MICHAEL RICHARD WEIR WAS born May 12, 1970, the third son of Richard and Rosalie Weir. He was ten years younger than Jim and seven years younger than Craig.
“I still tease my mom about being an accident,” he likes to say. “She denies it, of course.”
Richard Weir was a chemist working in the rubber division of a company called Polysar—later bought out by Bayer—in Sarnia, Ontario, a mostly blue-collar town of about seventy-five thousand people that sat right on Lake Ontario. He was a reasonably good golfer, and when he bought a house directly across the street from Huron Oaks Golf Club, all his sons became involved in the game. Mike was the most athletically gifted and the one with the most interest in sports. When he was nine, Mike began working in the Huron Bay pro shop for Steve Bennett, picking up the range and cleaning clubs for the members.
Like most Canadian kids, he had started playing hockey almost from the day he could walk—and skate—and, even though he wrote with his right hand, he picked up his first hockey stick with his left hand and began playing left-handed. Since it is generally considered an advantage to be a lefty in hockey (because a left-handed shot will in all likelihood go in the direction of a right-handed goalie’s stick rather than his glove), Weir was encouraged to play that way.
Being left-handed is not an advantage in golf. Some buy the theory that a lefty playing the game right-handed is at an advantage because his front side is his left, and, thus, he has more strength with his lead hand and lead leg. But if that were really the case, why wouldn’t lefties be taught to pitch right-handed?
Ben Hogan was left-handed and played the game right-handed with (to put it mildly) a good deal of success. Like a lot of people, Hogan learned the game right-handed because left-handed clubs were scarce when he was growing up. Weir was able to learn golf as a lefty because his godfather’s son, Aldo Iacobelli, played left-handed and gave him a hand-me-down set that had three woods and the three-, five-, seven-, and nine-irons in the bag.
“I was lucky,” Weir said. “He was only a couple years older than me, but he gave me the clubs because he wasn’t into golf, and I guess he could tell that I was.”
When he was eleven, Mike spotted a left-handed Gene Sarazen sand wedge in the pro shop and, with the money he made working in the shop, spent $50 to buy it. “I wore it down until it had no grip at all,” he said. “I still have it in my house today.”
Bennett could see early on that the youngest of the Weir boys had talent. When Mike was twelve, Bennett took him to a junior tournament, and when Mike won the tournament he handed him a card with a picture of a complete set of Wilson blade irons—two through nine plus a pitching wedge. The clubs were Weir’s reward for the win. He tossed the hand-me-downs and added the new irons to his beloved Sarazen sand wedge.
“From that point on, I was pretty much hooked on golf,” he said. “I loved all sports. I played baseball and, of course, hockey, and I pulled for all the Detroit teams: Red Wings, Tigers, Lions. I was never very big, but I was always a pretty good athlete.”
Mike was a reasonably good pitcher, but he gave up baseball as a high-school freshman. It just took too much time away from the already short Canadian golf season. He did, however, keep playing hockey. As much as he enjoyed golf, in a perfect world he would have grown to be a 6-foot-3-inch center for the Red Wings. In real life he never got past 5 foot 9 or high-school hockey.
“Until I was about fourteen, I was one of the better players around,” he said. “But after a while, size became a factor. Every year the guys were a little bit bigger, and I wasn’t. I was still a reasonably good player, but by the time I was fifteen or sixteen I knew I wasn’t going to be good enough to get drafted. If I’d been superfast at 5 foot 9, 150 pounds I might have been okay. But I was just fast, and at that size fast isn’t quite good enough.
“I also knew by then that golf was my best sport.”
By the time he was thirteen, Weir was a very good low-handicap player who did well in junior tournaments around Canada. But there was some feeling that he might be even better if he switched around and played right-handed.
This was 1984, and only one left-handed golfer in history had made a serious impact on the game: Bob Charles, who was right-handed but played lefty and won the British Open in 1963. Many, if not most, pros turned lefty players around in those days and taught them to play righty. When the subject came up, Weir decided to write to an expert looking for some guidance.
He had met Jack Nicklaus in 1981 when Nicklaus came to Huron Oaks and played an exhibition with Bennett. Because Weir was eleven and because he worked for Bennett, he got to watch the match from up close all day. He got Nicklaus’s autograph that afternoon and a handshake and a smile from the great man.
