COVER STORY | MICHELLE WIE
"She's More Passionate Than She's Ever Been" Acclaimed instructor David Leadbetter talks to Lewine Mair about the topsy-turvy career of one of his most prized students – Michelle Wie.
C
AFP
addies, managers and trainers have come and gone in Michelle Wie’s life but David Leadbetter has remained a constant. The coach has steered his charge through highs and lows to the point where she earlier this year joined his long list of major winners – a list taking in such great names as Nick Faldo, Ernie Els and Nick Price. To recap, in June Wie finished two ahead of Stacy Lewis at Pinehurst to capture the US Open, a performance worthy of the hype that been heaped on her since she first hit the media spotlight as a teenage prodigy.
Where there are other teachers who might have found it difficult to school a player so closely bound to her parents, BJ and Bo, Leadbetter has never found it a problem. He realised at the outset that the best way forward was for him to work with the family. “I always give BJ and Bo credit,” he says. “There’s no rule book on how to handle a child prodigy and, considering the amount of flak the family have had to take, they’ve done well. They were protective when they felt they needed to be and now they’ve given Michelle more freedom and she’s thriving on it. She’s more passionate about her golf than she’s ever been.”
Victory at the US Women’s Open in June at Pinehurst gave Michelle Wie the first major championship title of her career 54
HK GOLFER・SEP 2014
HKGOLFER.COM
HKGOLFER.COM
HK GOLFER・SEP 2014
55
"There’s no rule book on how to handle a child prodigy and, considering the amount of flak the family have had to take, they’ve done well."
AFP
Wie following her twostroke victory at Pinehurst (above); with longtime instructor David Leadbetter, who has coached Wie since she was in her early teens 56
HK GOLFER・SEP 2014
Leadbetter felt for the Wies in those years when players and public alike were so critical of the route the then 14-year-old Michelle was taking in peppering her schedule with men’s tournaments. “It all started with the Sony Open,” he recalls. “Michelle got a wild-card because the event was in her backyard in Hawaii and because she was out on her own in amateur golf on the island. Of course it made sense for her to accept. “Lots of people said that she should have been doing as Tiger did in playing on the USGA’s junior circuit and winning in all the different age-groups. But what these people failed to take into account was the time and expense involved in flying over to the mainland. That’s something which certainly didn’t make sense.” Following on from there, Leadbetter says he had no problem in understanding why Michelle yearned for more invitations from
the men after missing the cut at the Sony by a single shot. She eventually had the satisfaction of making a cut in Korea, but such was the mounting pressure and criticism back in the States that she played worse rather than better and took it upon herself to call a halt to the experiment. Not, mind you, that she had any regrets; she was proud of the way she had “thought out of the box”. When it comes to the technical side of the game, Leadbetter and the Wie’s modus operandi is as follows. Since Michelle is not remotely interested in looking at videos of her swing, she is happy for her father, an engineer, to do it for her. Hence the reason that Leadbetter and BJ will confer over the swing sequences in order that BJ can keep an eye on whether Michelle is making a good fist of interpreting what Leadbetter wants her to do. In contrast to the above, Leadbetter confirms that Michelle’s “table-top” putting stance is entirely down to her. She had been pondering on all those smaller Asian golfers whose putting statistics were so much better than the norm and eventually she came to the conclusion that they benefited from being closer to the ground. HKGOLFER.COM
Wie, who likened herself to “a bendy flag-stick” when the wind was playing up during the Women's British Open two years ago, started experimenting with her new method in Dubai towards the end of 2013. Leadbetter had been around far too long to throw up his hands in horror. After all, he had seen plenty of weird and wonderful putting styles across the years which worked perfectly well – Jack Nicklaus’s for one. “Jack,” says Leadbetter, “wasn’t exactly orthodox in the way he was bent over and crab-like over the ball but no one was going to tell him that it wasn’t right. My feeling with Michelle was ‘Hey, if she feels comfortable, let her get on with it”. To begin with, Leadbetter fended off the adverse comments of others with jokes along the lines that his player had eaten some camel meat and was bent double with food-poisoning. But it was not too long before Michelle’s improved putting statistics were telling their own story. In time, Leadbetter lit on one thing which had to happen if she were to render the method still more effective: she needed a putter which married better with the stance. HKGOLFER.COM
It was in the week before the US Open that Nike produced such a putter, one where the toe did not rear up at the end. Michelle loved it straightaway. Having finished down at 119th in the LPGA’s putting stats in 2012 and risen to 51st by the end of 2013, she was up at 34th post Pinehurst. For another aspect of Wie’s game which has changed dramatically across the years, Leadbetter points to Wie’s driving. When she was playing alongside the men, she could keep up with or even out-hit some among them. Ian Poulter was just one of the names Leadbetter used to advance. “At 14,” said Leadbetter, “Michelle had a whippet-like body and swing and could hit for miles. Today, she can still hit long when she has to but she’s a more solid striker and a straighter one.” On a different tack, nothing appeals to Leadbetter more than the way his player has done so much to balance the ledger at a time when more and more girls are thinking that they should give up their schooling to concentrate on golf. “Parents,” he says, “look at Charley Hull and Lydia Ko and think that that’s the way to go but HK GOLFER・SEP 2014
57
“Michelle’s dealt with much of what Lydia [Ko] is having to deal with and Lydia sees Michelle as someone who understands.”
AFP
Wunderkind: Wie as a 14-year-old playing at the Sony Open in Hawaii against the men. She would miss the cut by just a single shot. 58
HK GOLFER・SEP 2014
I say to them, ‘Look at Michele. She’s 24 and is that really too old?’” He thinks that Michelle’s years at Stanford, where she graduated in the realm of media studies, contributed hugely to where she is now. “Michelle,” he says, “is a thoroughly well-rounded individual, someone who can handle everything to do with golf and the on-tour lifestyle.” He understands the argument that girls are different from boys in that they develop more quickly physically. Also, he will never dismiss out of hand the suggestion that starting young will enable a player to stop at 30 and have a family. By way of a compromise, he recommends a truncated university career as being better than nothing: “Even two years can help with the growing up process.” He sees Ko, with her amazing amateur credentials, as a player who was probably right to make the transition sooner rather than later but still he worries about her. As he sees it, his new pupil is practicing too hard and is in danger of running into unnecessary injury problems. “Lydia,” he says, “is only 17 and if she keeps going at this pace, things are going to get out of hand.” He remembers Wie making kindred mistakes
at a time when she and her family did not fully understand the implications of injury problems tucked away, say, in a wrist. There was more than one occasion when Michelle came back too soon and, even as recently as 2012, there was no question that was affected by a degree of physical and mental burn-out. Leadbetter still winces at the memory of how an injured Wie set out to play alongside the men in the 2005 Omega European Masters in one of those periods when she was light years removed from full fitness. She finished last, or close to last, and her performance precipitated a fresh wave of criticism, with the European Tour deciding, then and there, that they would not want a repeat performance. When Leadbetter saw how much good it did Michelle to take six weeks off at the start of this season – “the whole family went back to Hawaii and she didn’t touch a club in that period” – he made sure that Ko was aware. Not only that, but he asked Wie to talk to her – past prodigy to present. “There is a certain empathy between them,” says Leadbetter. “Michelle’s dealt with much of what Lydia is having to deal with and Lydia sees Michelle as someone who understands.” HKGOLFER.COM