The Sure Thing
The Making and Unmaking of Golf Phenom Michelle Wie
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Michelle Wie couldn’t miss. No way. Big success? It was only a matter of time. At four she could drive a golf ball a hundred yards. At ten she was outdriving adult male golfers in her Honolulu hometown–from the back tees. At thirteen she won the Women’s Amateur Public Links, becoming the youngest person ever to win a USGA championship. The next year she was playing in LPGA and PGA Tour tournaments. At sixteen she was earning eight figures in endorsements. Yet by the time she turned eighteen, Michelle Wie was already branded a failure, a has-been, a victim of injuries, bad choices, and–worst of all–really terrible putting. How was it possible? How did this happen? How did she go from being the next big thing to the latest big bust?
The Sure Thing is a gripping and intimate portrait of the meteoric rise, fall, and uncertain future of the greatest sports phenom of the twenty-first century. Award-winning writer Eric Adelson takes us inside Michelle Wie’s world, showing her to be a bubbly, astonishingly normal girl trapped in a world of outsize expectations. In chronicling Wie’s career, Adelson establishes a new gold standard for reporting on the growing convergence of professional sports, marketing, and mass entertainment in the Internet Age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 2000, ten-year-old Michelle Wie rocked the professional golf world with her 300-yard drives; at 12, she was the youngest to qualify for an LPGA tournament; at 14, the youngest to enter a PGA tournament. From there, she continued to push relentlessly against the rigidly gender-segregated traditions of pro golf. Along the way, she managed to alienate a number of fellow women golfers and disenchant the golf community with her disregard for rules and etiquette; most damning, however, she was unable to live up to her own hype. Adelson, the first to write a national article about Wie, takes readers step by step through her career, methodically recounting each critical match and analyzing her professional development, including the role played by her father. Oddly, this where-is-she-now story stops short of the present, with very little information about Wie's current situation or her future. After charting the arc of every ball so dramatically, it's frustrating to see the larger narrative roll into the rough.
Customer Reviews
"Big Wiesy!!"
What an athlete!!! After reading this, I wonder who's to blame: the parents or her for trying to make it in the PGA. She's one of the reasons why I watch the LPGA.