So, when the question came up about switching from left to right, Weir decided to write Nicklaus a letter to ask him what he thought. He got an answer back quickly. “If you are a good player left-handed, don’t change anything—especially if that feels natural to you,” Nicklaus wrote.
That ended any thoughts of relearning the game right-handed. Weir still has Nicklaus’s letter—framed—in his home.
By the time Weir wrote to Nicklaus, he was hooked on golf and beginning to understand that he was more than just a decent junior golfer. The idea that he might want to play the game for a living had first crossed his mind in the summer of 1983 when he and his dad had made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Toronto to attend the Canadian Open.
“The first time I went, we were there on Tuesday, and Andy Bean and Tom Kite did a clinic,” he said. “I remember being amazed by the fact that they were using new Titleists as range balls. I couldn’t believe that. Then, at the end of the clinic, they rolled some of the balls over to us to keep. I was awed.”
Weir went back to see the actual tournament a few days later, piling into a car, this time with some friends, one of whom was sixteen and able to drive. “Jack and Johnny Miller were paired together,” he said. “We walked around with them for a while. I couldn’t get over the whole thing—the way the golf course looked, the way they played, the crowds.” He smiled. “And the Titleists on the range. I’m still a little bit in awe of that.”
Weir kept playing hockey until he graduated from high school, but the last two years his focus was on golf, because he and his dad and Bennett all believed it was going to be his route to college. He wasn’t an overwhelmingly good junior player—“I never won the Canadian Amateur; best I did was second,” he said—but he was a very good player, good enough to make it to the round of 16 at the U.S. Junior championships when he was sixteen.
“If I’d won one more match, I’d have played Phil [Mickelson],” he said. “It would have been lefty versus lefty.”
Mickelson is exactly five weeks younger than Weir. In an odd coincidence, both are right-handed and play golf left-handed. Mickelson first learned the golf swing standing opposite his father and mirroring him. Thus, when he took his arms back in the same direction as his father, he did it left-handed.
Weir went to a qualifier for the U.S. Junior that year in Michigan with Brennan Little, one of his closest golfing buddies back then. There were two spots available at the Michigan qualifier, and the Canadian kids won both spots. Little has been Weir’s caddy for most of his professional career and remains, to this day, one of his closest friends.
Playing well at the U.S. Junior brought Weir to the attention of a number of American colleges. Weir and his dad had written letters to several schools early in his junior year, with mixed results. “I think we wrote to about twenty-five schools,” he said. “We probably got responses from about eight or nine. Then, when I did pretty well before my senior year, we started hearing from more schools.”
He was allowed to make four official campus visits and opted to go see Marshall, Texas El Paso, Michigan State, and Brigham Young. None had elite golf programs, but all were solid Division 1 golf schools. Michigan State was also appealing because it was only a couple of hours from home. Weir had a friend, Bill Hutchinson, who was at Marshall. Texas El Paso was very eager to have him, and BYU’s coach, Jim Tucker, had recruited a number of Canadians, including Jim Nelford, one of the most successful Canadian players in PGA Tour history.
“I just thought I’d stay focused at a school like [BYU],” Weir said. “The campus was nice, and everyone was friendly—very friendly. You walk around there, and it seems like everyone is smiling. There’s a reason why they call the place Happy Valley.
“In the end, though, I made a golf decision. We played a very good schedule, a lot of tournaments, good ones, and that was important because I thought to get better I needed to play regularly against better players. I knew by then golf was going to be my focus in college, and I thought BYU was the best place for my golf game to improve.”
Brigham Young is primarily a Mormon school, named after the founder of the Church of Latter-day Saints. Weir was raised as a Catholic, although he has never been terribly religious. Even so, he was aware of his surroundings from the day he stepped on campus.
“They don’t put a lot of pressure on you or anything like that,” he said. “But there are occasions where they’ll try to recruit you. It helped when I got there that my roommate was also Catholic. I think we both felt a little bit out of place. When you first get there, they will ask you—very politely of course—every chance they get, if you’d like to know more about the Mormon religion.
