One might imagine that Michelle Wie, fresh off her win at the HSBC Women’s World Championship earlier this month, would have her sights set solely on following her first LPGA victory in almost four years with a W at this week’s Founders Cup.
Michelle Wie aims to stay healthy, ‘keep my organs in my body’
Wie hopes to maintain the roll she’s on, after notching her first win since 2014, but mostly the LPGA’s needle-mover wants to remain healthy enough to finish an entire season.
Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images
One, however, would have been wrong.
Sure, the 2014 U.S. Women’s Open champ would like to put the tour’s first U.S. start of the year in the win column, but she has a far more personal objective: try to keep her body intact for an entire golf season.
“My goal is to play the whole year and not to take an extended break during the season. That would be my whole goal,” Wie told reporters ahead of Thursday’s kickoff to the LPGA’s West Coast swing. “Keep my organs in my body. That would be great.”
Injuries and illnesses have bedeviled Wie through the years, leading to two exceptionally down years, 2015 and 2016, full of missed cuts and withdrawals and just one top-10 finish. In 2015, Wie posted as MCs/WDs (13) as she did complete tournaments.
Even after undergoing an emergency appendectomy (the source of her “organs” remark) last August forced her to miss the tour’s final major and led to some not-so-stellar results, last year was a different story. The 28-year-old Stanford grad posted eight top 10s, including a T6 at the season-ending CME Group Tour Championship, missed just one cut and kept the withdrawals to a minimum.
Despite an ongoing battle with arthritis in her wrists, Wie picked up in 2018 where she left off last year, getting off to a terrific start with two 11th-place finishes and her dramatic, come-from-behind win in Singpore thanks to a 35-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole.
That win — her first since her 2014 Open title — “opened up the floodgates” for other golfers seeking to overcome lengthy victory droughts. Later on the same day that Wie posted her W in Singapore, Phil Mickelson captured his first PGA Tour title since 2013 when he outlasted Justin Thomas in a playoff at the WGC-Mexico Championship.
Shortly thereafter, Steve Stricker won his first Champions Tour event, and last week Paul Casey ended his own nine-year tour winless streak by beating Tiger Woods and Patrick Reed by a stroke at the Valspar Championship.
Wie said she saw a stat that informed her it had been some 4,000 days since she, Mickelson and Stricker had prevailed in any tournament.
“Then Phil winning and Paul Casey winning after nine years, I just hope I opened the floodgates for people that haven’t won in a while,” said Wie.
As for her own prospective fortunes, the five-time tour victor expected that, in a career filled with disappointment for others expecting constant great things from the former pre-teen phenom, Wie said she anticipated that her finest golf was yet to come.
“I always think the best is in front of me,” she said. “That’s why I practice and work so hard. It makes me really excited. It make me really excited for this year and the future.”
That future includes staying on the course for all of 2018.
“My goal is to play all five majors because I don’t think I’ve done that so far,” said Wie, who would also like to practice without having to count the number of balls she can hit and play as many tourneys without worrying about her body breaking down. “Just really to be healthy and be able to give it 110 percent … I just want to be able to work as hard as I can and grind as hard as I want to and play as many tournaments as I want to. I just want to be able to play unrestricted.”
Even so, every three or four months, Wie must receive collagen shots in her wrists, after which she has to take a week off from hitting balls but then feels no pain.
“Knock on wood it keeps working,” said Wie, who traded cortisone shots for the collagen. “Hopefully these will keep working, and as long as I just keep maintaining it, hopefully for a really long time.”
Wie, by the way, offered a sarcastic “thank you” to Justin Thomas, who congratulated her on her victory and then holed out for eagle on the 18th hole in Mexico after her dramatic final putt at the HSBC.
“Yeah, I was really excited about that putt going in. It was pretty dramatic. Then I see on Instagram that he holed out from the fairway to get the clubhouse lead,” Wie said.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, just have to upstage me. Like let me have my moment, you know.’ I texted him, ‘Great shot, but way to upstage me,’” Wie said with a smile.
