Caddie's role: 'Go Michelle" badges adorned the sea of sponsors' hats outside the ropes at the Sony Open in the Waialae Country Club, Honolulu, Hawaii, last week. Michelle mode had taken on a life of its own.

The buzz fizzed around south-east Oahu as audible as the swoosh of the wind through the lanky palms that surround the seaside golf course.

The 15-year-old prodigy Michelle Wie was making her second appearance at the event having missed last year's cut by one shot. The local expectation was bigger than a child's on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately the six-foot tall youth missed the halfway cut more convincingly, by eight shots, this year.

I got the chance to observe the Hawaiian wunderkind first hand last Tuesday in a local charity six-hole foursome shoot-out involving some of the participating pros (including Retief Goosen) accompanied by qualifying young amateurs from the area. What a tough position the talented adolescent Wie is in.

Everyone wants a piece of her and her handlers are willing to give them as much as they want. She is articulate and seemingly mature beyond her years, so when she is asked yet another question she replies almost better versed than the last answer.

All this for a young girl who has effectively bunked off high school to play in a men's professional golf tournament.

Kids screamed when she was introduced on the first tee. Adults looked in amazement at the height of her. In a country that is keen to elevate as many young talented people as they can to heroic status and subsequently destroy them with unnecessary adulation, I could not help but feel concerned for the hugely-talented youngster.

TEAM MICHELLE was ever present. David Leadbetter , the famed coach, was by her side at every practice session early in the week. Jimmy Johnson, Nick Price's regular caddie, had been flown in from Texas to carry her bag and offer his advice for the big occasion. Her parents were there, friends, sponsors and the obvious predators waiting to pounce on any potential good deal.

That is if she ever gets to the starting blocks of professional golf without being run off the track along the way.

I remember the hooha surrounding teenager Justin Rose after his fourth-place finish as an amateur in the British Open at Birkdale in 1998. His immediate future was doomed by hyper attention and arguably not enough protection from the predators. The best thing that Wie could have learned last week would have come from a brief conversation with Justin Rose.

Rose took a fall from the relative heights of his Open performance for the next few years and battled his way back to serious contention out of the wilderness of mismanagement. Some would contend that he was just learning his trade in those dark years, others argue he should have been protected a little more.

I was asked in a questionnaire for visitors if Wie's presence at the event had influenced my decision to come to Honolulu. To which I naturally replied that the Irish winter and Retief Goosen had more to do with that decision. It was a indication of how the sponsors viewed the local starlet.

Fair play to them or shame on them? If they were really interested in the welfare of the young Wie they would invite her to play at their event and let her do it on her terms to give herself the best chance of performing to the best of her ability.

With the circus surrounding the local girl, quite frankly she had very little chance of making the cut. But the sponsors got more than their money's worth out of her in the process.

The badge for next year should be "Let Wie be". The teenager is a prodigious talent, give her a chance to develop and don't use her specifically as a promotional tool.

From a personal point of view we substituted whale watching in Maui to tree spotting on the golf course last week. Things were not quite going to plan on the short grass which gave me a chance to deviate to the impressive foliage that border the fairways of Waialae.

They are proud of their trees at the country club to the extent that they have put name plaques on many of the thick-leaved exotic trees dotted around the course.

As you enter the clubhouse grounds a huge sprawling Benjamin tree from India acts as a canopy for a large part of the carpark. Moving from the locker-room towards the practice ground a Paper Bark tree with a trunk that looks like crumpled dried sheets of paper catches your eye. Then you pass an Autograph Tree from Florida, a Tropical Almond from Malaysia and a Money Tree from Madagascar.

Out on the course the only advantage of an errant drive is that you are likely to improve your knowledge of tropical trees. With Silver Trumpets and Monkey Pod Raintrees you could be forgiven for thinking you are were in a botanical garden. The marshals' dream tree would have to be the Be Still tree from central America with its beautiful yellow flower. The Vertical Wili Wili from the Polynesian Islands leads to some giggling from the less mature among us.

Michelle Wie may look like a well developed woman who needs no sheltering from the perils of a commercial world, but much like the exotic saplings that were planted in Waialae years ago and which stand so elegantly and strong today, they would not be there without a formative stage of protective nurturing.