You could see the slanted head and fleeting glances when people peered around Pebble Beach’s Gallery Cafe, or as visitors sat on the patio overlooking the cypress-guarded 18th green at Stillwater Cove. They surfaced while having lunch with Brandi Chastain and Kristi Yamaguchi, and while climbing a flight of stairs and walking through a lobby.
That’s Michelle Wie Westthat six foot fixture of collective memory and modern golf history.
She didn’t win as much as she wanted to, and certainly not as much as many people thought she should or should have. But after nearly a quarter of a century in the spotlight, she’s still one of the brightest stars women’s golf has ever had, a player many people outside of golf know as a star even if they don’t know golf.
The competitive golf portion of Wie’s life will most likely be done at dusk on Sunday, when the US Women’s Open finishes on schedule at Pebble Beach. If things don’t go well, and maybe not because Wie West’s husband is her caddy for the first time and she’s barely played lately, it could be over by dusk on Friday. After the Open, she has no plans to return to elite competition, though she avoids using the word “retirement” in public (and confesses to using it in private at times).
She’s 33.
That went fast, didn’t it?
In 2000, when she was 10 and Bill Clinton was president, she played the US Women’s Amateur Public Links Championship. She won the event when she was 13, the same age she made it to an LPGA tournament and placed third on the weekend standings of a major tournament. She played a PGA Tour event at age 14, turned pro at age 15, had three top-five finishes in her first three majors as a pro, battled wrist problems, won the Open at age 24, and brought years later with more injuries, cuts and withdrawals. than strong showings.
So it wasn’t that fast after all. However, it will be ready soon. Barring a win this weekend or a surprise in years to come, Wie West will finish with five LPGA Tour wins, including the 2014 Open at Pinehurst, tied for 69th on the career win list. It adds up to a much better career than most players, though he falls short of the mighty expectations Wie West followed from the start, coming from a mix of internet age, youth, talent, celebrity and marketability. (By comparison, Inbee Park, a 34-year-old player from South Korea, has won seven majors but has long attracted a fraction of the public attention that Wie West had.)
“What’s the right word for this?” Wie West said in an interview in a sunlit lounge well out of earshot of aides.
“I’m very confident that I’ve had the career I wanted,” she eventually continued. “Of course I wish I could have done more. I think everyone thinks that.”
But, she said, “the what-ifs and the regrets and the ‘I wish I could have done this better’ can really drive you crazy.”
Even last year’s announcement of a transition, to use her publicly preferred term, went off the rails when her husband came down with Covid-19 and Wie West’s parents stayed behind to help with childcare. Ready to detail the rundown she rolled out on Instagram the week before, Wie West finished almost alone at the 2022 North Carolina Open.
She had spent years wondering if it was time to stop playing, frustrated with injuries and, more recently, torn by the idea that her family of three would only have so much time together. In 2021, vulgar comments about Wie West by Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City, gave her a new sense of purpose.
But eventually there came a point, she said, when she realized the toll of the game was ultimately too high, whereupon she feared her body would break down to the point where she wouldn’t even be able to play a game for fun. to play with her daughter. Her clubs have been almost exclusively in her bag ever since.
“It’s hard,” she said, “it’s hard to know when is the right time to walk away.”
That’s certainly partly because, for an athlete in any sport, retiring from competition means the stats are ready and, with few exceptions, the resume is frozen. For Wie West, retirement or transfer or whatever you want to call it sparked the inevitable debate about whether she had been a wasted or overdone talent.
Of course she hears it. She gets it too.
“People like to chirp and have their own feeling and whatever, and they’re totally entitled to it. They’re invested in my career,” she said. “I know I didn’t win as many as I, quote-unquote, should have.”
At the same time, she seems to wonder how fair it is. She graduated from Stanford and won a US Open, and those two achievements, she thinks, are what she wanted to do after all.
And yet she can still go through all the ways her career could have been different: if she had retained some of the lead at the 2005 Cherry Hills Open, if her quest that year to earn a spot in the Masters would have worked out, if she had made the cut at her first PGA Tour event instead of missing it by a stroke.
She enters this week’s 156-woman Open with measured expectations against a deep field.
The reigning champion, Minjee Lee, has won two majors since 2021 and is not ranked in the top five in the world. And there’s Rose Zhang, the 20-year-old Stanford student who won her debut tournament as a professional last month. Wie West’s group, teeing off Thursday at 8:28 a.m. Pacific Time, includes three-time major winner In Gee Chun and Annika Sorenstam, who recorded 10 major wins in her career and received a special exemption for this week’s field.
This spring, Wie West was musing on how to build her stamina for the rigors of a major, how to hone her iron and wedge game before returning to one of golf’s greatest stages, especially as it’s being played this year. on one of the sport’s most beloved courses.
“Just believe in myself, just get to a point where I’m confident I can run the strokes and make the putts,” she said. “And I hope it all comes very soon.”
She plans to stay closely associated with the sport — she recently hosted the LPGA tournament that Zhang won — but insisted she didn’t put much thought into how she transformed perceptions of the game that she said still enchants her.
Even now, she said, she will play with her husband and become convinced that, like every other golfer who has won, lost or never contested a major, she has unlocked the mysteries of the sport.
“You get that one feeling and it feels really good, and you’re like, ‘I think I’ve got the game. I’ve figured it out!’ she said “I still catch myself saying that almost every time I play, so I know it tickles me to want to get better.”
Soon, after all this time, it will happen outside the spotlight.