Michelle Wie West Didn’t Become Golf’s Biggest Star. That Doesn’t Make Her A Bust.
Michelle Wie West Didn’t Become Golf’s Biggest Star. That Doesn’t Make Her A Bust.
The former phenom made her mark in a different way than expected.
For sports fans of a certain generation (i.e., mine), Michelle Wie West will always be remembered as golf’s next big thing — the precocious phenom who finished ninth in an LPGA major at age 13 (!) and seemed destined to dominate the sport’s next few decades, whether she played against women or men.
That version of the future never quite came to pass for Wie West. Between injuries and the pull of a life beyond golf, she has won fewer trophies than most observers predicted back when she was a teenage sensation. But as the 33-year-old Wie West played the final tournament of her career last week in the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach — finishing out in style by making a 31-foot putt on the 18th hole — her legacy might end up being even greater in some respects than we could have imagined two decades ago.
Much of the early hype around Wie West’s game involved her uncommon power. By the age of 13, she was already 6 feet tall and driving the ball 300 yards — remarkable at a time when the average LPGA Tour player hit the ball 249.7 yards (and the average men’s pro landed at 285.9). It was this prodigious driving ability that led to speculation that Wie West might become the first woman to make the cut at a PGA Tour event since Babe Didrikson Zaharias in 1945.
And Wie West did compete against the men often, becoming the all-time leader among women with eight PGA Tour events played, even if she didn’t make the cut in any of them. (She narrowly missed playing the weekend at the 2004 Sony Open in her native Hawaii, though her second-round 68 remains the lowest score ever shot by a woman at a PGA Tour tournament.) All of those entries came before Wie West had even turned 19 or was eligible to play full-time on the LPGA Tour, which was both extraordinary and fuel for doubters — those who began questioning why the phenom was making high-profile appearances against men when she had gone the entire 2007 and 2008 seasons without a single top-10 finish against women.
In retrospect, Wie West’s teenage slump and the reaction to it illustrates how little empathy the sports world had 15 years ago — and how much it has always loved to build up icons in order to tear them down. At the 2007 U.S. Open, when Wie West held back tears as she battled through what was later revealed to be a broken wrist, one fan impatiently shouted, “Play through it!” The struggles of that time nearly ruined Wie West’s career, derailing the wunderkind before she ever had a chance to fulfill her potential.
But after Wie West rebuilt her game and became a full-time LPGA Tour member at the ripe old age of 19, she finally began unleashing her mighty swing on the competition in earnest. In each of her first four full seasons on the LPGA Tour, Wie West ranked among the top 5 in driving distance, topping out with a tour-leading 274.5 yard average in 2010. She won twice during that span and compiled 21 top-10 finishes, finishing both 2009 and 2010 ranked 10th in the world.
And I would argue the version of Wie West that got closest to meeting her early expectations came in the next phase of her career, when she drove the ball less powerfully but played a more refined brand of golf in totality. In 2014, Wie West dropped to 16th in driving distance but set new career-best rankings for greens-in-regulation percentage (No. 3), putts per green in regulation (No. 4), sand save percentage (No. 38) and overall scoring average (No. 3). She won her first and only career major championship at the U.S. Open that season, and ranked No. 6 in the world by year’s end.
Wie West would slump again in the years that followed, winning just one more tournament before pulling back on her full-time schedule due to injuries and a focus on her family. After hanging up the spikes for good last week, Wie West finished her career with five LPGA Tour wins, one major title and a peak world ranking of No. 2 (achieved at age 16 through what many considered a glitch in the world rankings formula).
Those numbers fall short in contrast with the careers of other stars to whom the young Wie West was compared, whether it was Annika Sörenstam’s 72 wins and 10 majors on the women’s side or Tiger Woods’ 82 wins and 15 majors among the men. By that standard, Wie West might warrant placement among the most disappointing sports prodigies of her era.
There’s another side to Wie West’s legacy, though. As she matured from a gifted teen trying to figure out stardom on the fly to a veteran leader on Tour, she found her voice as an advocate for female athletes to close the pay gap and be judged on their skills, not their looks. Wie West has also been an adopter of and investor in technology that helps players improve through analytics. Her next career phase seems like it will involve some combination of sports business and media.
And she has recently become a mentor to Rose Zhang, the 20-year-old fellow Stanford alum who is now in the same spotlight that Wie West occupied long ago. As the Detroit Free Press aptly put it in 2016, Wie West’s story ended up being one of inspiration, not domination.
That might not have been the career epitaph we were all expecting when Wie West was poised to join Woods as the biggest draws of their golfing generation. But life seldom plays out exactly according to other people’s scripts, even when you are billed as a can’t-miss talent.
"I've been doing a lot of reflecting, and [feel] incredibly blessed for the journey that I have and the family that I've built," Wie West said last week. "It's just a really cool week to be here."
The path Wie West took instead was her own — and in her finale at the U.S. Open, she seemed at peace with it.
Filed under: Golf