After missing a five-foot birdie putt on the second playoff hole that would have given him the victory, he ended up losing the playoff to Singh on the third hole. Even Singh, who rarely shows any emotion or feelings, understood how disappointing the loss was for Weir. When the two men shook hands, he said softly, “I’m really sorry.”
So was Weir, who had been convinced he was destined to win. As disappointing as the loss was, the worst was yet to come. Over the next few days and weeks, it became apparent that the jerk who had jerked his shoulder had done some damage.
“It hurt, but it wasn’t as if the pain was overwhelming,” Weir said. “I could still play, could still swing the club. But without knowing it, I was compensating, changing my swing to deal with the pain. I should have gotten it looked at a lot sooner than I did, but I was thinking I needed to be a man and play through it.”
There were moments when he was able to do that. A final-round 67 at Pebble Beach early in ’05 allowed him to finish second, four shots behind Phil Mickelson. He played solidly at Augusta, making up for the missed cut in ’04 by finishing tied for fifth. But nothing was easy. When he played well, it was usually because he was “short-gaming it to death,” getting up and down all over the place to score better than he was hitting the ball.
He was missing cuts too, something he rarely did. By year’s end, he had missed nine cuts, only four fewer than he had missed in the previous four years combined.
He reached a nadir at the British Open, the tournament he had probably most looked forward to that year because it was his first chance to play at St. Andrews. Knowing that Jack Nicklaus was planning to make it his last competitive event, Weir had called Nicklaus in the spring to ask if he could play a practice round with him over there. Nicklaus had told him he would arrange everything, and they would play on Tuesday.
Which they did: Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Kenny Perry, and Weir. The crowds as they worked their way around the Old Course felt like Sunday at a major. Everyone wanted to see Nicklaus and Watson together. Perry and Weir were pretty much along for the ride, but they loved every second of it.
“When we got to 18, we took pictures on the Swilcan Bridge. Then when we got near the green, Kenny and I just stayed back so Jack and Tom could walk on the green together,” Weir said. “It was just incredible. I could see they both had tears in their eyes, and I know Kenny and I did too. It was magical.”
The only down part of the day was Weir’s play. “Jack and I played against Tom and Kenny,” Weir said. “The only reason the match was even close was because Jack held us in there. It was discouraging having to be carried by a sixty-five-year-old man, even if it was Jack Nicklaus.
“When we finished, though, I was inspired. Mike [Wilson] and I went to the range and worked, and I was convinced I was going to play well. Then I went out and missed the cut by a mile.”
Weir shot 76–75 and never had a chance to play the last two days, the cut coming at 146. It was the sixth time in seven tournaments since the Masters that he had failed to make the weekend. The only exception had been the U.S. Open, where he tied for 42nd place. Weir had steam coming out of his ears after he signed his scorecard. Lorne Rubinstein, who wrote for the Toronto Globe and Mail and had known Weir his entire pro career, was waiting for him. Weir was in no mood to talk to anyone, but he wasn’t going to say no to Rubinstein.
Rubinstein asked the usual questions, and Weir gave the usual answers about his disappointing play. Then Rubinstein threw out a comment in the form of a question that stunned Weir.
“There are some people who think you aren’t trying as hard, working as hard, practicing as much as you used to,” he said. “You think there’s anything to that?”
Weir likes Rubinstein and respects his understanding of golf. But he was really angered by the comment. “You think I don’t work hard enough?” he said, his voice as cold as ice. “Follow me around for a while, then tell me what you think. I really can’t believe you’d say that after all the years you’ve known me. That’s not who I am, and you know it.”
With that, he stalked away as angry as he could remember being in a long time. He spent most of the evening thinking about what could possibly be wrong with his golf game. He thought blaming it on the shoulder pain was excuse making. It had to be something else. He finally called Mike Wilson on the phone and asked him if they could meet on the range early the next morning.
