On the day Michelle Wie broke her longest LPGA tournament victory drought, she was asked if she could see something of herself in Atthaya Thitikul, the 15-year-old Thai amateur who also played the HSBC Women’s World Championship on Saturday in Singapore.
“It seems like a long time ago,” Wie told reporters. “I just remember how in awe I was and, now, it’s just weird that I’m the old one now, (the one) that she looks at, I guess.”
Wie is still only 28, so “old” is a comparative term. But in this, her 17th year of competing in LPGA Tour events and 10th season of full-time play on the circuit, she has been around long enough to earn a different kind of admiration.
Once upon a time Wie, who turned pro before her 16th birthday, caused us to marvel at her considerable poise and promise for one of such a tender age. Now, it is her persistence and dogged determination that is praiseworthy.
From child prodigy to grinder, Wie has reshaped perceptions and her fortunes.
With black kinesiology tape snaked around her right knee and bands around the arthritic wrists that she had occasionally shaken as if to stir life, Wie won Saturday for the first time in 86 LPGA tournament appearances.
A 36-foot putt from off the green for a birdie on the 72nd hole clinched her first victory since 2014, producing triumphant fist pumps that signalled the relief of a long-sought breakthrough.
On her Twitter account, @themichellewie, she tweeted, “Woke up thinking it was all a dream but it’s all just hitting me now…”
It was Wie’s fifth career tournament title, and unlike her early years, when so much seemed to come so soon and so easily to her, this latest one was a tribute to her tenacity and resilience.
She won once each in 2009 and ’10 while attending Stanford, and after her 2012 graduation, seemed to have made a significant move forward with two victories in 2014. But the last of them — a major, the U.S. Women’s Open — got more distant in the rear-view mirror as the years went on and the lists of missed cuts and ailments mounted.
There were neck and back injuries followed last year by an emergency appendectomy that sidelined her for nearly two months.
“It has been a tough journey since 2014,” Wie told her post-round press conference. Moments where, she acknowledged, “it was hard to keep going and to keep playing. My family believed in me relentlessly and, with that, I started to believe in myself.”
Wie said, “You know, I’ve had some injuries, had a really bad year, just lost some confidence. But I’m just really proud of myself for pulling myself out of it.”
After hoisting the championship trophy Saturday, Wie said the U.S. Women’s Open victory seemed “a long time ago (that) I was on the stage. This feels new. It is such a long time.”
Not so long, though, that she forgot how to win or how much it drives her. “Winning is everything. I mean, there is no better feeling than when you sink that winning putt,” Wie said. “It’s a high, for sure. You go out there and it is this feeling that gets you going. It is this feeling that makes you practice. It’s that winning putt that makes you practice for hours and hours and hours. Even in the hard times, it gets you going back. You know that good feeling is on the other side.”
This past weekend it was, finally, back on her side.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
