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Wie confident as LPGA Tour opens season in Ocala

 
Michelle Wie says she is “very excited for this year,’’ with her main goals to be consistent and stay healthy.
Michelle Wie says she is “very excited for this year,’’ with her main goals to be consistent and stay healthy.
Published Jan. 27, 2015

OCALA — Well-rested and healthy, Michelle Wie is ready to get back to work.

"I'm very excited for this year," said Wie, set to begin play today in the LPGA Tour's season-opening Coates Golf Championship (2 p.m., Golf Channel) in Ocala. "No major swing changes. I want to just keep the momentum going, just keep building. My goal for this year is the same. I want to be consistent, but at the same time I want to get a little bit better each and every day."

Wie, 25, won the U.S. Women's Open last year at Pinehurst, then struggled the rest of the season with a stress fracture in her right hand. "My top priority this year is to stay healthy," Wie said. "Been working out really hard."

The sixth-ranked Wie is one of eight top-10 players in the field at Golden Ocala Golf and Equestrian Club. Top-ranked Inbee Park is playing along with No. 2 Lydia Ko, No. 3 Stacy Lewis, No. 5 Suzann Pettersen, No. 8 So Yeon Ryu, No. 9 Karrie Webb and No. 10 Lexi Thompson.

Park and Lewis shared the tour lead last year with three titles. Lewis also had six runner-up finishes.

"That's what motivates me this year that last year could have been an unbelievable year," Lewis said. "It was good, but it could have been unbelievable."

Park is starting the season earlier than she has before.

"I never really played the two first events, but I decided to play this year and get the feel of it early," Park said. "It was a very short offseason, but I feel like I did the things that I really needed to get done. Worked on the swing, worked on rehab, my body."

Cheyenne Woods, Tiger Woods' niece, is making her first start as a tour member.

"It feels great to officially finally be a member," she said. "I'm excited for this week and to finally tee it up."

Sadena Parks also is starting her rookie season, giving the tour two black members for the first since 1971. Woods and Parks are the fifth and sixth black members in tour history.

allenby sticks with story: A defiant and at times angry Robert Allenby stood by his story Tuesday that he was robbed and beaten in Honolulu, basing the account on what he remembered and what he was told by a homeless woman who came to his aid. "There has definitely been a lot of confusion," Allenby said. "But I think the No. 1 thing that you should all remember is that my story stays exactly the same as the way I told it. I told you what I knew, and I told you what someone told me. That's the bottom line. I never lied to anyone." Honolulu police are investigating the Jan. 16 incident as second-degree robbery. No arrests have been made. Allenby said surveillance tape shows him leaving a bar with three people he doesn't recognize, and his next memory is being in a park. He said a homeless woman told him he had been thrown out of a trunk. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser quoted the homeless woman, Charade Keane, as saying she never told Allenby she saw him in a trunk and did not how he was injured. Another homeless man in the park, Chris Khamis, said Allenby told him he was depressed and drugged at a strip club and that he passed out and hit his head on a lava rock.