...Coming pretty quickly.

As an illustrative point, let me cite two quotations mentioned roughly 90 days apart on this website:

“[Jiyai Shin] will be the best player in the world by this time next year – which means she only has to get past one player” – Mike Clayton, November, 2008.

“While the second half of Ochoa’s 2008 was hardly a disaster, it fell far shy of her stunning first half, at least opening up the possibility that her anticipated long run at number one might be shortened by the imminent maturation of players like Yani Tseng, Paula Creamer and, especially, Jiyai Shin. One week in Thailand does not by itself eradicate such possibilities, but it certainly sets a tone as we move forward...” – Me, last week.

Chalk one up for Mr. Clayton, who’s looking more and more prescient by the week, while my sense that Lorena had made a significant stand took less than seven full days to begin showing cracks. Of course, if last week’s victory in Thailand didn’t completely guarantee Ochoa’s long-term presence at the summit, Shin’s subsequent triumph in Singapore hardly leapfrogs her all the way there either, but...

It wasn’t so much that the 20-year-old Korean defeated an elite field at the HSBC Women’s Champions, but rather how she did it. After standing tied for 32nd (seven shots in arrears) at the halfway mark – and still some six behind after a third-round 66 – Shin charged out of the box like a world number one on Sunday, birdieing the first four holes to launch herself immediately back into the fray, then coolly adding birdies at the 11th and the par-5 15th to edge third-round leader Katherine Hull (who came home in a disappointing 40) by two.

True, the win will likely only lift Shin into fourth place in the Rolex Ranking, and she’ll need to log several more significant victories before the idea of actually overtaking Ochoa numerically becomes a realistic possibility. But the diminutive and amiable Shin has, within the last 10 months, beaten powerhouse international fields at the Women’s British Open, the JLPGA co-sponsored Mizuno Classic, the season-ending ADT Championship in Florida, and now at the HSBC Women’s Champions.

So if she is number one by November of 2009, remember who said it first (hint: it wasn’t me).

Elsewhere, aside from India’s Jyoti Randhawa carding a smoking third-round 62 en route to winning the Asian Tour’s Thailand Open, we must take note of the impressive victory achieved at the PGA Tour’s Honda Classic by Shin’s countryman Yong-Eun Yang. Yang entered play standing a stellar 460th in the Official World Ranking, but this number has clearly been skewed by his decision to spend the last few seasons swimming upstream in America instead of racking up rankings points back in Asia, where he is a four-time winner in Japan, as well as the 2006 Korean Open champion. Most impressively, however, Yang won the 2007 HSBC Champions, edging a certain Tiger Woods by two strokes in Shanghai. That victory earned Yang full status on the European Tour (who co-sponsored the event), which in turn got his Western career off and running – another example of how much easier it is today for young foreign players to find their way to America.

And win.

And finally, true, the WGC events still fail to generate much worldwide, Major-like excitement, and this week’s WGC-CA Championship can well be viewed as little more than the old Doral Open on steroids, but... It’s not very often that the entire worldwide top 50 are present in a single field, meaning that someone is in for a World Ranking points bonanza next Sunday night. Should that person happen to be named Garcia, Mickelson or Ogilvy, and should Tiger Woods happen to struggle in his first post-surgery stroke play event, then the bunching atop the World Ranking may really start to become newsworthy...