For all the multi-million dollar adroitness with which Michelle Wie has been marketed, you sense there is still one sponsorship opportunity that has somehow been missed.

With a growing number of second- and third-place finishes — such as yesterday's tie for third in the Sybase Classic in New Jersey — she'd be a natural for, say, Lady Schick or some shaving product that could tout her propensity for coming close.

Her LPGA resume this year reads three top-10 finishes, including a second and third. In her career, there are five seconds, five thirds and 16 top 10s.

Of course, with 53 career LPGA appearances, the conventional wisdom had her, by now, winning several times on the Tour.

That she is still looking for a breakthrough victory, on a circuit whose events she first played as a precocious 12-year-old qualifier, once again adds fuel to the theory that, at age 19, she has not yet learned how to win. Something that yesterday's winner, 20-year-old Ji Young Oh, has apparently taken care of with her second title in 58 appearances.

By way of illustration, for Wie there was that back-nine slide in the season-opening SBS Open at Turtle Bay. And yesterday, it started coming unraveled at the par-5 fifth hole. Until Wie dropped a short second shot into the water, turning what should have been a birdie — and quite possibly an eagle — into a bogey, she was solidly in contention. A double-bogey on the 12th hole pretty much sealed her fate.

That Wie has so consistently put herself in contention suggests that the breakthrough win shouldn't be far away. Of course, that has been the thought for several years now. But what her performance at Sybase said was that she had been in contention despite playing something that was far from her best. For example, she missed three puts of 5 feet or less on Saturday that could have put her in the lead.

You'd like to think this is the year and summer, if not the month, that Wie puts all the lessons and talent together to end her expanding drought. Once she breaks through that so-far impenetrable barrier the suspicion is that Wie won't be an infrequent visitor to awards ceremonies.

To be sure she has pocketed some serious moolah this year at $290,649. But, for her, that is tip money to the estimated $12 million a year she rings up in endorsements. Much of which is said to be up for renewal this year.

After all, commercials about coming close aren't where the bucks are for Wie.