The Hole Story by Craig DeVrieze

Not since Tiger Woods threatened to win his first title here in 1996 has the John Deere Classic garnered so much national attention.

That’s because in the eyes of many national golf writers, the “next Tiger Woods” apparently is a soon-to-be 48-year-old Kentuckian named Kenny Perry.

Perry, you may remember, made his case as the hottest player on a suddenly Tiger-free planet when he won the JDC earlier this month. It was his third win in five starts and Perry went on to Milwaukee to post another top 10.

He was in the headlines that week, too, of course, largely as a target of scorn for having bypassed the British Open. But, with the WGC Bridgestone Invitational up this week followed by next week’s PGA Championship, the golf-writing press has moved on and now warmly is embracing nice-guy Perry’s middle-aged emergence as the feel-good story we knew it to be during JDC week.

Perry was featured in the New York Times on Thursday. Sports Illustrated spent three days with him at home in Franklin, Ky., last week and a Perry story figures to be a prominent piece of the magazine’s PGA Championship preview next week or, perhaps, of its Ryder Cup coverage in September.

No story, of course, can fail to mention Perry’s win at TPC Deere Run.

It’s a nice bonus, and it beats being remembered as the joint where Michelle Wie was felled by the heat.

It’s no secret I am one of Michelle Wie’s most fervent backers. Someone who unquestionably was excited to see her get herself back into contention at an LPGA event last weekend and someone who was mystifed and dismayed when she made the inexplicable mistake of failing to sign her scorecard last Friday in Springfield.

Who does that?

This. remember, was Michelle’s third major rules miscue. First, the DQ in her first pro start for taking an improper drop and then there was the issue of touching a leaf in her backswing in a bunker at the Ladies British Open two years ago, which constituted grounding her club in a hazard.

She mocked the rules book then, noting it wasn’t her favorite bedtime reading. But, for goodness sake, you’d think she would have read it by now.

Too, you would think that, after the miserable two years she has endured since her WD at TPC Deere Run in ‘06, Wie and her handlers would stick to her vow earlier this year to focus on the LPGA Tour.

Instead, she has accepted an invite to next week’s Legends Reno-Tahoe Classic.

Please, understand, I am not one of those who dismiss Wie’s desire to challenge the men. I think there was a time she could do it, and she proved it at the 2005 JDC.

I also hope there will be a time when she can do it again, and do it consistently. I just don’t think that time is now.

She needs to build up her confidence as well as rehabilitate her reputation. One nearly magical weekend in Springfield simply is enough to do the former, and the debacle in the scorer’s tent only served to do further damage to the latter.

Meanwhile, I sincerely wonder if Wie’s need to hit it far enough to compete on a PGA Tour set-up hasn’t been a contributing factor to her inability to hit fairways anywhere. I just don’t see how playing next week in Reno gets her any closer to being the otherwordly talent I still believe she can be.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what I or anyone else thinks. Wie has proven she will stubbornly set her own course, which, frankly, is one of the things that that makes her a true trendsetter.

The concern here is that she hasn’t proven she can learn from her mistakes, which could just be the thing that derails her still promising career.