Weir looks for a silver lining
Still looking to win in his 25th year at national open
To put in perspective how long it’s been since Mike Weir first played in the Canadian Open, consider a few facts.
When Weir made his debut at Glen Abbey Golf Club, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino and Johnny Miller all finished in the top 40. The total purse ($900,000) was less than the cheque that will be cashed by this year’s winner ($1,062,000, all figures U.S.). And Weir, a19-year-old amateur who missed the cut by 12 shots, was still more than a decade away from his first PGA Tour win. The year was 1989.
So when Weir tees it up in the 2016 RBC Canadian Open at Glen Abbey on Thursday morning, it’ll mark the 25th start at the national championship for the greatest golfer this nation has ever produced. Now aged 46 and sporting a hipster-worthy beard flecked in silver, it’ll be a silver anniversary of sorts.
“It’s hard to believe — it’s been a long time,” Weir was saying Wednesday.
It’s been a long time, too, since Weir was competitively relevant. The man who peaked at world No. 3 in 2003, the year he counted his groundbreaking Masters win among three PGA Tour triumphs, hasn’t won a tour event since 2007, hasn’t ranked among the world’s top 100 players since 2009, and missed last year’s RBC Canadian Open while taking an indefinite leave of absence from the game. Given all that, and the $28 million in career PGA Tour earnings that have helped make Weir a presumably wealthy individual, it would be easy enough to believe he’s making his Open appearance as a ceremonial figure. Or maybe he’s passing time until he’s eligible for the 50-and-over Champions Tour in a few years.
Weir, after all, has lately dipped his foot into work as a broadcast analyst, working for TSN after he missed the cut at this year’s Masters, and he will join TNT at next week’s PGA Championship. And as for competing among the seniors — on Wednesday he said he’ll definitely consider it when the time comes.
But Weir also said more than once that he’s not yet ready to abandon competing among the planet’s best players of any age. And if that won’t make Weir anything more than a sentimental fan favourite this week, when he’ll find himself in an impressive enough field headed by defending champion and world No. 1 Jason Day and world No. 2 Dustin Johnson, it certainly qualifies him as persistent.
“I want to win. I love to compete. I love feeling the juice when you’re in contention to win. I still feel like I can do that. I’m still driven to do that,” he said.
“That hasn’t gone away yet. We’ll see if one day it does.”
As if to underline the doggedness of his pursuit to reclaim his game, Weir wasn’t alone during Wednesday’s pro-am at Glen Abbey. He was followed around the lot by Richard Zokol, the 57-year-old former pro who, like Weir, is on the short list of Canadians who have won on the PGA Tour. Zokol, watching Weir from behind a beard turned wholly grey, was carrying a clipboard on which he was charting data on Weir’s performance.
Asked about the nature of the numbers, Zokol said he doesn’t put much stock in traditional golf stats like greens in regulation and fairways hit. Instead, he said he has developed a system for measuring what he considers the most important aspects of performance — what he calls “assessing and executing shots.” The idea, he said, is to en- courage players to focus their attention not on the results of their shots but on the process that goes into creating them.
“Stats are after-the-fact products. It’s the difference between collecting data that comes out of the exhaust pipe of a car rather than data on what makes the engine run,” Zokol said.
“When a golfer’s attention is on the result, it stimulates anxiety. And that creates havoc in a player’s mind.
“You hear people say, ‘Oh, I played well today but I didn’t score well.’ And there’s a lot to that. The real discipline is to learn to detach emotionally from the results.
“It’s hard for golfers. It drives a lot of people out of the game. It creates what I call golf insanity.”
Wednesday’s theme at Glen Abbey, in some ways, was golf stability. It was announced that RBC had signed a six-year extension to retain title sponsorship of the tournament through 2023. If Weir plays in every national championship between now and then, he’ll tie George Cumming’s record of 32 Open starts. Whether or not he’ll be in the field for so many national championships to come, Weir credited the sponsor for saving the event from possible extinction.
“They did save it — and it was in trouble years ago, before RBC came on board,” Weir said. “They’ve been a great supporter of golf in this country and around the world.”
Weir, in his pursuit of professional development, went to see Zokol in Kelowna last month. He said Zokol is helping him think about his game in a “more structured way.”
“He has a cool app that he’s putting together and I think it’s really valuable,” Weir said. “Now I’m trying to apply it inside the ropes.”
If such talk can sometimes sound like pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo, Weir said the mysteries of golf’s mental side revolve around a simple truth.
“The golf ball’s just sitting there. It’s not like any other sport, hockey or baseball, where you’re reacting to something. So there’s a lot of time for conscious thought. And that’s where golfers get in trouble.”
Zokol said it says a lot about Weir that he’s still thinking about how to stay out of such trouble all these years and millions since he first plied his trade among the world’s best players. As Zokol stood behind the 18th green at Glen Abbey on Wednesday, he marvelled at Weir’s fitness level — he’s still as slim-waisted as he’s ever been — and at his “open-minded” outlook on the game he still loves.
“Mike’s greatest trait is his tenacity — it’s what caused him to win the Masters. And he’s not giving up,” Zokol said. “That’s impressive. Because a lot of people do that. Giving up is easy.
“If he’s willing to keep going, I admire that.”