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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Michelle Wie has a clean slate for a future that remains muddled. Considering all she has gone through, there’s simply no telling what will happen next. When she won the U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links at 13, it would have been hard to imagine her going six years without another trophy to call her own. And when she had a share of the lead on the back nine of three majors her first year as a pro, who could have guessed she would be fighting for her future at Q-school just two years later? Then again, with an average score last year of 76.7 — no rounds in the 60s, only two better than par — what would have been the odds that she could even survive Q-school to earn LPGA Tour membership? “I have a clean slate,” she said. “I took the long way to get here, but I feel really good about it.” But as much as Wie wants to move forward, it will be difficult for her to escape expectations created by her past. There remains a fascination about the 19-year-old from Hawaii that even the LPGA Tour brass finally recognized. Tour officials erected a tiny grandstand behind the 18th green for the final stage of Q-school, and a crowd close to 500 that surrounded the green Sunday when Wie finished was about 475 more than who usually watches this event. Swing coach David Leadbetter was asked if the LPGA Tour needed Wie as much as she needed the tour, and he found his answer walking up the final hole with a couple of hundred fans who had gone the distance. “Look around,” he said. The question is whether that fascination continues now that Wie looks more like everyone else. Q-school winner Stacy Lewis, the former NCAA champion from Arkansas who went 5-0 in the Curtis Cup this summer in her last amateur event, was the latest who couldn’t figure out from a player’s perspective why Wie received so much attention.BRIDGESTONE INVITATIONAL Such thinking used to be naive. No other teenage girl came within three matches of qualifying for the Masters and nine holes of qualifying for the men’s U.S. Open. No other female showed enough potential to bring in $15 million in endorsements during her junior year in high school. But now it’s a fair question.Latests Golf For one thing, Wie no longer has youth on her side. One of the more memorable lines that helped create the mystique of Wie came from Tim Herron, who played with her in a junior pro-am at the Sony Open. Coming off the 18th green, Herron acted indignant when a magazine reporter asked him about Wie. “Nothing about me?” Herron said. “You don’t want to know about my eagle? No ‘Happy New Year, good to see you, how are you playing?’ All you want to know is how far some 12-year-old girl is blowing it by me?”Accenture Match Play Championship She famously qualified for an LPGA event in seventh grade, played in the final group of an LPGA major at 13. More impressive than her score at the Sony Open — a 68, the lowest by any female competing against men — was her age. She was 14.
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