Ledbetter, Price Go After the Parent Wie's
Good stuff. How long will Ledbetter last by criticizing the parents?
Will the Wie's contract a hit man?
Once the show, Michelle Wie, who turned 18 last Thursday, has become a sideshow. For one of golf's sadder, although far from resolved tales, look no further.
Wie, a Stanford University freshman, shot 79-79-77-71 at the Samsung World Championship in Palm Desert, Calif., last week. She finished 19th in the 20-player field, 36 strokes behind winner Lorena Ochoa. The next day, her agent, Greg Nared, resigned as the vice-president of golf for the William Morris Agency.
Nared was hired little more than a year ago, principally to work with Wie.
But it's all gone wrong for her this year, on the course, where her scoring average in eight LPGA Tour events was 76.7, and also off the course.
“After careful consideration for my future, I have resigned effective immediately,” Nared said in a statement.
Nared was the second manager to leave the agency after working with Wie. Former PGA Tour executive Ross Berlin had been hired by William Morris to work with Wie after she turned professional two years ago. Berlin didn't think she should have played two men's events late last year on the European and PGA Tours. She finished last in both tournaments. Her parents had taken her out of high school in Honolulu so she could play.
Before that, Wie had challenged for wins in the 2006 Kraft Nabisco, the LPGA Championship and the U.S. Women's Open – all major tournaments. She didn't win any, but she was confident and strong.
“If she hadn't played those [men's] tournaments, then everybody would have considered 2006 her best season yet,” Wie's swing coach, David Leadbetter, who had made his opinions known to her and her family, said Monday from his home in Orlando. “It was absolute madness for her to play them. That started the whole debacle. Now with Greg Nared leaving, you feel like this is the Titanic.”
Wie has also been dealing with injuries. She'd developed tendinitis in her right wrist. Then, in February, she broke her left wrist. She came back too early.
“First, the wrist hadn't healed properly and she'd done very little rehab,” Leadbetter said. “You don't come back and play so fast. The injury has to heal and then you have to rehab it. Then you have to get stronger. When you don't use your wrist, the forearms and upper body atrophy. After you get stronger, you have to hit balls and get competitive. Then you play. Michelle bypassed the whole process.”
Wie has come to that realization, but too late.
“The only thing I would do differently, I wouldn't have played this year,” she said last week. She admitted she didn't take her injuries seriously enough.
Three-time major champion Nick Price said this week he feels Wie also bypassed another process.
“Teenagers need to establish their characters and mature,” Price, who has three children, the eldest of whom is 16, said from his home in Hobe Sound, Fla. “As a golfer, you also should play the normal junior and amateur tournaments and then the LPGA. That's where Tiger's parents were so smart with him. The advice she's had from her parents or other people to keep playing PGA Tour tournaments has been very unsound.”
Wie is a wealthy young woman because of endorsements with Nike and Sony. For a time anyway, it seemed reasonable for her to play PGA Tour events. She had a dream, and she came close to making a PGA Tour cut when she was 14. But at some point, as Leadbetter said, her and her parents' approach became unrealistic.
“It's not even logical,” Leadbetter said. “I'm scared for her future.”
Leadbetter did say Wie's injuries have healed, with the help of Gray Cook, a Virginia-based strength, conditioning and functional movement specialist. Leadbetter watched Wie before the Samsung and was pleased with her swing.
“But I told her to keep her expectations low, and that she had to get her tournament nerves in shape,” Leadbetter said. “She'd hardly shot par in a round all year, and to suddenly play a tournament against the top 20 in the world?”
Wie has been taking a course at Stanford called introduction to humanities. Meanwhile, she's had quite an introduction to the cutthroat pro golf world. “Pretty traumatic,” she said. “Pretty epic, actually.”
Wie and her parents, who have rented a house near Stanford, where she lives in a dorm, need to move from epic to real. Wie needs a sane life, not an epic one. Only her parents, and, ultimately, Wie, can make that happen.
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