Post by boolaboss on Mar 31, 2013 3:47:01 GMT -5
By Scott Bordow
USA TODAY Sports
It's been 10 years since we were introduced to Michelle Wie.
She was 13 years old, all arms and legs and even then the sound of the ball coming off her club was, well, different. Ernie Els said Wie had the best swing he had ever seen, and Wie fulfilled those strong words when she became the youngest player to make an LPGA cut at the 2003 Kraft Nabisco Championship. The following year she became the fourth, and youngest, female to play in a PGA Tour event when she teed it up in the Sony Open.
LPGA FOUNDERS CUP: Complete coverage
The world of golf was hers to conquer, and there was talk of Wie becoming the first woman to play in The Masters.
Then life got in the way.
SIDELINED: Gulbis recovers from malaria
Oh, Wie won a couple of tournaments — the 2009 Lorena Ochoa Invitational and the 2010 Canadian Women's Open — but she didn't dominate the LPGA tour and become the crossover superstar that could boost the popularity of women's golf.
As a result, Wie's career has been labeled everything from a disappointment to an abject failure. Her critics, however, have it all wrong.
Wie didn't become an inferior golfer. She became a better person.
Rather than let the sport define her, Wie enrolled at Stanford and graduated last summer with a degree in communications.
She's into art and writing, she loves to bake and as her website says, "Michelle has a whole other life outside of the ropes."
Given how many professional athletes rarely escape the boundaries of their sport, Wie's choices should be applauded, not jeered.
"I think she was a child that was forced to grow up so fast," said television commentator and former LPGA pro Dottie Pepper.
"I know she came out (from Stanford), at least it seems to me, a more well-rounded person with a lot more interests.
"Golf is not the end of the world. If this is not what she decides to do when she's 30 years old, so what?"
For Wie, the decision to go to college rather than focus all her energy on golf wasn't a statement about who she wanted to be as much as it was an affirmation of who she's always been.
"Education has been important to me all my life," she said Wednesday, as she prepared for the RR Donnelley LPGA Founders Cup at Wildfire Golf Club.
"I remember when I was taking my exam to get into the high school I went to; I quit golf for a month and just studied for the exam. Stanford was definitely one of my biggest goals in life and just being able to say I did that makes me feel really good as a person."
Now that school is out, however, Wie's interests are no longer divided. After a miserable 2012 season in which she missed the cut in 10 of 23 tournaments — "It was probably the worst year I've ever had in my entire career," Wie told reporters earlier this year — she spent much of the winter overhauling her swing with coach David Leadbetter.
"We took apart everything. There was a couple of bloody (golf) gloves in the process," Wie said. "But I feel good. I'm excited to play."
The results haven't been immediate — Wie finished 45th and tied for 45th in her two starts this season — and Pepper wonders if the best golf Wie ever will play occurred when she was 13.
Maybe that will be the case. Maybe Wie will never discover the gift she brandished a decade ago.
But think about this: Wie is 23 years old.
Isn't that when most people leaving school begin to flourish?
Bordow writes for The Arizona Republic
