GERAINT PALMA BACON

1. As a young Korean-American teenage woman starting a career in professional golf,

there were three challenges she had to contend with in order for her to succeed in order to
become a topnotch player in league with Tiger Woods or Annika Sorenstram.

First, she had to continue competing in more golf tournaments and winning them in order
for her to rank higher. She had to land more putts, the likes that put Woods or Sorenstram
on the top of their game. One of her advantages is her youth – as a young player, her body
can still adjust to that of a typical professional golfer, and luckily she has good height and
the perfect limbs for swinging those clubs.

Still, as someone young, her experience in terms of execution and accuracy was not yet as
controlled if compared to her competitors in the pro golf scene. In the Forbes magazine
article, there was an instance where she was supposed to be tied for the lead – instead a
series of missed of putts blew her chances to a victory over a critically important
tournament. As she had thrust herself in an arena where results and numbers, as well as
commentaries on her performance are exacting if not stringent, there was so much
expectation for her to deliver in the works department.

The key word here is consistency – she must not only have the talent and the technique,
but also the depth and precision every time she sets her foot on the golf course and the
birdie range.

Second, given her prodigy in the sport, and granted that she is consistently good enough
for her to climb through the ranks and become a top player, also critical to her success is
how they package her not only as a golf player but also as a celebrity. Her parents will
come into play here as agents in configuring her image into one that is the total package.

With her parents were very much invested in her projection as a very important player and
sports personality, she would also need the discipline and the drive to follow their game
plan. A clash of culture is imminent here: as a natural-born American with Korean
immigrants as parents, it would be inevitable that her propensity to become individualistic
and self-determining will naturally have conflict with the Korean culture of austere individual
training. Already, in the Forbes 2005 article, her parents seemed to have a predominant
role in determining her image and training regimen. They also took in a bevy of consultants
and endorsements to ramp up her rise into a celebrity golf player, including a psychologist
who will help her with stress management. This must have been too much for a teenager
like her who was already handling a strict golf training regimen and image-building activities
all while managing her teenage moods. She must have handled this well, all the way when
she became an adult.

Her parents have to take credit for this. Acting with caution and careful calculation, they
were able to weather that tumultuous path to her stardom. Careful not to ruin her precarious
teenage life, they were able to submit Wie to a lifestyle where rigorous training regimen and
a balancing act of image-building go hand-in-hand – it has become like a second skin to
her. They were, in a way, good mentors to her for having the foresight and the resilience to
guide Wie into becoming the person that she is today.

Lastly, she also had to hurdle the idea of her life being subjected to public scrutiny, by an
audience that may have the tendency to pry into her privacy. As said in the article, there
were instances that people questioned her entry into a predominantly male sport, and if that
entry was a form of tokenism given her young age and ethnicity. Her reputation as a golf
player was put into question, which is tied with the possible product endorsements that
come with her image build-up. She also needed to shield herself from the reverberations of
negative publicity, like in the case of being called names in media for ditching the caddie
she was working with in a tournament as well as the so-called token entry into the LPGA
Championship given her age. She had to thank her parents for shielding her from these
scathing criticisms, as she was very young and it would devastated her emotionally.

2. At this point, we already know Michelle Wie had become a professional golfer now,
winning her first LPGA Tour in 2014. My advice to the teenage Wie would have been
worded like this: “Remember that in the sport, you have to take risks, risks that could make
or break you. As an athlete myself, I know the pressures of the game both inside and
outside the game area – you in a golf range, me in a volleyball court. Still, live your life as a
teenager entering the rites of passage any normal teenager would go through – enjoy
whenever you can because we only live once. Let the negative voices in your head out, and
turn them into positive ones.”