The Girl Has Game.

That tropical depression hanging over Hawaii last week had nothing to do with the weather. It was the accumulated blues of the nation's male chauvinists, who watched in awe and dumb terror as a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Michelle Wie, shot rounds of 72 and 68 and came within a stroke of making the 36-hole cut at the Sony Open. Wie, the youngest golfer to play in a PGA Tour event, was a little bummed herself. "Just one more shot, and I would have made it," she said after finishing with birdies on two of the last three holes. "It's killing me now."

For those who think females don't belong on the same playing field with males, Wie's performance had to be unnerving. Forty-seven manly men finished behind her at Waialae Country Club, including 18 players who have won Tour events. She tied with Jim Furyk, the current U.S. Open champion, and with Ben Curtis, the British Open champ. Wie held her own in an area in which men are almost always demonstrably superior, averaging 271 yards off the tee, better than a third of the men. "There are sports that lend themselves to coed or open competition," says Dawn Riley, president of the Women's Sports Foundation and a former America's Cup sailor. "A tall, strong woman can compete with men in golf."

Wie, a ninth-grader at Oahu's Punahou School, is already tall (six feet) and strong. Her swing mechanics and tempo are virtually identical to those of Tour star and Sony Open winner Ernie Els. (Her nickname, the Big Wiesy, is a send-up of Els's, the Big Easy.) The crisp click her club face makes at impact is the same as that of, say, Vijay Singh. Players watching Wie hit 300-yard drives on the Waialae practice range rolled their eyes and whistled.

The mood was very different last summer when Annika Sorenstam accepted a sponsor's exemption to play in the Bank of America Colonial. The Tour players gave the 33-year-old LPGA superstar credit for spunk, and they admired her ability to hit fairways and make pars under pressure. But few thought Sorenstam had enough game to play on their tour. Her drives had no pop. Her short game was unsophisticated. She didn't spin the ball enough to get close to the hole on hard, fast greens.

Wie, in contrast, plays the power game. She can reach most par-5s in two shots, and she spins the ball sufficiently to attack well-protected pins. She is a more complete player, in fact, than Tiger Woods was at 16 when he missed the cut by six strokes in his first Tour event, the 1992 Los Angeles Open. Wie still needs the kind of imagination and consistency in her short game that you see on the PGA Tour. Yet given the years of growth ahead of her, it seems inevitable that she'll wind up competing, on a regular basis, with the best men. "She can play on this tour," says Els, who shot a practice round with Wie before the Sony. "If she keeps working, doing the right things, there's no reason why she shouldn't be out here."

Unlike Sorenstam, who said that playing with men was a one-time effort, or Suzy Whaley, who, at 36, played in the Greater Hartford Open last year, Wie is the first evidence of a new breed: a female golfer growing up with male stars as an ultimate (and realistic) benchmark. Wie has said she hopes someday to split her time between the LPGA (on which she made six cuts last year, once finishing in the top 10) and the men's circuit. Doing that would cause some controversy among feminists--some of whom want to remove all barriers to women athletes, and some of whom want to protect and expand existing women's leagues--and it would infuriate the not-in-my-sand-trap wing of the opposite sex. The Tour, on the other hand, could only benefit, as advertisers and networks throw money at the ultimate reality show: Wie versus Woods--the Lady and the Tiger.

There are larger questions. One is whether Wie will inspire the next generation of schoolgirl athletes to hang up their basketball shoes and head for the links. If that happens--and if women eventually make up more than their current 22% of an estimated 26 million U.S. golfers--then the recreational golf market might finally see the explosion of growth Tigermania promised but hasn't quite delivered. That would please a lot of people of all ages and both sexes.

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By John Garrity

Edited by Kostya Kennedy and Mark Bechtel