Anyone who follows professional golf even casually knows about the recent travails of teenage phenom, MIchelle Wie, who Butch Harmon thinks is playing worse now at the age of 17 than she was as a 14 year-old. The latest golfing embarrassment for Wie was withdrawing this past Thursday from her first LPGA tournament of the season after posting a 16 over par score on her first 16 holes of the tournament. As Geoff Shackelford reports, most folks think Wie withdrew to avoid the LPGA’s “88 and over rule,” which bans a non-LPGA member from playing in an LPGA event for a year if the non-LPGA member shoots 88 or over in any tournament round.
Juxaposed against Wie’s golf problems, however, is this annual Sports Illustrated list of the 50 highest earning athletes for 2007. Tiger Woods laps the field with his prodigious $100 million in endorsement income, but the only female on the list is Wie, who comes in at no. 22. Interestingly, Wie has the higest ratio of endorsement income to income derived directly from competition at 26-to-1 (she earned about $750,000 in golf earnings last year). And she hasn’t even entered Stanford University yet!
Is American a great country or what? ;^)