Yesterday, the Huffington Post unveiled its new sports section.  The left-leaning site has been covering sports in passing from time to time, but finally announced an official sports function.  Founder Arianna Huffington has managed to pull in a variety of writers, including very tired columnist Mike Lupica. 

Since I'm kind of a moderate politically, I'm familiar with the site's political coverage.  It's generally pretty good.  I was hoping the same thing for sports; perhaps HuffPo Sports would function like the Slates or SIs of sport.

So, consider me tickled pink when I saw a piece on golf on day one!  Sure, it was on Michelle Wie - a dead story right now - and by a guy that I've never heard of named Matt DeBord.  But, it was golf.  Then I read the story. 

It's fiction.  Almost complete fiction.  It's an AWFUL article.

In the spirit of Fire Joe Morgan, let's point out all of the factual inaccuracies in Matt's "story" about Michelle Wie after the jump.  This is gonna be fun.

First, the title: Michelle Wie v. Golf.

You gotta be kidding me.  Everyone in golf wants Michelle Wie to succeed - from her parents, to the people at Nike, to the LPGA Tour players and staff, to other equipment manufacturers, to fringe golf companies that might have better women's sales if Wie is successful.  No one wants her to fail.

Consider Michelle Wie. Now 20-years-old, the phenom from Hawaii burst onto the professional golf scene in the period between 2003-2005. By her sixteenth birthday, she had already played an event on the men's PGA Tour twice. She then turned pro, signed with Nike, and promptly almost won a women's professional major, the LPGA Championship.

Wrong again.  Michelle Wie didn't even turn pro until 2005.  In 2003, she finished T9 at the Kraft Nabisco Championship.  In '04, finished 4th.  She had already almost won a major by the time she finished runner-up at the LPGA Championship in 2005 - and even then, she was still an amateur.

The following year, she almost won the other four. By 2007, she was earning $19 million per year. Her beautiful, flowing swing has been called the best in golf, for a man or a woman, by Johnny Miller. She is an appealing, attractive, marketable young woman who will soon graduate from Stanford.

The other four?!  This isn't the Champions Tour, bub.  The LPGA Tour has four majors.  And, she had close calls in three majors that year - the first three.  At the Women's British Open, she finished 26th.  That's not exactly close.  But her swing is nice.

And from the moment she arrived, the golf establishment and the media have harassed, hounded, and undermined her success.

Yup, sure have.  That's why Golf Channel talks about Michelle Wie all of the time on LPGA telecasts - even when she's not playing.  Or why every golf magazine follows her around like a puppy dog when she is even in remote contention.  Or why ratings for the first event of the '09 LPGA year, in which she contended for the title, were double the '08 marks.  Yeah, we hate that bitch.

Why would golf do this to its most bankable star since Tiger Woods? Simple: She's a woman in a sport full of men who never stop being threatened. The golf establishment, especially in the United States, is full of venal, haunted little men -- players, executives, sportswriters, broadcasters -- who pledge allegiance to the spirit and dignity of an ancient Scottish game, but who in truth want to dismiss anything that disrupts their once-comfortable lock on the sport.

Ohhhhh.  This is going to turn into a "I hate being a man" column.  Now I get it.  Yup, all golfers just hate women.  We play to get away from women.  We think that the 19th Amendment was a disastrious mistake.  Every single one of us want Michelle Wie and the LPGA Tour to fail.  After all, there are so many jobs covering the PGA Tour that we don't need a women's tour.  Nevermind the mass firings at the LPGA Tour in the last two years, or the fact that there are only three men left in the United States that cover the pro golf beat for newspapers.  As a group, we would just prefer to purge ourselves instead of cover Michelle Wie and women's golf.

It's been forgotten now, but Tiger was assailed when he first arrived. Some called his epic 1997 Masters win a fluke. Others suggested that he had been given unfair advantages by being allowed to skip the PGA Tour's qualifying school. But over the ensuing years, through sheer brilliance, Woods wore down his critics. By the time he won the 2008 U.S. Open, limping through a Monday playoff on what was effectively a broken leg, all naysaying had been vanquished.