“But they never tried to shove it down your throat. There were a lot of rules: no beards, no long hair, no caffeine.” He smiled. “The good news was that Coach Tucker was a Mormon, but he wasn’t militant. He would look the other way if any of us decided we wanted a Coke. He understood that he had recruited kids from different backgrounds, and he always respected that.”
In fact, Weir’s freshman roommate was from the Philippines. “I remember he had Mizuno blade irons with his name on them,” Weir said. “Right away that told me he must be a pretty good player.”
It took Weir a while to adjust to the new world he found himself in. It helped that Tucker had recruited two other Canadians—Jason Tomlinson and Jeff Kramer—that year, and Weir soon began to feel comfortable on campus. Even though golf was his number one priority, he did well academically, graduating in four years with a 3.0 GPA. He majored in recreation management.
“Huron Oaks has always had a rec center in addition to the golf course,” he said. “I was thinking I might go back there someday and run it.”
He fit in well socially once he got over his initial homesickness and began to get to know people. Ty Detmer, who would go on to win the Heisman Trophy, was BYU’s quarterback when Weir arrived, and the Cougars were consistently ranked in the top 25.
“My sophomore year Miami came in to play, and they had won a bunch of games in a row over a couple of seasons,” he said. “We beat them, and we all ran onto the field to tear down the goalposts and celebrate. I remember the grass was so long that it came up over my shoes. I remember thinking, ‘So this is how we slowed them down.’ ”
The golf team he joined as a freshman was a good one. Tucker recruited worldwide, and there were players from the United States, Canada, the Philippines, Ecuador, and Colombia on the team.
“Coach believed in qualifying before every tournament,” Weir said. “He thought the pressure was good for us—and it was. You had to go out and play for your spot every time. Most of my freshman year, I played somewhere between number four and number six—which I was happy about. A couple times I made it up to third. I actually won one tournament out in Monterey, so, in all, I had a very good freshman year.”
Weir learned a great deal during that year. More than anything, he learned that he had a lot of work to do if he wanted to make his dream of playing golf professionally come true. Seeing good college players up close gave him a sense of how his game stacked up compared to those he had been watching on TV all his life.
“I wasn’t, by any means, one of the better college players in the country, and most college players don’t make it to the tour,” he said. “I knew I had to get a lot better if I was going to have a chance when I graduated.”
Freshman year was important for another reason: he met Bricia Rodriguez. She was a dark-haired beauty from Los Angeles whom Weir first met in the food court connected to his dorm. As luck would have it, when he moved off campus the next year, Bricia was living in the same apartment complex. She had grown up in a Spanish-speaking family but also spoke French and English fluently.
“Some guys joke about their wives being the smart ones in the family,” he said. “With me, it’s no joke.”
Bricia remembers first spotting Weir at the food court. It was his looks that got her attention. “I thought he was Hispanic,” she said, laughing. “He had dark hair and a little wispy mustache, and I knew there weren’t a lot of Hispanic guys at BYU, so I thought I’d like to meet him. The minute he opened his mouth and started talking, I knew he wasn’t Hispanic.”
She liked him anyway, even though he didn’t speak a word of Spanish. “I came from a chaotic family life,” she said. “My family always reminded me of that movie The War of the Roses. Mike’s family was so mellow. They lived in this cute town right by the lake, and there was a laid-back quality to their life I had never experienced. Plus, he was very sweet.”
Bricia was at BYU on an academic scholarship, working toward a career in social work. Mike was working toward a career in golf. He improved steadily throughout his college years. By the time he graduated, he thought his game was good enough to at least merit a tryout.
“My freshman year, my scoring average was about 74–75,” he said. “Obviously that wasn’t good enough. By senior year [1993], I was a lot better. I was never a great ball striker; I pretty much just mucked it around. But I got a lot better at getting it up and down and scoring, with experience. I won a couple good tournaments as a senior and finished seventh at the NCAAs. [He was second team All American.] That told me I was good enough to at least give it a shot.”
Weir’s plan after graduation was to remain an amateur until he entered PGA Tour Qualifying School that fall. He had been picked to represent Canada in the World Amateur Championships that would be played a few weeks before Q-School began. Unfortunately, he never got to play.