“I wanted to get out early so I wouldn’t be in the way of the guys still in the tournament when they got there to warm up,” Weir said. “But I didn’t want to fly home in the mood I was in. A lot of my family was over, so I was going to stay until Sunday anyway. I thought working with Mike would help.”
It didn’t. Wilson kept making suggestions, Weir kept hitting balls all over the empty range, and finally Weir couldn’t take it anymore. “I just told Mike to leave the range, to leave me alone out there,” he said. “I didn’t want to talk to anyone, listen to anyone. I just wanted to be by myself and hit some balls. He left, and I stayed there and kept beating balls until guys started to show up. It didn’t get any better, so I just got out of there.”
He spent the afternoon with his family, then flew home. He finally went to have someone look at the shoulder. There was nothing major wrong, nothing that needed surgery, but there was soreness that had been caused by the shoulder being wrenched that day in Canada. Someone recommended a chiropractor in Salt Lake City, and Weir began getting treatments. He could feel the difference almost right away.
He finished the year 56th on the money list—most of which came from Pebble Beach and Augusta—only the second time he had been out of the top 20 since his rookie year on tour. Still, he was somewhat hopeful because his shoulder felt better. He believed he had bottomed out at the British. He certainly hoped that was the case.
“I had struggled in 2002 because I was making swing changes and routine changes that turned out not to be a great idea,” Weir said. “But that year, only a few people noticed. I was ‘Mike Weir, nice player.’ When you’re ‘Mike Weir, Masters champion,’ it’s completely different. Everyone wants to know why you aren’t playing as well as you did when you were winning the Masters.
“If you say your shoulder hurts, you sound like you’re making excuses. In ’02 there were a lot of weeks when I’d miss a cut or not play well, and not a single person would ask me about it. In ’05 anytime I didn’t play well, there were a bunch of people asking ‘What’s wrong?’ Your instinct is to say, ‘If I knew what was wrong, I would have fixed it already.’ But that’s not the right thing to say. I understood why they were asking the questions. It’s a whole new world when you win a major. You have to take the good with the bad.”
He smiled. “Of course it’s like anything else. It takes you a while to figure that out.”
By fall 2006, he still didn’t feel comfortable with his swing or his game. “It seemed to come and go,” he said. “Some weeks were pretty good; other weeks weren’t so good. My short game was still good enough that I could compete some of the time, but I knew my swing hadn’t been the same since I’d hurt my shoulder. Mike and I tried everything, and nothing seemed to work.”
He managed a third-place finish at Pebble Beach and tied for sixth at the U.S. Open and was sixth at the PGA Championship. To the outside world, Weir was playing solid golf, if not the kind of golf he had played in 2003. He was making lots of money, but he hadn’t won since his successful defense in Los Angeles at the start of 2004.
“One thing that happens after you reach a certain level is that it isn’t about the money anymore,” he said. “Early on, how much money I made week to week and year to year really mattered. But at this point in my life, honestly, it doesn’t. I was very lucky to make as much money as I did, especially after the Masters win.
“We don’t have an exorbitant lifestyle. We’re still in the same house as before. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that I have the chance to make the money I make and that my family lives very comfortably. Bu
t the work I put into the game, the time I put into it, the time I’m away from my family to try to compete, has nothing to do with the money. Winning—playing as well as I possibly can—that’s what I’m out here for.”
Weir tried taking the Vijay Singh approach to fix his game—pounding range balls for hours and hours. “About the only thing that happened,” he said, smiling, “is that my short game suffered because I wasn’t paying enough attention to it. After a while out there, I’d lose focus. Vijay is about the only guy I know who can just go out there and pound balls for hours and make it worthwhile. It just didn’t work for me.”
During the summer of 2006, while playing his regular Tuesday practice rounds with Dean Wilson, his old college teammate at Brigham Young, Weir began talking to Wilson about the “stack-and-tilt” golf swing. The stack-and-tilt was becoming a much-talked-about swing theory on tour, and Wilson had started working with Andy Plummer and Mike Bennett, the two men who were teaching it. Wilson was very enthusiastic about the changes in his golf swing and had just won on tour—at the International—for the first time in his career.
