Posted on: Wednesday, June 8, 2005

Schedule could help Wie win

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

This week Havre de Grace, Md., then Colorado, Missouri, France, England, Georgia ...

By the time Michelle Wie returns to Punahou School for her junior year in August, her "what I did with my summer" composition should make a pretty good travelogue.

What will make it really something to write home about, though, is if she manages her first pro tournament victory somewhere along the way.

That quest begins Friday at the McDonald's LPGA Championship and some Wie-watchers — a whole species that has evolved to debate the progress and career path of golf's most dissected 15-year-old — believe they could see a breakthrough.

The theory is that by playing tournaments steadily for two months she will find a rhythm that has been difficult to attain while playing a hit-and-miss schedule of school and golf during the rest of the year. With a steady calendar of golf — and little but — the focus and the well-honed form should be there.

"I think this summer you're going to see her play a whole lot better," said Mark Rolfing, NBC Sports golf analyst. "She always seems to play better in the tournaments on the second or third weeks."

Indeed, some of her best performances outside Hawai'i — the championship of the U.S. Women's Amateur Public Links, a fourth-place finish at the Kraft Nabisco and sixth at Wendy's, etc. — have come when playing amid a cluster of tournaments.

"Even though Michelle has played a lot of LPGA events (20) there haven't been stretches where she has played several in a row," Rolfing said. "I would be willing to say that if Michelle played nine tournaments on the LPGA Tour this year, she'd have won one."

That would be a comparison with Paula Creamer, the 18-year-old who has been playing the LPGA Tour since February and won her first tour event last month, five days before high school graduation. Like it or not — and the LPGA has pushed the comparisons and budding rivalry — their careers have become inextricably linked since playing tournaments together two years ago.

Normally, they wouldn't be on the same course this week in what has been, since 1955 an LPGA Tour-only tournament. But the LPGA Championship, invoking what some have called the "Wie Rule," have opened up the field, exempting a top amateur (one guess as to who) and as many as five other non-LPGA players from other tours.

Predictably, on some fronts it has also opened up a can of controversy, too.

"You just can't be changing the rules for one person, regardless of who it is," Juli Inkster, a two-time LPGA champion, told the Baltimore Sun.

"It's the LPGA Championship, for only LPGA players," Grace Park told the Sun.

A victory this summer would go a long way to silencing the complaints.

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