“I filled out my Q-School application and sent it in,” he said. “I guess I didn’t read it closely enough. A few weeks later someone asked me what I was doing about my Q-School entry form. I said I’d sent it in. They said ‘Uh-oh.’ It turned out, as soon as I sent the form in I was a pro. So I couldn’t play in the World Amateur.”
That disappointment was mitigated when he breezed through the first stage of Q-School. Second stage, he knew, was the key, because making it through second stage to the finals meant he would—at worst—have some status on what was then the Nike Tour, which is golf’s version of Triple-A baseball, one step down from the big leagues.
He ended up in a playoff at second stage—eight players fighting for one last remaining spot. One player birdied the first hole. That left Weir and six others playing on in the darkness for the first alternate’s spot, which seemed important since it had already been decided that the first alternate from that site would be the first alternate for the finals.
“I finally birdied a par-three in the dark to get it,” he said. “Everyone congratulated me because never in history had the first alternate not gotten into the finals. Back then, 190 guys made the finals. There was bound to be one who didn’t get there for some reason.”
Weir flew to Palm Springs, where the finals were being played, hired a caddy, and played several practice rounds to get ready. Every evening he checked with the tour to see if anyone had withdrawn yet. On Wednesday morning, the first day of play, he warmed up and then sat on the tee and watched as each of the 190 players teed off.
“Everyone showed; no one withdrew,” he said, able to smile now at the memory. “Everyone kept saying to me, ‘This has never happened before.’ Well, now I can tell guys it’s happened at least once.”
He wrote a check for $1,500 to Jim Freedman, who had been scheduled to caddy for him, and made the ten-hour drive back to Provo to tell Bricia that they had to go to Plan B. “Felt more like one hundred hours,” he said. “And the $1,500 felt more like $15,000.”
Plan B was the Canadian Tour, which also had a Q-School, although it wasn’t nearly as difficult as the one for the PGA Tour. Weir made it onto the Canadian Tour, and he and Bricia were married on April 30, 1994. She caddied for him part-time in Canada, and he played well, finishing in the top 10 on the money list. That qualified him to play that winter on the Australian Tour, which is where he went after again failing the second stage of Q-School.
“I wasn’t an alternate this time,” he said. “I figured I saved some time, some money, and some heartache that way.”
That first winter in Australia wasn’t easy. The tour was set up much the same way the PGA Tour had been set up until 1983: if you missed a cut in a tournament, you had to play the next Monday to qualify for the next tournament. If you made a cut, you were automatically in the next week.
“I had one six-week stretch where I made it through Monday every week and missed the cut every week,” Weir said. “I was playing a lot of golf and making absolutely no money.”
His caddy most of the time was Bricia. That wasn’t easy on either one of them. “It was culture shock for me,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about golf. I remember one of the first tournaments I worked in, I walked onto a green and laid the bag down right in the middle of the green. Mike got this look in his eyes like, ‘Oh no, this isn’t going to work.’ ”
But when Mike began making cuts and making money, things got better. Bricia read books on Ben Hogan—Mike’s hero because he was a little guy who became a superstar—and on sports psychology so she could better understand what her husband was trying to accomplish. That was all good. But Mike still couldn’t get through what a lot of players call “the second-stage wall.”
“Every year it was the same thing,” he said. “I’d cruise through first stage, come into second stage convinced I was ready to get through. Then something would happen, and I would miss. In ’96 it was by one shot.”
Somehow, he managed not to get discouraged. Part of the reason was that he still believed there was great room for improvement in his game. He and Bricia had gotten into a pattern of living each year that wasn’t awful: he would play Australia in the winter and Canada in the summer. Since there were no kids yet, they would load up their Toyota Camry after coming home from Australia, put everything else in storage, and head north.
“It was actually a fun time looking back at it,” he said. “I guess you could say we were still young and carefree, and I was just trying to make myself a better ball striker. My swing was pretty much homemade, so I had to figure out a way to improve it to the point where I could compete with the top guys.”
Bricia’s confidence in Mike never really wavered during that period, and she still caddied for him often. “If anything, it was my confidence in me,” she said. “I knew Mike well enough to know he was going to keep after it and keep getting better. I just wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep doing it.
