By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

If you are Michelle Wie, it probably isn't just the homework from physics class that has you shaking your head these days.

For golf's most precocious 15-year-old, whatever avenue you choose, it seems you're damned if you do and damned if you don't on the course of public opinion.

When Wie accepted an exemption into the U.S. Women's Open last year, she pretty much got ripped from coast to coast for taking it. Likewise when she was granted sponsor's exemptions into the Sony Open in Hawai'i the last two years, it became a sore point with a lot of people.

Why, critics suggested, doesn't Wie earn her way in? Why doesn't she attempt to earn a spot through qualifying if she wants to play that bad?

Just last month at the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the LPGA's first major, 16-year-old amateur Morgan Pressel complained: "She's been given everything and left the rest of us with nothing. We actually have to play our way in. We don't have anything handed to us."

Now, fast forward to this week's announcement that Wie wants to play in the prestigious men's U.S. Open in June, a tournament she will attempt to earn her way into through the considerable test of local and sectional qualifying. Nothing is being handed to her.

Still, via blogs and elsewhere, critics are lining up to take shots at Wie for trying to become the first woman to play in the Open in what will be its 105th tournament, June 13 to 19 at Pinehurst, N.C. They suggest, among other things, she stick to playing with girls her own age. Or, at least, play the LPGA circuit.

Never mind that the odds of earning a spot in the Open field, a double gauntlet of qualifying with an 18-hole local and 36-hole sectional, are the longest of anything Wie has so far taken aim at. That it is so improbable a leap even her father discounts her chances.

Should she get through the local round May 13 at Turtle Bay — and it would likely require finishing first or second — Wie will wade in against a largely PGA sectional in Rockville, Md. immediately after the Booz Allen Classic in June.

We're told by the USGA that some 7,000 golfers last year attempted to earn a coveted place in the U.S. Open through the route Wie is taking and only about 76 made it. "Even for a pro without a full exemption, it is tough," a USGA spokesman said.

USGA officials said they don't know if any woman — let alone a 10th-grader — has even attempted to qualify for the U.S. Open. They say legend has it that Babe Zaharias, who played in three PGA tournaments in the 1940s and made the cut in one, wanted to play the U.S. Open but believe she was eventually talked out of it.

You get the feeling nobody will talk Wie out of it. Whether she qualifies or falls considerably short, give her credit for being willing to tackle a challenge of historical proportions. Her critics owe her that much.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.