. Although books of this kind can be a little too "inside baseball," in one nugget La Russa describes Charlie Lau as the person who "singlehandedly influenced the game of baseball more than any other individual in the past quarter century." That, indeed, is high praise. Lau, who died in 1984, was a batting coach with the Yankees, Kansas City Royals, Baltimore Orioles, Oakland A's, and Chicago White Sox. Lau identified certain principles that have been adopted even by current players who never knew him. Among other points, he emphasized swinging from the top to bottom with no uppercut, and also making a complete follow-through, in which the top hand comes off the bat at the end of the swinging arc. Look for this the next time you watch a televised game. Among the players to adopt this technique is St. Louis slugger Albert Pujols.

• Sometimes I wonder if Muhammad Ali ushered in the era of trash talking in sports, and if he did, if he ever wishes he could end it.

•Is there any doubt that Lee Corso is the football version of Dick Vitale, the fast-talking, high-energy basketball analyst. It's been so long now since Corso last coached or played the game, a little review may be in order. He and actor Burt Reynolds were teammates and roommates at Florida State University in the 1950s. As a head coach, Corso sandwiched stints at Louisville and Northern Illinois around 10 years at Indiana University, where he led the Hoosiers to their first bowl victory in 75 years (a 38-37 win in the 1979 Holiday Bowl).

• Is there a NFL defensive player who competes with greater heart or is more fun to watch than undersized Miami Dolphins linebacker Zach Thomas? If so, I haven't seen him.

• Sorting through my mail at home the other day, I came upon a piece that appeared to be from the Women's National Basketball Association. It turned out to be a credit card application from  Discover Card. The connections to the league were hardly major incentives to sign up: a special edition WNBA card, access to Discover Card WNBA fan lounge events (after-game parties for schmoozing with players), and eligibility for exclusive offers at WNBA.com. The timing of the mailing seemed a little odd, given that the league's 10th anniversary season ended Sept. 9.

• Here's a novel seasonal promotion from the Detroit Shock, the champions of the WNBA: downloadable stencils for use in carving the facial images of several players and Coach Bill Laimbeer into pumpkins. Fans are encouraged to send in pictures of their  Halloween jack-o-lanterns for posting on the Shock website.

• It's a little early to call it a trend, but last Saturday I noticed that the wives of two college football coaches, Texas A&M's Dennis Franchione and Indiana's Terry Hoeppner, charged onto the field to hug their husbands after upset victories (A&M over undefeated Missouri and Indiana over 15th-ranked Iowa). It was heartwarming stuff.