“Working with your husband isn’t easy under any circumstances, I don’t think. There were times when we’d both be uptight out there. He might say, ‘Will you please give me the goddamn four-iron now,’ and I would snap back, ‘Get the damn four-iron yourself.’ In the end, it probably made us closer, but there were some difficult moments.”
Mike experienced two turning points along the way during his search for a better swing. The first, a wake-up call, came in 1995 when he got the chance to play in the Canadian Open—a spot he earned because of his ranking on the Canadian tour’s Order of Merit.
“I went out to the range on one of the practice days, and it was packed,” Weir said, smiling at the memory. “The only open spot I could find was next to Pricey [Nick Price], who was still the number one player in the world at the time. I was nervous just being next to him. I stood there and watched him for a while, and I was in complete awe.
“I thought I was making pretty good progress with my ball striking, but when I watched him for a while I realized I was so far away from where I needed to be it was almost a joke. I stood there and said to myself, ‘Okay, what you’ve been doing isn’t good enough—I have got to find a way to get better, a lot better.”
The second turning point came that winter. Weir was getting ready to play a minitour event in Palm Springs, and he went to visit Brennan Little, who was working at a club there. Brennan was also taking some lessons from a pro named Mike Wilson, who had worked at the Leadbetter Academy. Weir had studied Price’s swing on tape after the driving range revelation in Canada and had also studied Nick Faldo. Both were students of Leadbetter.
“I decided to tag along one day when Brennan was working with Mike to see what they were working on,” Weir said. “I was impressed. I could see Brennan’s swing getting more efficient. There was a real organization to what Mike was trying to do. I knew that the path I’d been going down wasn’t getting me where I wanted to go. I needed a more reliable path. I decided to try to work with Mike for a while and see what happened.
“One thing about teaching me is that it’s harder because I’m lefty. Mike actually started to hit some balls and play lefty a little bit to get a better feel for my swing. He even got pretty good playing lefty. All of that helped me a lot.”
After working with Wilson, Weir went back to Q-School for his fifth try in the fall of 1997. His lifestyle was already changing. Bricia was due to give birth to their first child two weeks after the conclusion of the Q-School finals.
“It was pretty good motivation,” Weir said. “But the fact was I was a better player and a more confident player by then. Mike and I had worked on my swing and on my short game. I got myself into good position at second stage and kind of hung on.”
Bricia is a firm believer in both karma and mojo. “They say golfers with pregnant wives have good karma,” she said. “I really think that was a factor that year at Q-School.”
As is always the case at Q-School, Weir couldn’t be absolutely sure how he stood on the final day of second stage. But he played solidly and walked off the 18th green thinking he was inside the number. He was—by three shots.
“It was a big relief,” he said. “It meant I had a place to play over here regardless of what happened in the finals. I didn’t have to go back to Australia right after we’d had our first child. I think I played the finals without really feeling any pressure as a result.”
He played well the entire six days and erased any doubt about whether he was going to get his PGA Tour card during the sixth and final round when he holed a 40-foot birdie putt on 14, got up and down for par at 15, and almost holed a four-iron for a hole in one at 16, tapping in for another birdie.
“I had about a 15-footer for birdie at the 18th, and I wondered if I should go for it,” he said. “I really thought I was in if I made a par, so I cozied it up there and then got a little bit nervous after I tapped in, thinking I might have needed a birdie. Fortunately, I was right. I made it with a shot to spare.”
He had a solid though unspectacular rookie year on the tour, making a little less than half the cuts (thirteen) in twenty-seven tournaments. Still, he thought he had wrapped up his card with six weeks to play when he holed an eight-iron from 155 yards on the 18th hole at the B.C. Open to jump up to a tie for seventh place.
“I really thought I’d made enough at that point,” he said. “But I struggled the last few weeks. Then I made a 10-footer at Disney [the last tournament of the year] to make the cut and thought I was absolutely locked. But a bunch of guys played really well on the weekend and passed me.”
He ended up 131st on the money list, making a little more than $218,000 for the year. Going back to Q-School was a disappointment, but like a lot of players who have gone through the rigors of their rookie year on tour, he went back a much better and far more confident player. Players who go back to Q-School after a reasonably good, but not quite good enough first year on tour will almost unanimously tell you that they go back convinced they will mop up their Q-School competition.
