Posted by
Ed Lilly on Sunday, July 20, 2008 9:53:44 AM
Michelle Wie, a Stanford student who knows a little bit about golf at its highest levels, has been disqualified from this weekend's play at the ongoing LPGA event for failure to sign her scorecard before leaving the scoring tent after Friday's round of play.
If you click through to the story and/or watch the embedded video in
the story from ESPN News, Wie offers no explanation, citing it as just
an inexplicable, but honest, mistake.
Perhaps she's right, but Wie has a curious history already in
competitive play. Just off the top of my head, I can remember her
having a 2 stroke penalty assessed after a round at the Women's British
Open for grounding her club in a hazard. After that incident, she
fired her caddy. (Whoever was on her bag this week better be making
some phone calls to have a new gig lined up - the story makes a cursory
reference to it not being known whether Ms. Wie's caddy accompanied her
to the scoring tent. My guess is he'll be gone by Monday evening.)
Wie then had the fiasco involving her agent essentially taking her off
the course at a tournament where, had she continued the round, she very
likely would have shot an 88 or higher, running afoul of the somewhat
obscure "Rule of 88" as it was called at the time, which would have
meant she could not have competed in LPGA events for a lengthy period
because of her score. Wie and her agent cited her lingering wrist
injuries as the cause for her poor play and reason for withdrawal. She
then showed up early at the next week's LPGA McDonald's tournament, a
women's major, to practice.
Perhaps her earliest snafu was her disqualification for having taken an
illegal drop, an error that was not caught until a golf journalist
questioned it and a subsequent "investigation" and discussion showed
that she had indeed taken a drop in violation of the rules.
By almost all accounts, Wie is cited as a bright girl and clearly a
very talented golfer. She must be pretty smart if she was accepted at
Stanford. Granted, she's rich and famous, so it's not exactly a
shocker that a big school that wants a prize like that to put in it's
publicity material would let her in. But she can't be a complete
blockhead if she's any kind of student at all there.
Yet still she keeps running into these problems.
Very much unlike another young golfer who went to Stanford a few years ago - Tiger Woods.
Wie is still very young and may go on to become the "Female Tiger" that
so many expected her to be when she was only 13. But the more these
little things keep happening to cause distraction and derail her
efforts to win, you have to wonder whether she'll instead be some kind
of serial female Roberto De Vicenzo.