Mike Weir Is A Winner Again

It’s nearly 2,000 kilometres from Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz., to The Woodlands Country Club outside Houston. A two-plus-hour flight or a long day’s drive if you wanted to do it, eastward on Interstate 10 through New Mexico and a lot of dusty desert and one-horse towns.

For Mike Weir the journey took 13 years, six months and one week. An odyssey full of injuries, doubt, despair and upheaval — both personal and professional — to go from the winner’s circle at the PGA Tour’s 2007 Fry’s Electronics Open to that of the PGA Tour Champions’ Insperity Invitational Sunday.

How many missed cuts were there around the world between his hoisting hardware at Grayhawk and The Woodlands? One hundred and twenty-eight.

“Boy yeah, lots happened in that window, between 2007 and now,” said Weir during a virtual conference call, a glass of celebratory red at his side. “Not all great but there are some real valuable lessons to be learned, I think, at least for myself that’s the way I’ve tried to look at it.

“Things can be hard in life and it has been for not only my golf game, there have been some other things that have been difficult. I’ve tried to keep my chin up, I’ve tried to be there for the ones I love more than anything, especially my children. That’s been my focus and golf has been a bonus. To work on my game and come back has been a bit of a bonus.”

Weir never knew what was in store for him when he left Scottsdale after his eighth PGA Tour victory. How could he? He’d broken a three-plus-year winless drought using the stack-and-tilt swing method that was popular at the time. He’d demonstrated the move to International Team captain Gary Player on the range at the Presidents Cup in Montreal three weeks earlier. Player gave Weir a makes-sense-to-me nod and later sent the lefthander out against Tiger Woods in a Sunday singles match that the Canadian won, thrilling a nation that he elated most memorably in 2003 with his Masters win.

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