Moment of Glory Page 4

  “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 giv
e 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.”