(Michelle) Wie Will Rock You

Golf's 16-year-old phenom is on the verge: of womanhood, of a pro career (against the guys), and of a marketing whirlwind that will change her life. But she's got to sink those putts.

By Katrina Brooker

October 14, 2005

"I will miss these days," BJ Wie says, watching his daughter Michelle play golf. It's a hot September afternoon, and he is standing at the edge of a driving range 25 miles outside Honolulu. The trade winds are blowing hard off the Pacific, whipping the leaves of the banyan trees. The golf course here, Ko Olina, is a dry, dusty spot near the center of Oahu—nothing like the lush Hawaii of postcards. The grass is brownish, and shrubby hills block views of the Pacific. For the Wie family, in many ways this is home. It is here that they practice golf—planning and preparing every putt, every chip, every drive. It is here, now, that they have come to get ready for the tournament that will soon change their lives forever.

As BJ looks on, his wife Bo sits cross-legged on the grass at Michelle's feet and tees up a ball for her. She says something quietly in Korean, their native tongue. Michelle instantly sucks in her tummy. Her body, long and curvy, coils like a letter C over the tee. A gust of wind whips her black ponytail sideways, but her gaze remains intense and focused on the ball. BJ and Bo are intense too, studying their daughter, the way her wrists cock, her elbows tuck, and her knees bow. She swings, and cracks the ball into the air. It cuts through the wind, and disappears behind a hill somewhere at the back of the range.

"It's been a really special time, this period before ..." BJ pauses, as though he's not sure how to describe what's to come next. "I know next year, it's not going to be the same."

Right now Michelle Wie is a girl on the verge. At the cusp of womanhood, she is about to become the next million- dollar baby of sports. She is about to be so rich, so famous, that a year from now the girl teeing up her ball today will no longer exist. After she turns 16 on Oct. 11, she will launch her professional career competing against other women at the Samsung World Championship in Palm Desert, Calif. Next month, at the Casio World Open in Kochi, Japan, she makes her pro debut against men. Michelle Wie is the kind of athlete who promises to transcend her sport. People who don't care about golf or even sports will know her name, in the way they know Joe Montana or Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods.

Michelle, as an amateur, has already rocked the golf world. At the age of 10, she was the youngest player ever to qualify for the Women's Amateur Public Links Championship. At 13 she won it—becoming the youngest champion in the tournament's history. Last summer she was the first female player to qualify for the Men's U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship, earning a shot at competing in the Masters—where no woman has gone before. Michelle was eliminated in the quarterfinals, but for several breathtaking days of golf, she fought for a spot at Augusta.

With a drive that can blast more than 300 yards (her best yet, the Wies say, is 391), she outguns most of the women on the professional tour—and nearly half the men. Her aim isn't just to be the greatest female golfer; it's to be the greatest golfer, period. Tiger Woods, Ernie Els, Phil Mickelson—that's who she views as the competition. This is no empty boast: She played her first professional men's event at 13, at the Bay Mills Open on the Canadian tour. Since then she has played in four more men's tournaments. As a professional, she plans to play on both the PGA and LPGA tours. If she succeeds, she will make history.

Her drive to take on the boys has become the biggest story in sports. It's a cliffhanger: Will she qualify for the PGA Tour? Will she make it to Augusta? Can she win? Everywhere she plays, people want to watch. "People are intrigued by her. They want to see what she can do," says Clair Peterson, tournament director of the John Deere Classic, an event on the PGA Tour. He gave her an exemption to compete in this year's tournament in July. That created a mini-tempest among some tour members. Mark Hensby, the defending champion, said publicly she didn't deserve to be there. Yet as 10,000 fans followed her around the course, the tournament's gross climbed 40%, to $2.8 million. Its TV audience was over two million viewers, up 54% from the year before. "That's huge. That's a Tiger rating," says Kevin Landy, a TV producer for USA Network, which broadcast the event.

Simply put, Michelle sells. For this reason, major advertisers from automakers to cosmetics companies are after her. As this issue went to press the Wies were close to wrapping up a five-year deal with Nike with an annual base of at least $5 million plus incentives that could pay out far more, sources close to the negotiations say. A slightly smaller deal with Sony was close to completion. In her first year as a pro, with sponsorship deals, overseas appearance fees, and prize money combined, she could make $10 million or more, the sources say. That's huge, considering that the No. 1 female golfer, Annika Sorenstam, will make close to $8 million this year. And it's just the beginning.

To negotiate deals and manage Michelle's career the Wies have hired the William Morris Agency, the legendary Hollywood shop. "There is no shortage of offers," says David Wirtschafter, president of William Morris, which also has a few handpicked sports clients, such as Serena Williams. "If she plays on both tours, she will be viewed in the same economic light as the male players." That means a lot more money: Tiger Woods will make well over $80 million this year, ten times Sorenstam's paycheck.

To earn that kind of money, though, Michelle still has a long way to go. "We as a company would be interested in her, absolutely," says Larry Peck, marketing manager for golf at Buick, which sponsors three PGA Tour events and is paying Tiger Woods a reported $35 million to sell cars. "But she has got a lot to prove—she's got to compete and win." So far, despite many exciting close calls, Michelle has won just one tournament, the Women's Amateur in 2003. Now, as a pro, she will have to show she can fulfill the promise of her amateur career. And that will take some big adjustments.

