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Experience abounds
for 15-year old

AND so that old coach's clich raises its head once again:

You've got to learn how to win.

It's tired, but it's true. Sealing the deal isn't as easy as it looks to us from the outside. We saw it a couple weeks ago at the U.S. Women's Open. Yesterday, in those final holes, we saw it again.

(Well, once we figured out that SportsCenter's Michelle Wie updates were several minutes ahead of USA's "live" coverage of the John Deere Classic -- then we saw it.)

Michelle had it. She was right there. She'd played brilliantly.

But you have to learn how to win.

This is now two possible career-making, destiny-defining, history-defying tournaments in a row that this little truism has bitten her at the end.

This time she was even closer. But she just couldn't finish out those last four holes.

Now, shooting under par in a PGA Tour event is a tremendous accomplishment for a 15-year-old girl (or, if you want to get technical about it, for almost anyone, really). Let's not forget that.

It was a tremendous accomplishment.

As would have been making the cut. But even making the cut isn't winning.

Playing to make the cut is like fighting Mike Tyson to go the distance without getting knocked out.

OK, that analogy may be a little outdated.

But you get the idea. That would have been an incredible, amazing, unbelievable accomplishment, too. But it ain't winning.

Our Dave Reardon, who is at the John Deere Classic (Silvis, Ill. -- Dave gets all the glamorous trips), had a great line. In yesterday's paper, he wrote that Wie was "outplaying male professionals two weeks after faltering among other teenage girls."

That sentence says it all when it comes to expectations and pressure and the freedom of being the underdog, nothing to lose, just swinging away. But underdog or not, if you're good enough -- and Wie was great these last two days -- all that other stuff tends to find you.

And then you've got to know how to win.

Yes, she's 15 and there's time. It's still incredible. She's having a great time. Chalk this up to experience, again.

She's shown she can play on that stage.

The stage has shown her there's a little more to it than just that.

It should be noted, of course, that failing to make the cut in a PGA event is not losing.

But then, that in itself could be another contributing factor to why winning is sometimes such a tough lesson to learn.