Now here's something the kiddies can learn from Michelle Wie.

Never mind the golf game and the earning potential. That stuff is so specific and special to that tall girl that either you have it or you don't. And most don't.

Never mind the earrings and the swoosh outfits made special just for her. That's just costuming for the show.

We know now that Michelle Wie has something more reliable than talent and more lasting than fame. She has grit.

Or as retired Farrington High School football coach Skippa Diaz would put it, "haht." That girl get haht.

Mistakes, disappointment, embarrassment and bad breaks are not necessarily great teachers. They can be, if the student at the heart of the heartbreak is smart enough, strong enough and humble enough to pay attention.

Michelle Wie clearly is.

There she was at that news conference on Sunday looking like she had just had a good cry. The glam was gone. She peered out through Jake Shimabukuro glasses and a baseball cap, looking not at all like the covergirl picture carried worldwide just two weeks ago.

Sadder but wiser. Tougher. More grounded.

Michelle Wie dried her tears, picked up her disappointment, faced the public and took it like a man, so to speak. She behaved like a pro.

"I made an error," she said. "I respect the rule."

There was no public display of pouting, no drawn-out wrangle over the rules, no club-tossing or aspersion-casting. Just graceful control over obviously raw emotion and a stated intention to move past the incident.

"It obviously is not the way I wanted to begin, but it's all right," Wie said. "At least I got it out of the way."

Robert Smith, the LPGA tournament official and manager of rules, even commented:

"Obviously, I know when I played as a youngster, and when I was a 16-year-old, if this would have happened to me, I would have been pretty broken up. She was a little bit emotional about it unfortunately. But you know what, good things come from things like this. That's what I believe."

Good things do come from mistakes and disappointments. Good things rarely come without a large helping of heartbreak along the way.

The true measure of greatness is not how well you get the world to wink and give you free passes, but what you do with yourself when things get hard.

Ask Skippa Diaz. He'll tell you the mark of a champion, in sports and in life, is humility. "Be humble," he always says. To play the game, your feet have to touch the ground. Wie might have been hovering lately, levitated by the updraft of celebrity. She has now soundly landed.

"Rules are rules," Wie said. "I'll get over it."

And she will.

Now that's an impressive debut.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.