Michelle Wie’s U.S. Women’s Open advice for Lucy Li: Pick our brains

Michelle Wie has been there and done that and she hopes golf’s newest phenom, Lucy Li, takes advantage of all the resources available to her as she prepares to become the youngest player to start a U.S. Women’s Open.

Those assets include herself, an old lady of 24 compared with the 11-year-old who’ll tee it up on Thursday in the first U.S. Women’s Open staged, for the first time in history, on the same course (Pinehurst No. 2) that the men played in their national championship a week earlier.

“I would say just to have fun,” Wie said Tuesday about what advice she would offer the pre-teen from California. “Go out there, try to learn as much as you can, go up to any pro.

“We’re not scary,” added the winner of three LPGA tournaments, “we won’t bite.”

Wie, a veteran of the prodigy wars who made her first Open cut when she was 13 and is playing in her 11th such event, wishes she knew then what she knows now.

“The one thing I wish I did more when I was 13 was to go up to pros and ask them anything. You get a little scared. I’m not scared anymore, so I don’t have any fear of asking anyone anything now,” she said. “But I wish I had done that more when I was younger, just to go up to anyone and really pick their brains.”

That’s certainly something that Wie has done over the years, learning about life and golf from, in addition to her parents, the likes of Mallon and Phil Mickelson.

Mallon taught her to have confidence in her putting.

“She told me that she convinced herself that she was the world’s best putter,” Wie told Beth Ann Nichols recently. “So I started telling myself, I’m a really good putter; I’m a really good putter, and now I believe it.”

Mickelson asked the then-high-schooler over to his club’s short-game practice area, a session about which Wie still raves.

“I was with him on the chipping green and on the range doing wedge drills for seven hours,” Wie said to Nichols. “I remember everything.”

Now, with her career on the rebound after some disappointing seasons and years of unfair criticism behind her, the Stanford grad believes the lessons she’s learned over time can help her take the next step in what she views as a two-part vocation so far.

“I really feel like I’m kind of starting the second part of my career,” Wie said during her Tuesday press conference at Pinehurst. “I think a golf career, you’re going to have ups, you’re going to have downs. It’s not a short career, it’s a very long career. I’m in it for the long run.”

It seems as if Wie has already been in it for ages. She made her Tiger Woods-like “Hello, world” debut before the new kid, Li, was even a glint in her parents’ eyes and has experienced the highs and lows of national prominence and supposed dashed expectations and come out of it a strong, self-assured young woman on top of life and her game.

But it hasn’t all been sunshine and lollipops. From ranked No. 3 in the world when she was 16, Wie plummeted to below 100th last year.

Now 11th after zooming up the rankings ladder from 61st to start 2014 and eyeing the top rung, Wie was off the radar screen when Mallon took a gamble and put the struggling golfer on last year’s U.S. Solheim Cup team. Even more so than it did when Wie played on the 2009 squad under Beth Daniel, being part of the biennial competition against Europe changed the trajectory of her career, giving her the confidence to contend weekly.

While not the odds-on favorite to win this week (world No. 2 Inbee Park holds that honor), Wie is right behind Stacy Lewis (No. 1), Lydia Ko (at 17, yesterday’s teen phenom and No. 3), and reigning Kraft Nabisco champion and another former whiz kid Lexi Thompson (No. 6). Certainly, with eight top-10 finishes in 12 starts this year, including coming up short of Thompson at Rancho Mirage and earning her third tour win in April at the LPGA Lotte Championship in her native Hawaii, no one would be surprised if Wie were to capture her first major title on Sunday.

“I feel that I came into the year saying that I want to be more consistent and I feel like I’m kind of on track,” Wie said.

Certainly her stats prove her point, as she leads the tour in rounds under par and ranks second in scoring average and greens in regulation and fourth in putts per GIR. The last figure is especially attention-grabbing, given her unconventional “tabletop” putting method, which grabbed the wrong type of attention when she first bent over almost 90 degrees at the hips but has won kudos for its results.

“My putting stance is kind of what I feel comfortable with,” said Wie, who was 119th in putts per GIR two years ago. “I think that I still need to get better, but I think I’m definitely on the right track. It may look funny, but it feels good to me.”

Wie has not played her best in the U.S. Women’s Open, a T3 in 2006 her highest finish. In the years since, she has made two cuts in six starts and finished T55 (2011) and T35 (2012) and hoped not to be too hard on herself this week.

“I get really excited for the U.S. Opens and I try not to put so much pressure on myself, but I always end up doing so,” said Wie, who sported athletic tape as she practiced on the course and will enter the tournament a bit banged up.

Just a product of the aging process, she said.

“It’s just a nagging [knee] problem that I’ve had for a little bit. But the tape, it looks a lot worse than it actually is,” she said. “I just feel like I’m getting old. Not 13 anymore and tapeless.”