Up to this point it has been the three Wies—Michelle, BJ, and Bo—vs. the world. As first-generation Americans who speak English as a second language, BJ (short for Byung-Wook) and Bo (short for Hyun Kyong) have guided their daughter's every move through the fierce world of high-stakes golf. They taught her to play. They attend every practice, every tournament. Until recently BJ, a professor of transportation at the University of Hawaii, has been her caddie, her manager, her press agent, her contract negotiator. Now all that's about to change. It's not just about going pro: Michelle, their only child, is almost ready to go out into the world on her own. And BJ and Bo are almost ready to let her go.

"My homework assignment is ripping pictures out of Us Weekly—you know, to figure out what my style is going to be," Michelle tells me one evening after practice. "You know Kate Hudson? I love her look." We are sitting in the back seat of her parents' car, driving to her favorite sushi restaurant in Waikiki. Michelle is talking about how she and her newly hired image consultant, David Lipman, are constructing a new look to go with her new status. Lipman revamped N'Sync's Justin Timberlake from teenybopper to Hollywood hunk. He is also working with Angelina Jolie. When Michelle appeared on the David Letterman show this summer, Lipman dressed her in Dolce & Gabbana heels and a slinky Alexander McQueen top that made the TV host stammer. Over six feet tall, with creamy skin and black sloping eyes, Michelle Wie is a knockout. "She has something I've never seen before," says Lipman. "When she did Letterman, she stepped out of the car with all the paparazzi there and she walked the red carpet like Nicole Kidman. She knew which way to turn her shoulder to the cameras. She knew where to look. Nobody taught her that."

But for all her movie-star looks and It Girl vibe, Michelle is still very much a teenager. She stresses about the SATs and getting into college. (Her top choice is Stanford.) She worries about getting fat. She loves movies and shopping and gossip. Even when she talks about her career, at times she is more schoolgirl than pro golfer. "My agent says he might be able to arrange for me to meet Brad Pitt!" she tells me excitedly. At one point, as we drive through Oahu traffic, Michelle glances at an instant message from her cousin in Los Angeles. "Omigod!" she suddenly squeals. "Johnny Depp is getting his hand put, you know, in Hollywood!" She spreads out her fingers as though she were pushing them into wet concrete. Then, looking over at me, she says very seriously—like this is something I need to know: "I love Johnny Depp."

From a marketer's perspective, Michelle Wie is a dream. Not just an incredible athlete, she's also young, beautiful, and perhaps best of all, approachable. Look at the faces in the galleries that follow her around tournaments. It's not your typical golf crowd. Little girls and teenage boys are alongside middle-aged men and soccer moms. And the Wies are ready to take advantage of it. During one practice, Michelle is wearing a thick stack of bangles on her wrist. Later I ask if they get in the way of her swing. When she says no, she likes wearing them, her father, without missing a beat, tells me, "That's good. She can have a watch company sponsor her."

Perhaps no one is more aware of her selling power than Michelle herself. It's clear that her aim is not to be just a golfer with some nice endorsements. Indeed, she picked William Morris over other agencies for a simple reason: It had no other golfer. "I'm an only child, so I guess I'm used to being exclusive," she shrugs. One rival shop, IMG, has many golfers on its roster, including Woods and Sorenstam. But William Morris has deep connections in movies, TV, books, and music, and a 106-year history as a starmaker. "She is going to be bigger than sports," says Wirtschafter. "She will become a face and a figure in the world. Michael Jordan was one of those people. And if all goes well she could be some version of that."

To get there, Wirtschafter and his team at William Morris are packaging Michelle as an exclusive product. Right now the team is sifting through offers but is in no hurry to commit. CEOs of major corporations are clamoring to meet her. Sony chairman Nobuyuki Idei has played a round of golf with her. Still, not just any sponsor with a fat checkbook gets through the door. "We don't want to turn Michelle into a NASCAR racer," says Ross Berlin, whom Wirtschafter poached this summer from the PGA Tour to be Michelle's agent. The idea is to have a small number of big sponsors who elevate Michelle's status. Michelle, who speaks Japanese and Korean, is already known in Asia. Now the aim is to make her famous everywhere from Sydney to Seoul to San Diego.

She'll have fashion experts help her choose what dress to wear, what haircut to get, which lipstick to apply. She'll learn to move on television. She'll appear in magazines, everything from Sports Illustrated to Vogue. "We want to define her physical persona, both on and off the golf course," explains Lipman. Her look is still a work in progress, but Michelle already has ideas. "I'm not preppy," she insists. On the golf course, the land of striped shirts and khaki, she's aiming for a younger, edgier style. She has talked with Nike about designing her a hip mini-dress to play in. She also wants to scrap baseball hats in favor of newsboy caps—the kind J. Lo wears in her videos. During a recent meeting with a designer at Nike, she talked about turning one current fashion craze into a trend on the links: the golfing cowboy boot. "How cool is that?" she asks. Don't laugh: If Michelle Wie wears them, it could be that golfers everywhere will be dressing like ranch hands.

For sure, Michelle Wie will be a pretty package, one that any advertiser would be after. Ultimately, however, she's getting paid to play golf—and win. If five years from now she's still missing cuts and trying to earn a spot on the PGA Tour, she won't be so alluring. And while she has come close to winning other tournaments, Michelle has also been known to crumble, particularly on the putting green. This year at the Sony Open, she three-putted within eight feet of the pin for a triple bogey. At the Women's U.S. Open, she was tied for the lead but blew her last round by missing several critical putts and finished in 23rd place. "Now, she's going to make something like $10 million? For what? For winning one tournament?" asks Morgan Pressel, who placed second in the Women's Open. As Michelle turns pro, the pressure is on: Sponsors pay the really big bucks for championships, not missed putts.

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