Hi everyone, this is where I’ll be writing up some thoughts to go with my book on The Sure Thing, The Making and Unmaking of Golf Phenom Michelle Wie. The book came out June 23, and that was a special day for me, considering it took 10 years of reporting and five years of writing (and re-writing). But the reporting and the writing don’t stop, because Wie’s career is just beginning. So this will be a place where the story can go on from my end and hopefully from yours.
After a great week of interviews, from Honolulu to Vermont, I’m excited for another circuit this week. I’ve faced a lot of good questions already, and I thought I’d address some of the FAQs here, starting with “Was playing against the men just a marketing ploy from the start?” I’m going to say no. There is no question, Michelle’s career path made her millions. And no question, her father was a clever marketer from the beginning. But I still don’t buy that Michelle’s goals of playing on the PGA Tour were concocted by her parents.
I first interviewed Michelle on the phone when she was 10. I called her father, B.J., out of the blue one August day in 2000 and he put Michelle on almost immediately. There was no time for him to say, “Now Michelle, I need you to tell this man that you want to play against men, so that we can be rich one day.” Michelle picked up the receiver and told me she preferred the PGA to the LPGA, and she wanted to beat Tiger Woods. That seems like a dream most young golfers would have in the year 2000, especially a young golfer who played on her boys’ baseball team as a child. And most golf fans on the mainland don’t realize that Michelle didn’t have much competition from junior girls in Hawaii. Junior girls golf was simply not prominent on Oahu in the ’90s. So it made sense for Michelle to start playing against boys as well. Whether Michelle truly loved golf is a question I’ll address in a future blog, but whether she truly wanted to beat the men is, in my mind, not up for debate.