Tiger's 1997 Masters win was definitely not considered a fluke.  Would a fluke prompt Augusta National to enter into a decade's worth of massive course changes - including lengthening the course some 500 yards in a move known the world over as TIGERPROOFING?  Bobby Jones' thoughts on Jack Nicklaus, "He plays a game with which I am not familiar," were resurrected to describe that win.  Further, Tiger skipped Q-school in 1996 because he managed to WIN TWICE IN SEVEN STARTS AFTER TURNING PROFESSIONAL.  Winning gets a player a two year exemption on Tour.  Who could have guessed?!

Tiger was a legend before he ever turned pro.  Having reeled off six consecutive USGA titles BEFORE turning pro was a record accomplishment.  The expectation was that Woods would crush professional competition in time.  Otherwise, Nike would not have bet a record amount of endorsement money on the man.  But, yeah, that guy is a joke.

Wie, by contrast, has been worn down, by the media, the sport's overlords, and her peers. Only recently has she begun to show signs of her teen dazzle. But it could be too late, as the LPGA Tour has experienced an armageddon of sorts since the financial crisis hit in late 2008.

Yeah, she wasn't worn down by - say - her manager parents who are clearly implicated in Eric Adelson's fantastic book on Wie that was released earlier this year.  She was pressured by them to succeed and fulfill their dreams of riches.  The LPGA Tour acquiesced to many of the Wie's demands, including allowing an exemption for her into the very same LPGA Championship in which she finished second in 2005.  The LPGA Championship is an event intended for professionals, which Wie wasn't at the time.

Her peers open disliked her because they were under the impression that she thought she was better than them.  Consistently in public remarks, Wie talked about her desire to play pro golf with the men for her career.  The LPGA Tour was an afterthought for her, sending the clear signal that this life she lives now was the backup plan.  Wie kept to herself, made few friends at first, and became a teenage pariah - rather than phenom. 

Eventually, Wie's parents were smacked down by the LPGA Tour's outgoing commissioner Carolyn Bivens.  It forced Wie to become more social.  Wie played better with her parents not running interference on all of the details.  Players got to know her better and came to love her.  The Solheim Cup experience was the turning point in the perception of Wie by the professionals of the LPGA Tour.

The LPGA was already in bad shape. It had a great crop of new, young players, including Wie, but it was failing to convert them into tournament draws. As Wie fell in the rankings and suffered through controversy after controversy, players such as Lorena Ochoa, Cristie Kerr, Morgan Pressel, and Paula Creamer stepped up, but the world was indifferent. Meanwhile, a bevy of South Korean players was arriving. They were all talented, but it was an impossible TV sell. If the LPGA couldn't get viewers to watch Ochoa and Creamer, it was going to find the South Koreans challenging. Some commenters even went so far as to argue that the game's future lay not in the U.S. and Europe, but in Asia, and South Korea in particular. Given how good the South Korean women are, they're probably right.

A PARAGRAPH OF FACT!  WHAT?!  I WAS ALL READY TO LAMBASTE THIS PARAGRAPH, TOO, BUT THEN MATT PULLED A SWERVE ON ME AND LAID OUT SOME TRUTH.  SHIT.

This was the exact moment the LPGA, and golf in general, needed Wie, to act as a marquee draw, to establish a showcase for her peers and to allow the South Korean generation to gain exposure. Instead, golf has made sure that Wie wasn't a factor. But golf had committed a grave sin against Karma. As the financial meltdown laid low sponsor after sponsor, the LPGA was forced to scrounge. But what did it have to sell? Ochoa, a wonderful Mexican player and a player in the mold of the great international sportswomen of history, but beyond her, a coterie of inconsistent youngsters.

