She turns 19 in a month, but Michelle Wie seems a lot older than that. After all Wie has been through, she seems as much a part of the landscape of women's professional golf as almost anyone out there.

But the reality is that she isn't part of it at all, which is why Wie is once again showing off her uncanny ability to make news.

This time it's different, though. This time it's actually good news.

To try to earn her 2009 LPGA Tour card, Wie has entered the first stage of tour qualifying next week at Mission Hills Country Club.

Score this as a first step in the direction Wie should have been following all along.

Now, qualifying school is a daunting golf experience, regardless of your pedigree or your ability to get the ball in the hole, but maybe it'll be easier than that for Wie. She should at least have a few good memories about the course because it's where she played in the last group on Sunday at the Kraft Nabisco Championship ... as an eighth-grader.

At the same time, there are no guarantees in qualifying school, not even for someone as talented as Wie.

But for the first time in a while, she's made a decision that's not messing up her career path.

It's not being disqualified at her first event as a pro, or creating a controversy by pulling out of a tournament because she was on her way to an 88, or missing the cut playing in another men's pro tournament, or getting disqualified for not signing her scorecard.

She's done all that.

After turning pro the week of her 16th birthday, Wie has stuck to a game plan that she said was always her design, even though her parents appeared to be behind the wheel far more often than she was. And along the way, Wie drove very far off track.

In her first full year as a pro, she held at least a share of the lead in three majors in 2006. Then after she injured her wrists, Wie's fortunes changed, her game faltered, her missteps increased and her image started taking hits.

And the fact remains that Wie hasn't won any kind of tournament since the U.S. Women's Public Links Championship, when she was all of 13.

Almost from that moment, her peers and others have suggested that Wie learn how to win against female players, instead of constantly loading up her playing schedule against the male pros, experiences that gained her almost nothing except more notoriety. Most of that negative, by the way.

Her parents came off as heavy-handed, Wie as a diffident underachiever. It didn't start off that way. She signed a multimillion-dollar endorsement deal with Nike to jump-start the cash register and Forbes estimated her endorsement income at $17 million in her first year alone.

There's never been any company pressure on Wie to perform in order to live up to her endorsement checks, according to Nike Golf President Bob Wood, but it certainly won't upset the folks on the Nike campus in Beaverton, Ore., if Wie comes back and makes up for lost time on the LPGA Tour in 2009.

At Mission Hills, the top 30 players advance to the LPGA Tour Qualifying Finals at Daytona Beach in December. The top 20 players and ties at the finals earn their 2009 playing privileges. There's a chance Wie could miss out at Mission Hills, but still show up at Daytona Beach and play her way into the finals.

Wie never really tipped her hand about whether she wanted to go to qualifying school, but her father, B.J., has been quoted as saying she had no choice because there were no options left. Wie simply didn't earn enough money this year to finish the equivalent of 80th on the LPGA Tour's money list to earn her tour card.

Qualifying isn't the only school that Wie must negotiate her way through. She's going back to Stanford for the quarter after the Mission Hills qualifier.

Trying to get an education at an institution as challenging as Stanford can't be easy, but then neither is the learning curve in professional golf. Maybe she had no other choice than qualifying school, but for whatever reason Wie is showing up for her on-course class, she's already wiser for doing it.