Mike Celizic

A year ago, I’d hear people talking about Michelle Wie when she played in a tournament. On Thursday, when she dropped out of her first tournament since January, I heard nothing.

This is something her father, B.J. Wie, should have considered before force-feeding his daughter into professional golf before she was old enough to have a driver’s license. Two years ago, she was the biggest story to hit the sport since titanium drivers. Today, with her game going down the tubes at warp speed, she’s bordering on irrelevant. It’s not far from there to washed-up.

I hope Michelle doesn’t arrive on that forsaken shore, where she’d be forced to pass the time drinking mai tais (when she’s old enough) with Anna Kournikova. Wie is still supremely talented. Her career need not be over before it starts. Anna was supremely talented, too. But the hype machine and the tons of money she made for being born with good bone structure short-circuited it all.

A year ago, just being 16 and statuesque and able to whack a dimpled ball 300 yards was enough for Wie. But then the skill that got her $20 million in endorsement deals when she turned pro just before her 16th birthday started to abandon her. She kept entering men’s tournaments, and though she made the cut on the Korean Tour, she couldn’t do it on any men’s tour that counts. From just missing the cut at the John Deere Classic, she went to being the worst golfer out there.

Her women’s tour results also suffered. Now, trying to come back at Annika Sorenstam’s tournament after four months off with a broken left wrist, she walked off the course after 16 holes, saying "No mas." She said she couldn’t play because of sore wrists, but if she’d made two more bogies on the final two holes, she would have shot 88 and been banned from the tour for a year.

A year ago, that would have been a headline. Today, it’s barely a footnote.

If Doc Emmett Brown were around, he could pack Wie in his DeLorean and take her back four years, before B.J. decided to throw his daughter into the deep end of the golf pool before she was capable of swimming in it. Then she could start over again and do it the right way, the Tiger Woods way. That would have meant working her way up from local tournaments to national age-group tournaments and maybe even some college golf before joining the LPGA.

Then, after she tucked a few majors in her purse, let her see what she could do against the men.

Alas, B.J. didn’t think that was the proper route for his daughter to take.

Instead, he encouraged her goal to play with the men — not later, when her game would have been allowed to mature — but right now. She drew big crowds for awhile and made all that money, some of which may even have filtered into her parents’ bank account — sort of like agent fees. I don’t know about that, though. I’m just guessing.

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