“Dean was clearly a lot more confident with his swing,” Weir said. “Mike [Wilson] and I had been searching for a while and hadn’t come up with anything. I finally decided it was worth at least hearing what Andy and Mike had to say.”
Weir hadn’t qualified for the Tour Championship in fall 2006, but American Express had asked him to fly into Atlanta that week to be involved in a commercial that he and several other players were to appear in. It was one of those trips Weir dreaded—extra time on the road when he wasn’t playing—so he decided to make it more than a trip to do a commercial. Through Wilson, he tracked down Plummer and Bennett and asked if they might have time to meet with him in Atlanta.
They met in the clubhouse at East Lake Golf Club, in the small players’ dining room next to the locker room area. Plummer and Bennett first showed Weir what the stack-and-tilt looked like on their computer and explained to him that a lot of great players used the stack-and-tilt concept, Hogan and Nicklaus among them, without ever calling it stack-and-tilt. The essence of the theory was simple: less movement in the swing. There was more detail than that, but Weir quickly grasped that they were talking about a basic feature of almost any golf swing: keeping the head directly above the ball.
“We talked for a while and then went out on the range and hit some balls,” Weir said. “I picked up what they were trying to get me to do pretty quickly, and I liked it. I flew home the next day and called Mike to tell him about the session and that I’d decided to work with these guys at least for a while.
“It was one of the toughest phone calls I’ve ever made. Mike and I had worked together for ten years, and I had made huge progress working with him. I’d gone from a guy who wasn’t on the tour to a guy who won the Masters. It was difficult, painful in fact. But it was something I really felt I had to do at that moment. I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing.
“I told him, and I was being honest, that I didn’t think it was his fault. Maybe after ten years, I just wasn’t listening anymore or I wasn’t hearing him anymore. Regardless, I felt as if I was beating my head against the wall, and I was tired of fighting my swing, which I’d been doing for two years. He was great about it. But it was still really hard.”
Soon after the session in Atlanta, Weir played in an event called the Champions Challenge, which Johnny Miller puts on annually in Salt Lake City. Nicklaus was there playing with his son Michael as his partner. Standing on the range, Weir asked Nicklaus if there was any one thing that Jack Grout, his longtime teacher, had emphasized with him through the years.
“Jack said absolutely. That every year when they would start out, [Grout] would take his head and hold it absolutely still so he couldn’t move it even if he wanted to move it. He wanted him centered over the ball so he couldn’t shift his weight too much and so his left shoulder stayed over the ball.
“It was exactly what Mike and Andy had been talking to me about. To be honest, I couldn’t really handle all those swing thoughts, so I just focused on one thing: keeping my head centered and unmoving over the ball.”
Weir spent most of the next few months working on his new swing to prepare for the start of the 2007 season. In past years when he went home to Salt Lake, he had been happy to put his clubs away until just before he began his new season, when he would usually go to Palm Springs to spend some time with Wilson.
Now, he found an indoor facility where he could go and hit balls when the weather was cold. “It was called Mulligans,” he said. “I thought that was appropriate.”
The initial returns on the new swing were mixed. Weir didn’t have a top-20 finish until the Masters, where he finished tied for 20th. Things began to pick up during the summer—a tie for eighth at Tiger Woods’s new event held at Congressional Country Club, a future U.S. Open venue, and a tie for eighth at the British Open.
The turning point, though, came at the Presidents Cup. Weir was a captain’s pick for the International Team since he had not finished in the top 10 in the point standings for the team. Gary Player picked Weir, in part because of his past experience, but largely because the event was being played at Royal Montreal Golf Club, and it made sense to have the most famous Canadian golfer in history on the team.
The U.S. won with ease, but that didn’t dim the enthusiasm of the Canadian fans, especially in Weir’s matches. Looking to add a little drama to the final day, Player matched Weir against Woods, figuring that would add spice to at least one of the twelve singles matches.