“You know the guys at Q-School aren’t as good as the guys you’ve been playing against all year on tour,” Weir said. “If they were, they wouldn’t be at Q-School. So you sort of go in with the attitude, ‘I may not be as good as Nick Price or Nick Faldo or Fred Couples or Davis Love but I am better than you guys.’ ”
Since he had finished in the top 150 on the money list, he was exempt into the finals, meaning he had a five-week break after Disney. It also helped that he and Wilson had spent the time between Disney and the finals working on a new move on the range.
Wilson was concerned that Weir made a big swaying move on his way back, causing his swing to be inconsistent. Sometimes when he got to the top, he was able to get the club back into position on the way down, sometimes not. Wilson’s idea was to get Weir to cut down on the motion in his wrists and to keep his right arm—the front arm in a left-handed swing—up against his chest. That would make it impossible for him to sway on the way up. In order to make sure his arm was in the proper place, Weir adopted a preswing waggle, taking the club back almost to the top to make sure he felt his arm against his chest, and then, instead of swinging, he would simply come down and reset his club behind the ball. Then he would swing.
The waggle was almost like a fake out to those watching. “There were a few times after I started using the waggle that I would make the move, and guys in my group would start walking off the tee expecting the ball to be in the air,” he said. “Obviously I wasn’t trying to fake anybody out, but a few times I did.”
Armed with his new confidence and his new move, Weir headed for the finals in Palm Springs. “First day I hit the ball as well as I could hit it and couldn’t make a putt,” he said. “I shot 75. The good news was I knew I still had five rounds left, and I couldn’t possibly putt that badly again.”
He didn’t. He shot 27 under par the last five days and finished first in the 169-man field, three shots ahead of runner-up Jonathan Kaye. That not only returned him to the tour, but, as the medalist at Q-School, he was high enough in the exempt pecking order that he would be able to play every week without worrying about how many players ranked ahead of him had decided to enter.
Right from the start, his second year on tour was entirely different from his first. He finished fifth in Atlanta, his best finish ever, but the real turning point may have come on a Monday playing with no official money at stake.
“There was a Skins Game up in Montreal,” he said. “It was me, David Duval, and Freddie [Couples]. I just had one of those days where I made everything. I shot 63 and won all the skins. After that, I really felt I could compete with almost anyone.”
Couples, who is now a close friend of Weir’s, remembered that day vividly, even ten years later. “When you see Weirsy, at first you don’t think there’s that much there,” he said, shaking his head. “He’s a little guy, he’s lefty, he’s got that funny waggle and all. But he’s become a solid ball striker, and around the greens he’s got a magician’s touch. That’s what I remember about that Skins Game. And you could tell it wasn’t just luck or a fluke. I mean he had real touch, a real feel for what he was doing. I remember thinking, ‘This is a guy who’s going to make some noise out here.’ ”
If Weir had any lingering doubts about his ability to hang in with the best players, they went away a week later when he was in the last group on Sunday for the first time in his two years on tour. The setting was the Western Open outside Chicago. The venue was Cog Hill, one of the tougher tests on tour at the time. The second player in the group was Eldrick T. Woods, also known as Tiger.
“I was three shots behind, and it was Tiger who never loses a lead,” Weir said. “So, in a sense I had absolutely nothing to lose. I just told myself to go out and play as hard as I possibly could and let the chips fall.
“After nine holes, I’d cut the lead to one. I’m not going to say I was making Tiger sweat, but I was playing well. At the 10th hole, he hit his second shot over the green. I went into a front bunker. He got up and down; I didn’t. That was pretty much it. He ended up winning by two. I was still pretty happy with myself on the day. I shot one shot lower than Tiger, and I hung in there, didn’t get nervous, and finished second. In all, it was a great experience.”
A few weeks later he made his first cut in a major, finishing 37th at the British Open, and went into the PGA Championship—also played outside Chicago that year, at Medinah—feeling great about the state of his golf game.
“The second place at the Western had taken Q-School completely out of the picture. I was closing in on a million dollars made for the year at that point,” he said. “My swing felt great; my game felt great. I wasn’t thinking about winning, just thinking I was ready to play really well.”
