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By Dave Shedloski
PGATOUR.com Senior Correspondent

HONOLULU -- She appeared at a news conference Tuesday afternoon wearing a beige "newsboy" cap infused with traces of golf style and festooned with the Nike logo. That Michelle Wie helped design the hat would suggest she knows how it should be worn, although maybe the fact that she had pulled it down over her ears was not a fashion statement.

Perhaps it was just a statement. Hear no evil.

The most famous senior at the Punahou School here on Oahu can't wait to earn her high school diploma this spring and move on to unlocking mysteries and welcoming maturation through college life at Stanford University. But first, however, Wie would like to earn a degree of respect and satisfaction that has thus far eluded her in her young golfing career.

Courtesy of a special exemption into the Sony Open in Hawaii -- her fourth -- Wie on Thursday resumes her bid to make her first cut in a PGA TOUR event and thereby prove she possesses skills commensurate with many of the game's best players. Australia's Gavin Coles and rookie Stephen Marino of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., join Wie at 8:30 a.m. HST (1:30 p.m. EST) on the first tee at Waialae Country Club for the opening round of the TOUR's first full-field event of the season.

A local product whose celebrity was verified by her appearance in a Sony Corp. holiday shopping catalog distributed nationally by mail -- and for which friends complimented her before asking for free PlayStation 3s -- Wie has been around this block before and reignites what has become an annual debate.

Is she worthy of the invitations she has received into men's tournaments?

The answer seemed clear cut in 2004, when, as a 13-year-old, Wie took advantage of calm conditions on her home course to shoot level-par 140 on rounds of 72 and 68. She missed the cut by one stroke and a gang of 48 TOUR pros left Waialae agog after finishing behind her.

However, since that remarkable clarion blast of a debut, Wie's game seems to be receding, allowing a contrary opinion to metastasize. Though she played well for most of her first professional season on the LPGA TOUR in '06, her appearances against the men have become increasingly futile.

"We have gone through some growing pains a little bit," she said.

In July, Wie withdrew from the John Deere Classic after 27 holes due to heat exhaustion, though she was on her way to missing the cut after an opening 77. Two months later at the 84 Lumber Classic in Pennsylvania, she was 13 shots below the cutline with rounds of 77-81 one week after posting 77-78 at the European Masters. She capped her 2006 odyssey of men's tournaments with an 81-80-161 effort at the Casio World Open to finish second-last.

Not counting the U.S. Open sectional qualifier that she competed in a year ago, Wie has played in 12 men's events, including seven on the PGA TOUR, and has made just one cut. That came last May at the SK Telecom Open in Inchon, South Korea -- three years after the LPGA's Se Ri Pak successfully advanced there and ended up 10th.

"She's certainly not proving anything except that she can't play with the men at her level right now," Stuart Appleby said last week at the Mercedes-Benz Championship. "There's no doubt she's going to improve dramatically as a player and mature as a person, but right now, it's just the wrong time."

Her precocious debut aside, Wie has a capacity for patience -- promising, for instance, that she's willing to put in anywhere from four to 100 years to graduate from Stanford -- but a two-week pilgrimage to coach David Leadbetter's school in Orlando, Fla., radiates whiffs of prodigal confusion.

"It was time for that oil change. ... I had a flat tire on my swing," said Wie, who wore a wrap around her chronically sore right wrist. "Going down there for two weeks, working out with my trainer in the morning, and seeing my sports psychologist (Jim Loehr), not thinking about anything else, not thinking about school, about college anymore, just working on my swing, it made me a lot more grounded and confident afterwards."

Perhaps better assuaging her fragile psyche and relieving stress that she was feeling all the way down to her toes, she says, was the chance to spend the fall semester as a teacher's assistant at a Head Start school for 3- and 4-year-olds. Wie read to the youngsters, opened their milk cartons for them, played games and showed them how to use a Hula-Hoop.

Somewhere along the way she found a part of the kid that is still in her, the one that simply enjoys the game.

"Golf is still fun, but I think everyone experiences this: not just in golf but everyone as you get older, you find less joy in the smaller things," Wie said. "I think for a while I experienced that because I didn't find the same kind of joy in the same kind of things. But hanging around with those 3-4 year-olds made me realize again the joys of being young. I find more joy in smaller things now again, and I'm trying to be the same kind of kid I was then ... but take that fun to a higher degree."

It's no fun shooting the kinds of scores Wie has shot of late, especially with so many expectations upon her from so many sources, including herself. She bristles at the suggestion that her continued presence in men's events is a marketing ploy.

"Being the only girl on the baseball team when I was four years old was a marketing plan ... not," the teen blurted.

Quitting is a luxury she could, indeed, afford, given her income from endorsements, and it might seem attractive to a vibrant young lady who later this year joins the incoming freshman class at a prestigious university that should open up a whole new world to someone who already has traveled much of it.

Quitting, however, would not represent capitulation of her competitive relevance but rather a sacrifice of her intrinsic makeup.

"It was very unfortunate that I was not playing my best in the last few events, but that is not stopping me," Wie said. "This is what I want to do. It's what I've gown up with. I enjoy it. You can't trade happiness for anything."