“I saw a comment in the paper that morning from Peter Thomson saying that matching me with Tiger was like feeding a lamb to a lion,” Weir said. “Peter was my captain in ’99 when I beat Phil [Mickelson] four and three in the singles. I remember thinking, ‘I thought Peter knew me better than that.’ ”
The lamb beat the lion one-up that day, with seemingly all of Canada going crazy on every shot. Whether it mattered that the matches were already decided is hard to say (the U.S. won 19½ to 14½), but there was no doubt that Weir and Woods were throwing everything they had at each other.
When the two men shook hands, Woods smiled at Weir and said, “Great playing. I can’t wait till we do this again. I’ll kick your ass.”
Weir took the comment as a compliment, which it was. Woods went on to tell the media he had played as hard as he could—Woods always plays as hard as he can—and that Weir had deserved the victory.
“It’s funny how much attention you get when you beat Tiger anywhere, anytime,” Weir said. “Doing it head-to-head was such a big deal to people. I mean, it was a big deal, I knew that. But when I beat Phil the way I did in ’99, it hardly caused a ripple, and I was essentially a nobody at the time. Beating Tiger, even though they’d won the matches, was huge, especially to Canadians. To be able to give them something when we were getting hammered that way made me feel good. It was definitely a confidence boost for me.”
A month later, playing at the Fry’s Electronics Open in Scottsdale, Weir got his first win in almost four years. He held off Sean O’Hair and Mark Hensby, two rising young players, down the stretch, shooting 68 on Sunday, to hold up a trophy for the first time since February 2004.
“The last day was a tough windy day after we’d had absolute calm for three days,” Weir remembered. “On 17 I had a six-footer I had to make with the wind blowing like crazy. Then on 18, I put my second shot in the left bunker and came out to eight feet. Had to make it or play off. It was actually a little bit like the putt I had on the 18th at Augusta. When I knocked it in, it was the best feeling I’d had since that day—including the win over Tiger.
“I played well for four days, not one. I’d had tournaments in which I’d have one good round or two, but you need four if you’re going to win. I held up under pressure the way I did back in ’03. I know there were people who doubted if I would win again, and I know there are people now who don’t think I can win a major again.
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p; “That’s fine. I’ve had doubters all my life. I had people tell me I should play right-handed and people tell me I was too small or didn’t hit it far enough to make it to the tour, much less win on the tour.
“I know now that ups and down are part of playing golf; even Tiger has his down days and—for him—down years. I’ve had both too. I turn forty next year [2010], and I still believe I have lots of good golf left in me. I like my golf swing, and I think through the years I’ve figured out how to deal with being someone who is always going to have to plan time in my schedule for people.
“That may sound like something that’s simple, but, for me anyway, it hasn’t always been that way. Especially when I’m not playing as well as I’d like to play.”
In 2008, Weir won more than $3 million and finished in the top 10—including a second at one of the new “playoff” events behind Vijay Singh—in five of his last six tournaments. The next year wasn’t quite as good—more than $2.2 million, again with a second and a third but no victories.
“The good news is I’m playing consistently solid golf,” Weir said. “I still want to get better. More than anything, I’d like to feel that way I felt that Sunday at Augusta again. There’s just no feeling quite like it.”
BEN CURTIS PROBABLY WOULDN’T have minded if people had asked him what was wrong with his golf game in the two years after he became the first man since Francis Ouimet to win the very first major championship he played in.
Asking what was wrong would have at least implied that people believed him to be a better player than his results indicated. The questions didn’t come very often.
“I think a lot of people had decided I was a fluke,” he said. “I kept hearing I was a one-shot wonder.”
Candace heard it too, frequently, while walking the golf course with her husband. Sometimes she sensed people whispering, other times she heard them talking out loud. “It was always something like, ‘Can you believe this guy won the British Open?’ ” she said. “It was very hurtful to hear. I knew it wasn’t true, but right at that moment I couldn’t prove it.”
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