The Sure Thing: The Making and Unmaking of Golf Phenom Michelle Wie

Michelle Wie couldn’t miss. No way. Big success? It was only a matter of time. At four she could drive a golf ball a hundred yards. At ten she was outdriving adult male golfers in her Honolulu hometown–from the back tees. At thirteen she won the Women’s Amateur Public Links, becoming the youngest person ever to win a USGA championship. The next year she was playing in LPGA and PGA Tour tournaments. At sixteen she was earning eight figures in endorsements. Yet by the time she turned eighteen, Michelle Wie was already branded a failure, a has-been, a victim of injuries, bad choices, and–worst of all–really terrible putting. How was it possible? How did this happen? How did she go from being the next big thing to the latest big bust?

The Sure Thing is a gripping and intimate portrait of the meteoric rise, fall, and uncertain future of the greatest sports phenom of the twenty-first century. Award-winning writer Eric Adelson takes us inside Michelle Wie’s world, showing her to be a bubbly, astonishingly normal girl trapped in a world of outsize expectations. In chronicling Wie’s career, Adelson establishes a new gold standard for reporting on the growing convergence of professional sports, marketing, and mass entertainment in the Internet Age.

Eric Adelson first interviewed Michelle Wie when she was 10 years old for a story in ESPN The Magazine. A graduate of Harvard University and Columbia University’s School of Journalism, he lives with his family in Orlando, Florida.