Surviving school of hard knocks

I have always admired genuinely happy people. The problem is they are surprisingly hard to find. Michelle Wie is a prodigiously talented golfer who at 10 years old became the youngest player to qualify for a USGA amateur championship. At 14 she shot a 68 and missed the cut by one stroke at a men's PGA tournament and just before her 16th birthday she turned pro and subsequently signed a number of multimillion-dollar endorsement deals with the likes of Nike, Omega and Sony.

Everywhere she went massive crowds flocked. In 2006 she played in a men's event in her parents' homeland of South Korea and it was absolute pandemonium. A few months later she showed up at one of the hundreds of regional qualifiers for the men's US Open, an event that routinely draws about 50 people or so, and over 3,500 people showed up. Officials had to close the gates because the course could not handle the crowd. They loved the towering teenage female prodigy who could hit a ball like a 30-year-old man. But you can't inspire this much love without inspiring just as much hate.

The criticism was harsh and unyielding. She was all hype, she had never won a woman's tournament so what the heck is she doing trying to play with the men? Her family was ridiculed and her father routinely reviled as the worst kind of overbearing stage dad. Players blasted her and so did TV announcers and media pundits.

You would figure being caught in the middle of all that hate would negate all the love, which is why I approached an interview with Wie with a fair bit of trepidation. She would have to be suspicious of me and rightfully so.

Wie was in town for the HSBC Charity Golf Day to raise funds for Unicef at Clearwater Bay Golf & Country Club and as I was led down the hall to meet her I had visions of running a gauntlet of snarling handlers and sycophants. But there was only Wie and a rep from her PR agency sitting quietly in the background. She smiled and said hello in a most accommodating and genuine manner.

Tiger Woods lives in a bubble and always has. Very few people get near him. However, the female version of Tiger, at least from a marketing and media phenomena perspective, seems at ease. But surely she must despise this part of the job, meeting with the dreaded media. 'No I actually I enjoy it,' she said. 'It gives me an opportunity to interact with the press and I am grateful for that.'