Holy 14-over-par Batman

Yeah, she has lots of top-5 and top-10 finishes in majors. And no hope of winning a major any time soon. You don't get better by shooting 82-79-161-MC against the men. You get better by behaving like Paula Creamer and grinding it out every week against the women you're going to be battling for majors.

She's using LPGA rules as an excuse to play PGA events. Had she put up even a small fight, the LPGA would have happily granted her full membership considering the fact that she's the top draw they have.

Instead, she's spinning her wheels trying to play against guys who have been busting their asses for years trying to make it.

And don't even get me started on the subject of her missed childhood. You only graduate from high school once in your lifetime, and she signed up to play an LPGA event 6,000 miles away this weekend knowing full well that it would cost her the chance to attend graduation. Those are screwed up priorities.

In short, give me Paula Creamer and you take Michelle Wie. I say five years from now Creamer has twice as many LPGA major championships -- hey, Top 5's are nice but no one ever remembers who finishes 3rd at the Masters or the British -- on her resume as Wie does.

I'll go a step furher and say there's a 1-in-4 chance that Wie is out of golf altogether before her 30th birthday.

 

I'd gladly take that bet.

 

And, of course, there are years of research to back that up?

Look, she's not playing "men". She's playing a course. That's what golfers do. Who the other 143 people in the event are --- or what gender they are --- is of no consequence because none of them have any affect on any of her shots.

Now, if you want to argue that she shouldn't play "men's courses," OK. Maybe she shouldn't. I wouldn't begin to speculate on the correct way for golfers to "get better."

But don't give me that "the way to get better is to be like Paula Creamer" crap. Because for every Paula Creamer there are 1,000 would-be Creamers that did it the same way as Paula . . . and FAILED.

Why am I so passionate about this? Because I saw the same kind of herd mentality saying how the Williams sisters "weren't learning how to win" by bypassing junior tournaments in their teen years. Herd mentality ("Peyton can't win the big one"; "LeBron just isn't a clutch player") is almost always proven wrong.

BTW, when women's tennis players practice, who do you think they practice against? That's right, MEN. Because it makes them better players to practice against players they could never beat in a match.

Eighty percent of the balls Serena Williams hits in 2007 will be against a male hitting partner.

So maybe what Wie is doing will work out in the long run. Maybe it won't. The only thing I know for sure is that she still has 98 percent of her career still in front of her, so it's way, way too early to make any grand predictions of failure.

 

I'll just point out that Kournikova once made the semifinals of Wimbledon too. As a teenager. And people kept saying the big breakthrough was right around the corner. I'll bet you that Wie will someday win a major golf tournament, and she might win several. But there is no doubt in my mind that Nike and B.J. Wie screwed up in a major, major way by pushing her to go after too much, too fast. (And continue to do so.) Everyone wants her to be the female Tiger Woods before she's 20, but they'd prefer she skip right over all the hard stuff like, um, winning minor golf tournaments.

Tiger has dealt with pressure and expectations as well, or better than, just about any athlete in the history of sport. The world predicted greatness for him at age 5, and guess what? He more than delivered. But to deal with all of it, he had to become an incredibly insular and private person, and never show a hint of weakness, on or off the course. He's famous and one of the five-greatest athletes of his era not just because, like Wie, he's physically that much better than everyone else (although that's part of it) but because mentally he's been able to deal with all of it. And that didn't happen overnight. It was a process, and it evolved because of he had to deal with the pressure, pressure like winning a third straight U.S. Amateur title. When he did it, he was forever able to summon the fortitude of that moment and apply it to future golf tournaments. Wie doesn't have that. And I think that's going to be a bigger issue than people realize.

For every Tiger Woods, there are hundreds of prodigies who can't deal with the expectations and crack up, even if they have the game to compete with the best. The fact that Tiger didn't go Looney Toons is almost a minor miracle in itself. Wie seems like a really nice kid, and I hope she does figure it all out, but the people in charge of her career want her to HAVE IT ALL NOW without having spent any time on the foundation. Maybe that will turn out ok. Maybe she'll become LeBron James, and it won't matter. Or maybe she'll be Rashard Lewis, who skipped college, struggled a bit, then developed in a nice, if not transcendent, NBA player. But it would be a shame if she became Kwame Brown or Darius Miles ... or worse, Sebastian Telfair.

 

Yes, I am contending that playing from the men's tees on courses set to PGA standards is a mistake. A big mistake. She's trying to play in a world where she has to hit driver/3-iron from the rough when the equivalent on the LPGA (shorter holes, more forgiving roughs, wider fairways) is probably driver/7-iron from the fairway.