He did just that for three days. He was 11 under par after 54 holes, which put him in a tie for first place with—you guessed it—Woods. Once again, they were paired in the final group. Only this wasn’t the Western Open. It was a major, and Woods hadn’t won one since his blow-away victory at the Masters in 1997, meaning he had gone zero for ten. Woods walked onto the first tee on that steamy August afternoon with a look in his eyes that let Weir know this was a very different setting than the one they had played in six weeks earlier only a few miles down the road at Cog Hill.
“You really can’t understand what it feels like to be in the hunt on the last day of a major until you’ve been through it,” Weir said. “I hadn’t been there before, and I certainly hadn’t been there playing with Tiger.
“I just wasn’t ready for everything that’s involved in being in the last group in a major. I mean, if you think about it, I’d gone from the last group at Q-School in December to the last group in a major the following August. That’s a long way to travel in a few months.
“It was great that I’d done it, that I’d come so far, but I just wasn’t ready for it—especially with Tiger. It was completely different than the Western. The pressure ratcheted way up; there were more people; there was more noise, more security. A lot of times during the day I had to back off shots because of people moving after Tiger had hit or because of noise. I’m not making excuses, but it is a little bit like a circus. Tiger didn’t bother me at all. He was doing his thing; I was doing mine. He’s not much of a talker out there—especially on Sunday at a major. But that was fine because I’m not a big talker out there either. It was just everything, the whole experience. I wasn’t ready to handle it just then.
“I could have birdied the first hole, and I didn’t. Then I three-putted the second and three-putted the fifth from eight feet. At that point I started pressing, and the day just got worse and worse.”
By the time the day was over, Weir had shot 80 and had dropped to a tie for 10th place. Most players will walk away from that sort of debacle and insist it was a learning experience, without being able to explain what they learned—other than the fact that the pressure of the last day of a major is different from the pressure of the last day of any other tournament.
Weir, though, did learn, mostly by observing Woods. “As great as he is, I could see that he was nervous,” Weir said. “I remember on 17 he had a key putt that he absolutely had to make or he was probably going to end up in a playoff with Sergio [Garcia]. I watched the way he stalked that putt, made absolutely sure he was ready to putt before he got over it, and I remember the look on his face when it went in. I remember thinking, ‘I want to have a putt like that someday in one of these things.’
“You always know from the time you first pick up a club how important the majors are. I can remember watching the Masters as a kid and thinking how cool it would be just to play in one, much less contend or win one. By the time you become a pro, you know all four of them aren’t like the other tournaments. You see what it does to a guy’s career to win one. You hear players talking about them, telling stories.
“But after you experience playing late in one, you feel differently. It gives you a hunger to do it again that you didn’t have before. That day made me rethink my goals in a lot of ways. I didn’t want to just be a good player. I wanted to be a guy who had a real chance to win a major. Watching Tiger, especially those last few holes, seeing how much it meant to him and how exhausted and relieved he was at the end taught me a lot.”
The irony of that Sunday afternoon was that it was really the first time Woods had felt the pressure of trying to hang on to win a major. At the ’97 Masters he started Sunday with a nine-shot lead and, for all intents and purposes, needed to finish 18 holes standing to win the green jacket.
Over the course of the next ten majors, Woods never held a 54-hole lead, and seriously contended only twice—in the 1998 British Open and in the 1999 U.S. Open. In both cases, trying to come from behind on Sunday, he had finished third. This was different. He started the last day tied for the lead, and the man he was tied with—Weir—fell away fairly quickly. That left him trying to hold off Garcia, who was making his first significant appearance on the world stage at age nineteen. Watching Woods deal with that kind of pressure, seeing that it affected him too—he fought his way to an even par 72 that day to hang on and win by one shot—was most definitely a learning experience for Weir.
“Tiger was very gracious that day when we shook hands,” he remembered. “He just said, ‘Hey, you’re playing great. Forget about today.’ ”
ONE OF WEIR’S STRENGTHS is his ability to forget—a trait Woods has all but perfected over the years. Like Woods, Weir never seems to get discouraged when things go wrong. He may get angry, and he certainly gets frustrated. But he never says, “This is too tough.”
