Forget Michelle Wie - Paula Creamer is the Real Thing

You don't have to be a sports fanatic to have heard about Michelle Wie. Chances are, however, you have never heard of Paula Creamer. Wie is a 16 year old golf phenom that just signed large sponsorship contracts for Nike and Sony worth more than $10 million per year. With all this media attention, you would expect that she is a winning machine. You would be wrong. For all the hype, she has only won one amateur tournament: the 2003 USGA Women's Amateur Public Links. She has never won a professional tournament.

With her $1o million endorsement deal, Wie competed in her first tournament as a professional this weekend to try winning some money by actually playing golf (instead of being just an image in a magazine). How did it go? Chris Baldwin from the TravelGolf blog writes:

Michelle Wie's "first" tournament as a pro is shaping up like all her other tournaments... She hit a few spectacular shots, particularly with her driver, at the Samsung World Championship. She hit a few clunker shots. She melted down the stretch. She said all the right things in the media room. And she is more than poised to extend her winless streak (the Wie specialty) to 0 for 30 in pro tournaments.

The news gets worse for Wie. After finishing 10 strokes behind the Annika Sorenstam, the most dominating women's golfer ever, golf officials met with Wie and announced that she had been disqualified from the tournament due to a rule and scoring mistake.

...Wie no sooner had signed [her scorecard] for a 74 to finish fourth -- $53,126 -- that LPGA Tour officials took her out to the seventh hole to discuss a drop she took the day before.

Nearly two hours later, she was disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard. Because Wie dropped the ball closer to the hole -- by 3 inches according to her, by about a foot according to the rules officials -- she should have added two strokes to her third-round 71.

The disqualification notwithstanding, if the broad strokes of this story sound familiar: young and attractive media darling bursting on the professional sports scene; you have. It is remarkably similar to the career of monumentally mediocre women's tennis player and male magazine pin-up starlet Anna Kournikova. Like Kournikova, Michelle Wie, has never won a professional event. Both have also ridden the hype of professional expectation into bankrolling their very lucrative marketing machines. Though it hurts me to say, Michelle Wie is the Anna Kournikova of golf.

Michelle Wie, while getting immense amounts of press and attention, is not the story or the personality people should be following. The real rising star of women's golf is someone you'll never hear about in the Michelle Wie media onslaught: Paula Creamer. Why should we exchange one young women's golfer for another? Paula Creamer is a winner.

She has won on the tour, twice: the Sybase Classic and the Evian Masters. She has finished in the top five 8 times this year, four times in 2nd place. She has won $1.3 million this year playing golf. It also seems like she is mentally tougher than Michelle Wie, as evidenced by her 2 tour wins and other excellent finishes. Nicknamed the Pink Panther because of her love for the color pink and her fierce competitive spirit, Creamer is not a flash in the pan, she is a proven winner and a great golf story. Michelle Wie may develop into a better golfer in time but until then she is a marketing story, nothing more.
(h/t: PointFive, Oblogatory Anecdotes, MacStansbury, StopTheACLU,

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Technorati Tags: Michelle Wie, Paula Creamer, Pink Panther, golf, LPGA.

Comments

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Paula Creamer is born natural talent.. I hope She will get what in her mind.

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[taylor]

paula creamer is a very talented golfer and has a gift. she will go on to be a legend

[Brian]

No, she is not a proven winner.
It is Annika Sorenstam who is a proven winner.