Ahhh, good, back to the lies.  Ok, the rub against Michelle Wie - in addition to her parents, pushing aside of the LPGA Tour, and lack of social interaction with players and media - was that she was afforded TOO MUCH by the LPGA Tour before proving that she could win at a professional level.  In other words, the very shit that Matt made up about Tiger Woods in 1996 actually applies to the story of Michelle Wie.  Wie was given exemption after exemption without a win.  She didn't earn enough money to get her LPGA Tour card outright.  Finally, in 2008, she earned her way onto Tour.  You see, golf is a sport in which accomplishment must be earned.  Wie was an exception.  She had plenty of chances to prove that the hype could be true.  She had three years to do that and netted zero wins.  For a woman that was expecting to beat the pants off of women and men, Wie failed to deliver.  Now, she had to earn her way.  She is doing that this season, and very well.

Wie is currently ranked 15th in the Rolex Women's World Golf Rankings. She earned her playing privileges the hard way, by going through LPGA Q-school. She seems committed to women's golf, and to winning a professional event, and has put her foray into the men's game behind her. And yet...golf still hasn't given the love to this extraordinary, potential champion, and its best hope to ensure the survival of women's pro golf during what has to be seen as the most serious crisis in its history. The LPGA Tour has lost tournaments and seen prize money reduced in 2009. The only good news is that, in partnership with The Golf Channel, the LPGA no longer has to pay to get its events on TV, as it did for a number of years.

Most of this paragraph is actually right, but Matt tries to make it seem like it was everyone else's fault by Wie's that she had to go to Q-school to earn her card.  She was afforded literally every opportunity to avoid that, and she didn't take advantage. 

And, oh yeah, while the LPGA Tour may earn some $4 million from its rights deal with Golf Channel, that actually means that more tournament production costs are passed onto the events themselves.  But the LPGA is swimming in cash, Matt.  Oh, and the LPGA Tour paid for its television broadcasting FOREVER until 2010.

Golf likes to pretend that the game is bigger than any individual player, but over its history, that pretense has been upended time and time again -- to the sport's benefit. Bobby Jones, although a great sportsman, was briefly bigger than the game. Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus were bigger than the game. The great female champion Babe Didrikson Zaharias was bigger than the game. Tiger Woods...well, Tiger is bigger than anyone who has ever been bigger than the game.

Actually, golf is bigger than any one player.  In case you haven't noticed, Babe Zaharias is dead.  Jack and Arnie are not playing professionally anymore - instead, designing mediocre courses for large sums of money in Asia.  Bobby Jones' influence, like the others', is lasting.  But the game soldiers on in every generation regardless of the faces playing pro golf.  Since the game is unique in that golf has more adults participating in the sport than any other in the United States, golf's draw is that amateurs can learn from and compare themselves to the pros that light up courses worldwide.  Golf survives so long as there are passionate weekend hacks.  For as great as Tiger is, the game will go on without him.

Michelle Wie had the potential to be bigger than the game and to provide women's golf with the worldwide explosion in popularity that it needs. But the best possible time for that to happen was two or three years ago, before she was buried under an avalanche of negativity and slumped. She's back now, and she seems like a more mature person and more complete player. But opportunity lost is still opportunity lost. And if women's golf continues to falter, golf will only have itself and its ridiculous, petty culture to blame. Wie was, and to a degree, still is the future. Her ascent was Tiger Woods crossed with the Williams sisters. Her decline was troubling. Her comeback is critical.

Matt, quit trying.  You're only restating the obvious.  In fact, this whole article was a compilation of lies and obvious factoids.  There is absolutely nothing insightful about this article.  I've written better blog posts that explain Wie's career in 100 words or less.  It makes zero sense for Matt DeBord to churn out a Michelle Wie piece when an American player - much less women's golf's supposed savior - has not won on the LPGA Tour since May.  Why not talk about something more relevant, timely, and substantive?

If this is what Huff Post Sports is going to look like, then I'm going to pass.