Michelle Wie

[Dr Winston O Boogie jr]

For a long time I've been saying that if Michelle Wie ever learned to putt she'd completely dominate that tour.
Well, she figured something out and if it keeps working for her, and she can avoid bad mental errors like what she did on sixteen, no one will touch her.
(She won in spite of the fact that she one of dumbest shots I've ever seen.)
She is by far the best ball striker on the LPGA Tour. In my opinion, she is the only one on that tour worth watching.
She just won the US Open and is leading in this weeks event.

[DonH57]

Congrats to Michelle. She is one of several young ladies I enjoy watching play golf.

[Mikeod]

I wonder if the improvement, besides the putting, may be due to Michelle playing up to her own standards rather than others' . Seems that early in her career she was burdened by unreasonable expectations.

[Dr Winston O Boogie jr]

I wonder if the improvement, besides the putting, may be due to Michelle playing up to her own standards rather than others' . Seems that early in her career she was burdened by unreasonable expectations.

There's no question about that, but she was never a very good putter even by LPGA Tour standards. I also think that although she is Stanford educated, she has made a lot of dumb mistakes on at crucial times on the golf course.

I've known people that are very intelligent but just don't have a good golf mind. They don't think about consequences. Sometimes they take huge risks at the wrong time. This happens quite a bit with players with a lot of talent and confidence. A player that progresses to this level has to believe that they can do anything and hit any shot. What many of them have to learn is that even though they are capable of playing a shot, it's not always prudent to do so. I think that Michelle had a bit of this problem. It might have been helped along by the fact that her father was always telling here that she was the greatest female player in history and was good enough to play with the men. But whatever the cause, poor decision making and poor putting will hold you back no matter how well you can hit it tee to green.

In Michelle's case, I think that it was mostly poor putting. In general the LPGA Tour players do not putt anywhere near as well as the PGA Tour players. If your one of the poorer putters on the LPGA Tour, you really need to work at it. This "table top" style that she has come up with may be the thing that helps her achieve her true potential. It's not really new, by the way. It was actually invented by a guy named Leo Diegle back in the 20s and 30s. Back then it was called Diegleing. The USGA tried to ban it but couldn't figure out how. They did ban his putter, however, which was a center shafted mallet model. If I recall correctly they created a rule that stipulates that a club cannot have a shaft lie angle greater than 72 degrees.
Here's Diegle in his prime:
http://i1260.photobucket.com/albums/ii564/Winston1027/imgres_zps087e1904.jpg (http://s1260.photobucket.com/user/Winston1027/media/imgres_zps087e1904.jpg.html)