Boston ? I first got involved in integrating golf last summer, as a member of a small feminist subcommittee at a quirky 9-hole course in Maine. We quietly and subversively liberated a Ladies’ Tee with a sign renaming it the Forward Tee.

This was not done, I hasten to add, because the women on the committee longed to play from the Men’s Tee. It was a subtle boon to older island men who could no longer make it over the gully from the greater distance and who also wouldn’t lay a club on anything labeled Ladies. In short, it was a ploy to make the game unisexually easier.

This is what distinguishes me from Annika Sorenstam: I think golf is waaaay too hard already. Of course, what also distinguishes me from Annika is about 90 yards on our best drives. But let’s not go there.

It’s the search for a challenge that brought this champion of the Ladies Professional Golf Assn. (the Forward PGA?) to the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas. She is the first woman to play in the PGA since the redoubtable Babe Didrikson Zaharias in 1945.

Annika has won 49 LPGA tournaments, 11 in the last year, and once turned in a score of 59. With that wipe-out record, no one surely would deny her the chance to test herself against the PGA. Well, actually Vijay Singh would, but the Fijian pro bowed out of the tournament after wishing her ill. And pro Fred Funk sounded like Fred Flintstone when he grumbled, “she’ll be taking a spot from somebody who’s trying to earn a living.”

Anyway, what’s intriguing is not the remarks of men whose handicaps are higher off the fairway than on. What’s notable is that Annika did not get the attention of the world until she was picked to play with the boys.

Before that, she was arguably the least-known best athlete around. She earned $2,863,904 last year, which isn’t exactly peanuts, but it was 41 cents for every dollar Tiger earned. That’s worse than the average working woman’s 76 cents to the male dollar.

Now, she’s had gigs on “60 Minutes” and Jay Leno. Sports Illustrated said she had the best head in the game, and hundreds of reporters went to record her every shot.

There is something a wee bit familiar about all this. It’s not just an echo of the Billie Jean King match with Bobby Riggs. (Fortunately this was not cast as another Battle of the Sexes.) But women do get more attention — criticism and respect, money and status — when they compete with men on male terrain.

We know this is still true in the work world. But it seems true as well in professional sports. A lightweight boxer doesn’t have to “move up” to the heavyweights to get the same status, but in many sports women are still dubbed second class as long as they are separate class.

This puts us in something of a pickle. We’re watching a generation of remarkable women athletes. The list of “first” and “only” and “breakthrough” women grows longer. Today’s female stars, like the buff Annika, would wallop yesterday’s male superstars.

There’s no reason why women can’t compete on the same turf in sports such as horse racing or stock car racing when, as Donna Lopiano, the head of the Women’s Sports Foundation, quips, “the athlete is the horse or the car.” We have as well a growing list of sports such as mixed doubles in tennis that are constructed for coed teams.

But in sports where strength matters, including golf, what happens if the exceptions such as Annika move “up”? Does the No. 1 woman become the No. 28 man? Does she leave a void in the LPGA? Does that help or harm women’s sports?

I’ve wondered about that from time to time as I’ve watched school sports. I have cheered the new girl on the boy’s team. “You go, girl.” We applaud the individual athlete. At the same time, I’d rather the entire girls’ team moved up a notch in skills and status. “You go, team.”

Marcia Greenberger, a Title IX advocate who shares some ambivalence, says about school sports, “Separate hasn’t yet become equal. But if we didn’t have separate, we’d be even further from equality.”

Ultimately, Lopiano suspects, we’ll have three categories of professional sports: his, hers and theirs. The real fun of sports, she adds, is competition between equals. It’s more fun seeing Serena against Venus than against Andre Agassi.

So, Annika — you go, girl. Playing the PGA is probably a one-shot thing and a publicity shot thing. But all in all, it would be better to find the competition growing and the spotlight glowing on the women’s own turf.

That’s my idea of a forward tee.