No, there have not been 1000s of failed would-be Creamers, but there have certainly been dozens. Players with Creamer's ability only come along once every few years. Wie was one of those players, and at this point there's no reason to believe Creamer won't out-perform her over the long run.

Playing alongside men isn't a total waste for Wie, but she would be much better off competing against the women on a regular basis. I go back to my assertion that she could have fought her way into full-time LPGA status and picked up experience and credibility that would have given her a legitimate right to tee it up in some PGA events the same way Annika did it.

For now, though, Wie is at risk of becoming a sad carnival freak show. This weekend's meltdown -- excuse me, her one-and-done Thursday round -- was a bad, bad omen.

 

I understand what you're saying but I'm not sure that tennis is an appropriate part of this conversation. There's a long history of very young tennis players scoring enormous success in grand slams and on the women's tour. (Though none of them had a snowball's chance of beating Top 200 men on any surface).

It defies logic because golf would seem to be less physically demanding, but for some reason there have not been many (any?) 14- and 15-year-old players capable of teeing it up against the veterans and winning majors.

 

The Kournikova comparison is laughable. For starters, the prime age bracket for women's tennis has been 16-24 for decades. Making the Wimbledon semis at her age was nothing unusual. Second, you're talking about one tournament. She never was consistently beating the top players of her generation.

Wie has contended in multiple major championships against players in their 20s, 30s and 40s.

 

I would just ask pm and others who are dumping on Wie, do you think she is determining her own schedule? That she has the final say? I wonder, if she had decided to pass up a tournament to attend high school graduation, how that would have sat with the old man? And don't forget her cultural background.

When she turns 21, go ahead and thwack her for that sort of decision. But I don't hold it against her now.

 

Yeah. I don't know enough about the family as a whole, but I do sense that someone at Wie Corp., Inc., is running the Stefan Capriati playbook.

If she's a student of history, then Michelle knows that -- when the time comes -- she can start reclaiming her life by shoplifting some cheap jewelry.

 

That's where golfers have an advantage.

Whatever mistakes Wie makes, she will have many years to learn from them and overcome them.

It's pretty amazing that Capriati was able to have that "second career" in a sport that usually eats its young by their mid-20s.

Wie and other golfers have the luxury of a career that can go well into their 40s and 50s. Mistakes made at 16 and 17, in the long run, likely won't make a difference at all.

 

Wrong -- the last time I checked sports were about winning and losing and this is the time she should be learning how to win tournaments. And she isn't going to learn how to win tournaments --- which is much different than improving your swing, improving your course management -- it is finding that mental toughness to make a great shot on the back nine on a Sunday with all the pressure riding on your shoulders. If you can't even make it to Saturday -- what are you learning? And further why should we care about you? She needs to play on the LPGA, learn how to win and dominate like you seem to think she automatically is going to for a year or two then talk about competing against men. She can't even beat women yet,so why is she so concerned with competing against men.

Apples to Oranges -- There are haters and assholes on every level and many of the people who had that "herd" mentality you speak of when it came to Tiger or the Williams sisters or LeBron James were exactly that -- haters.

That is not what is going on with Wie. I don't think anyone doubts she couldn't be the best women's player if she really wanted to be. Right now, however, she seems more concerned with being a freak show on a tour she simply cannot compete on -- and never will be able to compete on a regular basis -- than concentrating on becoming the best golfer on the tour she could dominate.

Again, apples to oranges -- when Serena, Venus, Amelia, Martina, Lindsay or anyone else starts trying to compete in men's events, then come talk to us. Practice and playing in a tournament are completely different animals.

I mean, the men's practice squad for the Tennessee Lady Vols is somewhat well known but that doesn't mean the Lady Vols are ready to go try and compete in the men's NCAA tournament.


Finally -- the comparisons to Kournikova are probably fair because while she didn't win anything -- she was at one point ranked No. 8 in the world and had a run of being very competitive in some very big tournaments. She could have improved from there but she never really was committed enough to her tennis to do so.

Michelle Wie has a chance to be special, she never will if she continues to try and put the cart before the horse so to speak.

 

Then how do you explain the Williams sisters' success despite never "learning how to win tournaments" before joining the WTA Tour full time?

She is playing on the LPGA. When this year is out, barring further damage to her wrists, she will play many more LPGA events than PGA events.

When healthy, she typically beats 70-90 percent of the women (as was shown in her performances in the majors).

So she can beat women. She just hasn't beaten every one of them in a tournament yet.

But she better soon. After all, every other pro golf up-and-comer has won numerous tournaments by age 17.