New mother Wie may yet return

NEW YORK • Michelle Wie West's eyes were not hollowed by exhaustion, as one might have expected of a first-time mother of a one-month-old. Her face was not streaked with tears, as it was 13 months ago after her injury-plagued body failed her yet again, lending a hint of finality to a golf career that had once seemed limitless.

Last week, Wie West, 30, looked and sounded refreshed during a virtual news conference to announce her appointment as assistant captain for next year's Solheim Cup.

She talked about motherhood and hinted at a possible return to competition and laughed off any mention of her rested appearance.

"It's concealer and coffee, the two C's," she said with a laugh.

Over her right shoulder hung one of several self-portraits she had painted over the years, this one of a woman in black-and-white with her hair piled high atop her head, set against a pastel, sponged background.

The unframed painting, one of a few decorating the walls of her San Francisco home, exudes a serenity that was absent in her earlier portraits, like the one from her teens of a woman with long black hair, sad eyes and a boarded-up mouth.

Wie West has been in the public eye since 2000, when, at 10, she became the youngest player to qualify for the US Women's Amateur Championship.

Over the past two decades she has won five LPGA titles, including the 2014 US Women's Open, earned an undergraduate degree in communications from Stanford and nearly made the cut in a PGA Tour event.

Along the way she became a sort of a psychological test for parents who saw her story as a childhood lost in the pursuit of riches or one saved by an emphasis on education; a child's passion nurtured by loving parents or one undermined by their active involvement.

Wie West said she has not thought intently about how she will raise her daughter, Makenna Kamalei Yoona West, though she is sure of this: She hopes to give her the siblings that she, an only child, grew up yearning for, and the fluency in Korean that she is so glad her South Korea-born parents insisted upon.

"I remember I used to hate my parents for making me go to Korean school on Saturdays," she said as her daughter made cooing noises while napping in her lap. "But that is something that I'll definitely be doing, being able to speak Korean is very important to me."

Her daughter already has a custom-made wedge and putter. Wie West's husband, Jonnie, an executive with the Golden State Warriors, played basketball through college, at West Virginia.

"My husband is such a golf nerd, I'm sure he's going to try to put a golf club in her hands as soon as possible," she said. "We'll see whether she grabs a basketball or golf club."

Her last competitive round of golf was in June last year, at the Women's PGA Championship at Hazeltine, outside Minneapolis.

She shot consecutive rounds in the 80s to miss the cut. Her surgically repaired right hand was not getting better, she said then, and there had been many injuries to her neck, back, hip, knee and ankle.

She married West two months later.

She has resumed practising, carting her daughter to the range with her between feedings. A return to competitive golf before the end of the calendar year is not out of the question, she said, but only if the spread of the coronavirus is under control.

"It just really depends on the state of the world right now because her health comes first," she said.

NYTIMES