Potentially, This Week Is Significant for Wie

Michelle Wie spent three days in Florida recently, working with David Leadbetter, her swing coach, but they didn’t limit the sessions to hitting golf balls. They also talked about how she was eating.

Leadbetter and Gary Gilchrist, his top aide for Wie, figure that the 14-year-old needs to eat something every three hours on the golf course to keep her energy level up. That topic is important because the feeling in the Wie camp is that she ran out of steam when she lost in the 36-hole final of the U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links championship last weekend.

At least Wie lost to an older player. Winner Ya-Ni Tseng of Taiwan is 15.

That match was only 10 days after Wie tried and failed to qualify for the men’s public links championship and only two weeks after Wie, the youngest player on the team, had helped the U.S. win the Curtis Cup.

So the evolution of Michelle Wie, golfer, continues as a work in progress this week when she plays the U.S. Women’s Open at Orchards Golf Club in South Hadley, Mass.

There may be some slightly different looks to her game and her appearance. Wie has ditched her Titlelist cap in favor of a Leadbetter Academy model and is keeping the Nike Ignite driver in her bag for another week, but she is considering swapping her five-wood for a two-iron to try to keep the ball on the fairway more often this week on typically narrow U.S. Open fairways.

Carrying her bag will be her father, B.J., who thought he’d retired as his daughter’s caddie but changed his mind after Michelle asked him. At last year’s U.S. Open, both Wies found themselves in a controversy when Danielle Ammaccapane and her father said the Wies didn’t know the rules.

Maybe B.J. figured the coast was clear this week because Ammaccapane isn’t entered, but it’s clear that Michelle is in a comfort zone with her father on her bag.

As for Wie’s game, Gilchrist says it’s the same, only better. Leadbetter’s vision of Wie’s swing is to shorten her backswing to improve accuracy and Gilchrist said this week he was trying to make sure Wie didn’t move too far off the ball in her backswing, and that she kept the lower half of her body still.

What has not changed is that the expectation level for Wie remains stratospheric, even this week at the U.S. Open, where a physically and mentally demanding setup taxes even veteran players. Gilchrist said Wie played nine holes Wednesday and was striking the ball well.

People are expecting her to play well, he said. And that can happen.

But right away?

In a stroke of timing that should surprise no one, Wie is on the cover of this month’s Golf for Women magazine, looking relaxed in a pink, sleeveless top, white shorts and large, round silver earrings.

The story about her is titled “Girl on the Verge.” And many people are waiting for her to cross over, maybe even this week at the Open, because winning is what’s expected of athletes who make the covers.

At this point, Gilchrist said, it probably would be a good idea to take a deep breath. The only people who may know Wie’s swing better than he are B.J. Wie and Michelle herself, but what Gilchrist thinks about is more personal than mechanical, more practical than fanciful.

He said it was time to show some patience, no matter how Wie has put her game together. She has every shot in the book, he said, but please be patient while she puts it all together.

It’s not easy for a 14-year-old to play four rounds under par, especially in a U.S. Open.

There’s a reason people aren’t issued driver’s licenses until they’re 16, Gilchrist said.

Wie has a few things to learn, he said, in spite of her obvious and prodigious talent.

Maybe it will happen this week. It would be a grand way for a high school sophomore to break into the big time. And maybe it won’t happen. That’s what Gilchrist reminds Wie-watchers when the teenager from Honolulu takes on some of the best players in the world in difficult conditions on a tough course.

In golf, you just can’t rush it, he said.

And nobody should rush Wie. We know she’s on the verge of something, we just don’t know what it is or when it will happen.