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Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Here we go again ... Michelle Wie to
play in Men's Tour event next week

By COLIN FARQUHARSON
Will she - or her advisors - never learn?
Just when we thought Michelle Wie was getting back to her old game, give or take the odd disqualification, the Hawaiian teenager has decided to tee it up against the men, again. She will play next week in the Legends Reno-Tahoe Open,.
It will be her eighth time playing on the US PGA Tour - and she has yet to make a cut.
“It's not every day that a woman is given the opportunity to play on the greatest tour in the world,” Wie said in a statement. “This is a tremendous opportunity for me to learn from these great players and take those lessons to the LPGA. This is another step in the process of making me a better player.”
Wie, who is 18 and attends Stanford University, California part time, has no status on any tour. She has only one sponsor’s exemption left on the LPGA Tour this year. She will be playing her seventh and final LPGA event of this year at the CN Canadian Women's Open next month.
The Reno-Tahoe Open starts at Montreux Golf & Country Club, Nevada on July 31. It is regarded as one of the weakest fields on the US PGA Tour, held opposite the World Golf Championship in Ohio.
“This will be a great experience for the community to see a player like Michelle in this setting,” tournament director Michael Stearns said in a statement. “Michelle is getting her game together, she's getting back in the swing of things and we have no problem extending her this opportunity.”
Wie showed signs of improvement last weekend at the LPGA Tour's State Farm Classic in Illinois. She was a shot off the lead going into the final round when officials discovered that she had left the scoring area without signing her scorecard after Friday’s second round.
Wie finished her round Saturday, and after officials spoke with her about the scorecard problem, she was disqualified.A win or high finish would have all but guaranteed her enough money to finish in the top 80 LPGA players this year, the cut-off for automatic inclusion in next year's tour.
There’s been speculation Wie would concentrate solely on women's competition, especially after last year when she injured both wrists and made only two cuts.
Wie's chances of securing a 2009 LPGA card now rest with her winning roughly $80,000 in her final tournament, which probably would take a top-three finish.
Otherwise, she could be headed to the first of two stages of the LPGA Qualifying School.
“I think the qualifying conflicts with school, so I probably won’t go to that,” Wie said last month. But that was when she had greater hopes of winning enough money to become exempt for next year.
Her father made it sound as though Q-school was a distinct possibility at the time.“What other options do we have?” he said.

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