“I usually just say, ‘Okay, that wasn’t good enough. What do I do to get better?’ ”
Three weeks after he lost Sunday at the PGA, he found himself in contention again. The setting wasn’t a major by any stretch, but for a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian the pressure was almost as great. The place was Vancouver, the tournament the Air Canada Classic, and Weir found himself in position to become the first Canadian to win on tour since Richard Zokol had won in Milwaukee in 1992. And, perhaps more important, he had a chance to be the first Canadian to win a PGA Tour event in Canada since Pat Fletcher had won the Canadian Open in 1954—sixteen years before Weir was born.
“People in Canada are very loyal and devoted to Canadian athletes,” Weir said when the subject of that very emotional day came up. “I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there aren’t that many of us. Obviously our population is a lot smaller than the U.S. A lot of the biggest stars are hockey players, so when someone has some success—almost any success—in another sport, it’s a very big deal.”
One might not think of Canada as a rabid golfing nation, especially given the shortness of the Canadian golf season. But Weir points out that more people per capita play the game in Canada than in any other country in the world. “I’ve often wondered if because the season is so short, it makes us appreciate the game more than in some other places,” he said. “When you talk about golf, it isn’t as if the first country you think about is Canada, but up there, I can tell you, people really get intense about it.”
The last day in Vancouver was intense from start to finish, Weir’s countrymen cheering him with every step. When he holed out from 155 yards with an eight-iron on the 14th, the roars seemed to reverberate from coast to coast.
“I remember it was cold, really cold,” he said, laughing. “Canadian summer—a gray August day where you could see your breath. People were wearing parkas all afternoon. I was tied for the lead on the 14th hole when I holed that shot with an eight-iron. The roar when that went in was like nothing I’d ever heard—at least for me. I might have heard a couple like that for Tiger. Then at 16, I made a long birdie putt, and that gave me enough cushion to get it done. I’m not sure if I was shaking from the cold or from nerves on 18. Probably a little of both. But I was definitely shaking.”
Weir had always known that his first win on tour would be a big deal in Canada. But actually winning in Canada ratcheted the whole thing up exponentially.
“It was just overwhelming,” he said. “There’s just no way you can prepare for something like that. If the next week we’d been playing someplace in the States, I think I probably could have handled the extra attention because there wouldn’t have been all that much of it. But the next week was the Canadian Open, and it seemed as if everyone in Canada wanted five minutes with me. I wasn’t going to say no to people. I understood this was a big deal to a lot of people, and I also understood it was an opportunity for me.
“But there was no way I was going to be able to focus on playing.”
Not surprisingly, Weir missed the cut. That was disappointing since the Canadian Open ranks behind only the four majors in importance to him. “It’s my fifth major,” he said, smiling. “Realistically, though, there wasn’t much I could do. I think I might have hit ten range balls that week—if that.”
The win not only established him as a star in Canada, it gave him security on tour. His two-year exemption guaranteed him a spot on tour—no more Q-School—through 2001. It also set him up financially, allowing him and Bricia to buy a house in Salt Lake City. There would be no more loading up the Camry for the summer.
For the year, Weir ended up making just under $1.5 million in prize money, which put him 23rd on the money list, a jump of 108 places from his rookie year. Armed with his two-year exemption and the confidence that comes from winning and making a lot of money, he played even better in 2000. He almost doubled his money, making more than $2.5 million for the year.
Perhaps more important than that, he won another tournament, and this time it was an international event that included all the top players in the world. It was played at Valderrama, in Spain, which had hosted the 1997 Ryder Cup matches, and Weir shot 67–67 the last two days to hold off Woods and Lee Westwood. As emotional as the victory in Canada had been a year earlier, this one, in a World Golf Championships event, with virtually every top player in the world, was a giant step forward.
“I had proven I could compete with the best guys, and I’d proven to myself that I could hold up under pressure trying to win a tournament,” Weir said. “But to actually beat the best guys on a Sunday was almost as good as it could get. After that I felt like when my game was on, I could win against anyone, anytime.
“That meant there was really one goal left for me to accomplish—winning a major. At that point, I hadn’t played in that many of them, but the win at Valderrama meant I was going to get into all four of them. No qualifying, no worrying about my world ranking—I was in. I just felt like my time was coming. I’d come a long way in a few years. But I still hadn’t completely climbed the mountain just yet.”