Michelle Wie is Finally Ready To Be the Next Big Thing

Michelle Wie’s critics forgot all along that she was only a young person struggling with the same issues all young people struggle with, namely becoming an adult. Now that she has, Liam Day believes she could be on the brink of the greatness every assumed for her when she was 13.

Some readers might ask why I’m writing about a female golfer on a website about good men. My response is: I don’t believe one can define masculinity in a vacuum. But even if I did believe that, Michelle Wie would still have lessons to teach us about what it means to be a good man.

More than a decade after becoming the youngest person ever to win an adult USGA-sponsored event at the U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links Championship, and almost 9 years after she turned pro at an age when most girls are more worried about their complexion than their backswing, Michelle Wie finally won her first major championship last month at the U.S. Women’s Open at Pinehurst Country Club.

It has been a hard slog for the girl wonder, who at one time entertained notions of competing on the men’s tour. Wie turned pro at the age of 15, signing endorsement deals worth up to $10 million. Master’s champion Fred Couples called her swing scary, and none other than Arnold Palmer proclaimed that she would have as profound an impact on golf as had Tiger Woods.

Too young to earn her card to play on the LPGA Tour, she competed through exemptions, which tournament organizers were more than happy to grant her because they hoped she would draw crowds to see her play. PGA Tour organizers did likewise.

The backlash was almost instantaneous. On the men’s side, players were annoyed that one of the limited number of exemptions each tournament organizer has to grant was being used for a young girl who many believed was not ready to compete. Her fellow female golfers felt scorned. Before trying to compete against men, they said, she should try beating women.

There was something elemental in the furor over the perceived special treatment Wie was getting from tournament organizers, a mix of Snow White and the prodigal son, of the envy the old have of the young for the one thing they possess that their elders can never again attain—youth—and of the hierarchical for wunderkinds who, they believe, don’t pay their dues.

This dynamic plays out in other professional fields. It is part of the reason that, despite new rules, medical residencies still involve inhumanly long shifts, even though they are clearly bad for the health of both doctors and patients, and why so many public school teachers resent their colleagues from Teach for America, who enter the classroom after only five weeks of training.

Then there were the stories about Wie’s bad behavior. She went through caddies faster than did Murphy Brown secretaries. She withdrew from pro-ams because she didn’t want to abide by the tournaments’ rules. She was accused of making illegal drops, and in 2012, at a tournament in Singapore, frustrated by how badly she was playing, she slammed her club into the ground and swore, which apparently upset some of the spectators, who expressed shock at the outburst. Fortunately for them, they never had to watch me play, because that was almost a hole-by-hole experience back when I still hit the links.

As early as 2007, articles appeared asking whether Wie was washed up. At the age of 18. Even just last year no less an emminence than Annika Sorenstam, the last women’s golfer before Wie to compete in a PGA Tour event, questioned whether Wie would ever meet the astronomical expectations that had been placed on her as a young teenager. “What I see now is that the talent that we all thought would be there is not there.”

Now all of that has changed. Funny how winning does that. Of course, what observers lost sight of over the intervening decade between her initial rise to prominence and her win last month is that this was a kid we were talking about. Yes, Wie may have behaved badly at times, but the number of times I behaved like a brat between the ages of 13 and 24 is too high to calculate. I once got into a screaming match with my father, who was also my high school basketball coach, because he switched me from point guard to off guard at halftime of a game my senior year. I can only imagine what sportswriters would have written about me. Of course, nobody outside my team or family really cared that I was obnoxious when I was 18. Thank God.

Two years ago, in an essay for The Good Men Project, I wrote about the self-relflection the death of a marginal NBA player, Dwayne Schintzius, sparked in me. At the time I wrote:

“I don’t know if being a young man in his early twenties has ever been easy, but it certainly hasn’t been for anyone who’s come of age in the last two decades. I was fortunate that I spent the years foundering in the privacy of a shitty, $300 a month apartment. Dwayne Schintzius was forced to endure them on the end of 6 different NBA benches.”

If that was true for Dwayne Schintzius, how much more true is it for Michelle Wie, someone proclaimed a superstar before she probably went on a date? In the last ten years, Wie has endured the glare of the media spotlight, the rigors of international travel, the incessant carping of her professional colleagues, who were, frankly, being unprofessional, and the embarrassment of failing in front of millions of people, all while enrolling in and graduating from one of the best universities in the country.

Oh, and learning how to behave when you’ve all of sudden got millions of dollars you didn’t have before. I can only imagine what I would have blown a $10 million endorsement deal on.

That Wie has survived adolescence to emerge at the age of 24 as the winner of a major championship is an incredible achievement. Whether she ever fully meets the expectations once set for her is still to be determined, but, either way, she is and will be, at least in my book, a success.

There is a long line of athletes that have been touted as the next big thing. Some of them, like Tiger Woods, live up to the hype; some, like Todd Marinovich, fold under the pressure; some, like O.J. Mayo, settle into solid careers that, though they might not live up to people’s expectations, are by no means anything to sneeze at.

We don’t know whether Michelle Wie will be a Woods or a Mayo, though, with her win, we can probably rest assured she isn’t a Marinovich. Though, even that is being unfair to Marinovich, who, by all reports, has finally kicked the drugs that cut short his NFL career to become a working artist.

Marinovich was famous for the nutrition and training regimen his father had him on from a very young age and which earned him the sobriquet, Robo QB. It was popularly reported at the time he attended USC that Marinovich had never eaten at McDonald’s. Supposedly, he didn’t drink or eat sugar. He had been bred, and I use that word consciously, from a very young age to be what his father wanted him to be: an NFL quarterback. The image was shattered when, while at USC, he was arrested for possession of cocaine, the first in a series of drug-related arrests.

Such a development is hardly surprising. In many ways, from an adolescent development perspective, it was almost natural, the rebellion of the teenage son against the wishes of the domineering father from a desire to carve out one’s own individual identity. It is also generally recognized within youth development circles that kids who are overdeveloped in some areas of their lives are likely to be underdeveloped in others. That was almost certainly the case for Marinovich, and likely the case for Wie, who lived out her teenage years, often the most difficult and embarrassing of our lives, in full public view.

The ongoing, publc discussion of whether Michelle Wie would ever live up to expectations has been based on a very narrow definition of success—whether she wins tournaments. As she is a golfer, that makes sense, but as she is also a person, her success in life needs to be defined more broadly. Todd Marinovich’s father had defined for him from the time he was two what success would be: a hall of fame career. Unfortunately for Todd, his development off the football field didn’t keep up with his development on it. Wie’s fellow golf prodigy, Tiger Woods, is another example of what can happen when our definition of success exists only within the bounds of athletic competition.

Let us hope that what we witnessed last month at Pinehurst was a sign that Michelle Wie’s development off the course has finally caught up to her talent, which is, despite what Ms. Sorenstam had to say, immense. If that is the case, we may be on the cusp of a decade of dominance to match Woods’, who won 14 major championships from 1997 to 2008. And, if that is the case, perhaps Michelle Wie’s struggle these past few years will help her to handle that success better than her male counterpart.

Either way, we should, though it is unlikely to happen, commit to never again anoint another teenager as the next big thing. Let kids be kids. Let them go to homecoming and attend prom and hang out and sweat out the college application process. There’s time enough for professional success, especially in a sport like golf, in which one can compete well into his or her forties. I suspect it is easier to balance one’s professional responsibilities while going through a mid-life crisis than it is the trials of adolescence. In fact, I know it is.

Photo: AP/John Bazemore