Don’t Count This Tiger Kid Out

A 13-year-old girl from Honolulu, a 39-year-old man from Fiji and a lot of golfers in between seem to think they could be the next big thing on the PGA Tour.

The 13-year-old is Michelle Wie, who is almost 6 feet tall, hits the ball 280 yards and shot a 73 from the championship tees in her failed attempt to qualify for last month’s Sony Open in Hawaii.

She served notice in a recent interview with Golf magazine that she is going Tiger hunting, as soon as she outgrows “watching cartoons ... and goofing around with friends who call her a golfing geek.” Oh yeah, she also wants to finish junior high and high school and go to Stanford.

By, say, 2011, she figures women will be playing on the PGA Tour and she will be challenging Tiger Woods, seeing as how “he’ll be pretty old by then.”

Vijay Singh isn’t inclined to wait that long. He can’t. He turns 40 on Friday.

When Phil Mickelson said he could “fly it past” Woods, which, incidentally, he can, a lot of people assumed he was calling out Tiger. As Mickelson has backpedaled to explain since, he wasn’t. But, two weeks ago before the AT&T; at Pebble Beach, Singh was.

“Tiger has had a great run, and everything comes to a some sort of stop sooner or later,” he said. “The guys are catching up. I’m hitting the ball much longer than I did four years ago. Ernie [Els] is no slouch with the driver either.

“It all depends on how determined a player really is. We can’t just sit back and let everybody kind of run over you. If I’m not winning, I’m not happy. I cannot speak for Tiger or anyone. I just want to go out there and beat everybody I can.”

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Tiger has had a great run?

No one else has dared place Woods in the past tense yet, but there are a number of players who seem to believe their day, if not here, is coming.

Identifying which ones have a legitimate claim is perilous. In 1996, as Woods was emerging as a PGA Tour de force, I wrote about the other young players who would challenge him. I named Justin Leonard, David Duval, Steve Stricker, Tim Herron and Stewart Cink. They’ve done well, with 28 wins, including two in majors, among them. But that’s still seven fewer tournaments (and six fewer majors) than Woods has won alone.

So to say that Charles Howell III will challenge Woods might in retrospect sound foolish, although many experts give him the best chance. David Feherty, a former golfer turned commentator, boldly predicts, “I don’t think we’ve seen anything like what we’re going to see from him.”

That is probably true sartorially. Employing the same Swedish clothes designer as Jesper Parnevik, Howell wears brightly colored shirts, tapered pants and a silver belt buckle shaped like a one-iron.

It could prove to be true about his game. An Augusta native, he was inspired when Woods won the Masters at 21. Howell, 23, said that showed him and others his age that you don’t necessarily have to pay dues on the tour if you have game.

A long hitter -- like most of his peers -- despite his slight 5-11, 155-pound frame, he became the first player since Woods to clinch his tour card by winning enough money in PGA tournaments via sponsor exemptions and was the rookie of the year in 2001. It’s not as easy, though, as Woods made it look and, although Howell was ninth last year in tour earnings, he has won only one tournament.

But he doesn’t wither easily. At 17, he took Woods deep into their third-round match at the 1996 U.S. Amateur before losing, 3-1.

“We’re less intimidated by Tiger than some of the older guys,” Luke Donald, 25, said. “We might be a little bit more cocky and feel like we can beat anyone.”

An Englishman and former NCAA champion at Northwestern, Donald in 2001 led the Great Britain & Ireland team to a Walker Cup victory, the first time it had ever successfully defended the title on U.S. soil. In two Walker Cups, he had a 7-1 record. Last year, he became the first European rookie to earn more than $1 million on the PGA Tour.

Another Englishman, John E. Morgan, 25, is the son of a Bristol dock worker who is successfully coping with epilepsy, in 2002 becoming the second rookie to win PGA and European tour cards in the same year.

David Gossett, 23, of Tennessee is a former U.S. Amateur champion and the only player to shoot 59 in the PGA Tour qualifying school. Matt Kuchar is a former U.S. Amateur champion who, as a sophomore at Georgia Tech, finished 21st at the Masters and 14th at the U.S. Open. He is still only 24.

Aaron Baddeley became the youngest player, at 18, to win the Australian Open as an amateur in 1999 and, despite a slow start as a professional, might still fulfill his promise in his homeland as the next Greg Norman. Baddeley is still only 21.

Ty Tryon, whose rookie year was interrupted by tonsillitis, mononucleosis and the 11th grade, is still only 18.

Sergio Garcia is still only 23.

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And Tiger Woods is still only 27.

He refers to the so-called “young guns” as the kids, but there is no indication that he is looking over his shoulder at them. Or at anyone else other than perhaps Ernie Els, who, at 33, has supplanted Mickelson, 32, as No. 2 in the world.

There might be more depth on the tour than ever before. Eighteen players won tournaments for the first time last season. But of those, only four -- Howell, Kuchar, Donald and Jonathan Byrd, 24 -- are younger than Woods.

He is just now entering his prime. Jack Nicklaus won 12 of his 18 majors after his 27th birthday. Tom Watson won seven of his eight after he was 27. Arnold Palmer won all seven of his after he was 27.

Woods might face more challenges and more challengers in the future than he has so far. But chances are that the best is yet to come for him. He is still the next big thing on the PGA Tour.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com.