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 end
ed 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.”
4
Climbing the Mountain
BY THE TIME THE 2001 golf season ended, Mike Weir had established himself as one of the best players in the world. He had finished 2000 in sixth place on the PGA Tour money list and dropped only slightly—to 11th—in 2001. That had much to do with his decision to cut back on his schedule—from twenty-eight tournaments to twenty-three—after the birth of his daughter Lili in April 2000.
Moment of Glory Page 5