Has she completely lost it? I don’t think the way to recover is to go play at a PGA tour event next week! Talk about one crazy, mismanaged career.
Lost what? She never had anything but potential. She has not produced any kind of record.
Does she get any endorsements now?
In professional sports and in golf in particular careers are measures by the amount of money earned. Michelle Wie is probably one of the highest grossing womens golfers in the world when you factor appearance fees an sponsorships. That doesn’t happen without all the gamble and repeated attempts at the mens events. And if she one day has a Goydos type round she’ll explode even bigger. It was a smart gamble then financially and it continues to be so.
Could she have won more tournaments otherwise, maybe (though I don’t really believe the logic that playing better competition and courses hurt her skill level). But she sure as he’ll wouldn’t have been more successful aka $$$. I bet she’s in the ballpark of Sorenstams earnings already and she’s hardly cashed in at an event.
Has she been screwing some porn stars?
She’s still the #10 ranked female player. Give her a break.
They need better editors. She’s the #10 ranked female golfer. If men are included she’s well into the 3-digit range.
I don’t buy it. I don’t think Anna Kournikova had a better career than the Williams sisters, I don’t think Ryan Leaf had a better career than Chad Pennington, and I don’t think Michelle Wie has been a success at all. It’s not quite an umitigated disaster, but it’s been pretty damn bad.
For golf in particular, there isn’t a person on earth who would rate Tiger above Jack because of his endorsement deals. It’s all about winning majors, or at very least career top-3 finishes.
What is she - 23 or so? She still has plenty of time. Main thing is for her to learn how to putt - the area that most often lets her down.
Even if she never dominates like Sorenstam/Ochoa, I suspect she will still enjoy a long and successful career. (Come to think of it, if dominating is what she wants…) 
Michelle is 20 yrs old. She will be 21 in October.
She has one win on the LPGA.
In both your examples the Williams sisters and pennington vastly out earned your comparisons so I’m not sure what argument you are making. Golf is a slightly different animal in that virtually every golfer plays for endorsements and counts endorsement money as their primary salary.
Substitute Martina Hingis, Lindsay Davenport, Justine Hennin, or Monica Seles for the Williams sisters and the point still stands.
And again I strongly disagree with the golf thing. Do you really hold Tiger’s endorsements as evidence that he was better than Jack?
Did I ever say better? I’m not sure what Jack would have earned when you factor in inflation and all that, but I think that it’s pretty safe to say that Tiger has been more successful than Jack. Tiger has supposedly earned $750M in his career and that, my friend, is damn successful by any measure. You can talk about esoteric comparisons of who was “better” and what not, but I suspect that Michelle Wie’s primary concern is earning as much coin as she can. In that goal she’s been really successful and her career management has achieved it’s primary goal.
Esoteric? Are you really mounting the argument that in the arena of sports, careers are judged by endorsement deals, while success on the field/court/course/rink as measured by wins and losses is “esoteric”?
So in your eyes Anna Kournikova really did have a better career than, say, Martina Hingis?
And stars who take less money so that the team can be better, and then the teams goes on to win a championship – ala Tom Brady – that equates to hurting his career because he took less money?
Give her time. Her early career hasn’t been great, but look at Anna Kournikouva. She was a bad singles player with a model’s looks, and she eventually found doubles success with Hingis.
Kournikova was actually a good singles player. It was mostly a statistical anomaly that she never won a singles tournament. There are so many tournaments each year that a large number of them don’t get any big names to show up, and those are the ones that most decent players manage to steal a few wins from. Anna never managed to luck into those easy wins, probably because she was busy modeling instead of going to East Podunk to beat a field of 50th rank players. She did earn a top 10 ranking at one point, so she clearly had a lot of talent.
Granted she was a much better doubles player, at one point ranked #1 in the world in doubles.
I don’t know how much money Anna K. earned. I’m not sure that being a Maxim pin-up and internet sensation pays as well as you seem to be implying, I have no idea how many ancillary endorsements she got nor do I know how much money Hingis made off the court in Tennis related sponsorships. I suspect both are pretty close in total earnings, but that’s really not the point.
I will say that someone who earns more money than another person had a better career. Period. The entire point of having a career is to earn money and provide for oneself and their family. It’s all about the benjamins.
Now, if you asked me who had a better tennis career then the answer is Hingis by a mile. But that wasn’t even in the ballpark of the point I was making about Michelle Wie. Sorenstam has had a much better golf career than Wie and probably will once Wie calls it quits. However, if Wie’s earnings are close to Sorenstam’s now and project to far outpace her before Wie calls it quits, then Wie had the better career.
The OP said that Wie has had a mismanaged career because of her failed forays into the men’s game. I’m simply pointing out that his assumption that her motives are for a solid “golf career” might be missing the point. If Wie sacrificed some success in the LPGA for a huge payday by playing middling to poor in men’s games as a side show, it’s hard for me to begrudge her that. It’s tough to scrape out a living playing women’s golf. I’d say that from a financial standpoint her career has been managed awfully damn well. She took guaranteed paydays in the form of appearance fees to men’s tournaments instead of potential paydays in women’s tournaments, that’s just smart business and smart career management.
Then you phrased it poorly. I am basically reacting with your first quoted sentence here to rebut your quote from earlier in the thread:
Nobody measures athletes success by money any more than they measure franchise success by revenue. When you measure the most successful franchises you go by titles, no? Same with athletes. At least, this is the commonly accepted definition of success in sports.
It depends on the context. If you’re talking about a MLB or NBA franchise who blows out the payroll in order to win games to the point that they are losing money every season, then I think it’s safe to say that they haven’t been managed successfully. The team might be successful, the coach and players might be successful, but I don’t think people with any reason are going to be lauding the GM and owner as a success.
In this context, the OP talked about a mismanaged career. When talking about women’s golf as a professional sport, where earning enough money to even travel to events is a real issue for even moderately successful players, the monetary definition of career is really the most valid one. If you want to say that NBA/NFL/MLB players can discount earnings as a measure, that’s fine because frankly they are speaking in degrees of wealthy. Winning is more important than the difference between $110 and $125 million in salary. In women’s golf were simply being solvent is a real concern, I don’t think there’s any reasonable definition of career management other than money.
It is widely believed that her management team stunted her development, maybe to the point of permanently destroying her confidence, by throwing her out there aginst men when she was at the tender age of 14. And then again, and again, only to result in repeated failure and humiliation. Those stunts netted some good coin, but may have done irreparable harm to her golf game.
Whether or not this is objectively true, it is the common perception. Let’s pretend for a minute it is, in fact, the objective truth. Are you saying that because those stunts on the PGA were profitable, that by definition means her career was managed well? For the sake of this hypothetical, let’s say that had she not been developmentally stunted, she would have gone on to a long career on the LPGA that when all is said and done would result in slightly less money than her current fizzling career will end up generating.
She came back with a 76. She missed the cut by a mile.
In golf, where you are on the "money list’ is a key measure for whether you get into certain tournaments (especially Majors) and whether or not you get a Tour card the following year. World rankings are set by a formula using tournament wins, but that’s not the only measure of success.