Off the Fringe
Off the Fringe
MICHELLE Wie can still surprise you. She can. Just when you think you've seen it all, just when her scores astound you and she notches another accomplishment, now that she's playing with pros, and beating a good number of them, here comes the biggest shock of all. Wie is acting her age,
and thank goodnessReady? Come close, I have to whisper it. This is going to rock your world.
She's 12 years old.
Duh! you say. You already knew that, everybody already knows that, everybody in the whole world knows that, and in case we forgot, it was even in USA Today.
Yes, you know it. I thought I knew it, too.
Because, see, do you? Really, do you? I didn't. I thought I did. But now I really do. There's a difference, you know. A difference between knowing an "on paper" fact, and having it slap you in the face.
Twelve. Years. Old. Somehow we can say it all the time, but it's just a figure in thin air. It doesn't mean enough. Michelle must be a different 12-year-old. She's Doogie Howser. She's Mozart. She must be more advanced, more grown up, more mature. She has to be, to play a game like that, to beat those full-grown women, to collect those trophies, to win those titles, to carry herself with such composure on a golf course. For her, age must only be a number.
It has to be.
She's Britney Spears, right? -- "not a girl, not yet a woman."
No. It floors you when you talk to her, even though she's grown another inch in the last eight seconds. You look into her youthful face and hear that pleasant voice and listen to the nice things she says. And then it dawns on you, the realization washing over you in delicious shock and then you fall down and then they have to call the paramedics.
She's 12! She really is! She's just a girl!
Which is wonderful. This is absolutely great. Because you'd worried, worried that maybe she was turning into an adult already, or worse, some prodigious golf robot. But no. And that's great. She shouldn't grow up, not yet.
She should put it off as long as she can, just like the rest of us. She should stay 12 as long as she can. At least until she hits 13.
"You know, at 12 years old I was just beginning and I cannot imagine what it would have been like," said Takefuji Classic champion Annika Sorenstam, who has now won 32 tournaments.
Another writer, Jaymes Song of the Associated Press, tells a story of talking to Michelle's father, B.J., and asking how Michelle was spending down time between rounds of her first pro tournament, the LPGA Takefuji Classic.
B.J. said his daughter watched cartoons.
Ah, a nice little tidbit to remind us that she's only 12 years old. Cartoons. That sounds good in the story. But that's not it. That's not what tells us what we need to know for her age to truly hit us.
The part that really sinks it home happened a second later when Michelle looked at her dad and gave him that look, you know the look, the look only a 12-year-old girl can give to her father.
"Dad!" she said, "don't tell him THAT!"
She really is 12. And it's shocking, wow, it's shocking. But it's a good surprise. It's absolutely great.