Weir ‘ excited’ about progress in his game
READY FOR PRESIDENTS CUP ‘ Everything I’ve been working on feels better’
LAKE MANASSAS, VA. •
The Man in Black wasn’t speaking specifically about our own little man in black, but his message cut pretty close to the bone.
“You know,” said International Team captain Gary Player, “it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Masters champion, or you haven’t played well recently — it’s what you do this week. And we all know golf is a humbling game. Just last week in the World Match Play, Retief Goosen won his match 11-and- 10 one day and lost 7-and-6 the next.
“Golf,” he said, “is a puzzle without an answer.”
He doesn’t have to tell Mike Weir.
A star of Peter Thomson’s squad in his first Presidents Cup appearance here at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in 2000, and again for Player two years ago in South Africa, the winner of the 2003 Masters has seen his game deteriorate for more than a year now. The harder Weir works, the less he seems to be getting out of it.
But there are good memories here, he said, and the eternal optimist in him believes that the work is about to pay off, in a match-play, team format with which he seems entirely comfortable.
“I pride myself on that stuff. I’ll be ready for whatever,” Weir said yesterday, after a practice round with Aussies Stuart Appleby, Nick O’Hern and Peter Lonard. “Obviously, things haven’t been going that well, but my swing feels very good. I’m hitting it long, and straight, and I think anybody who’s paired with me is going to be … I don’t know if surprised is the word, but I know I’m going to play well.
“Everything I’ve been working on in my game, as the weeks go on, feels better and better. The Canadian Open [where he missed the cut] I saw some good things, although it wasn’t quite locked in the way I wanted. Last week was a little better. This week already it feels better. So the more I go on, and I’m playing the next three weeks in a row, whether it’s this week, next week, down the road, I’m excited about the things in my game that are happening. I’m going to be a more versatile player when it’s over.”
For the sake of Player’s squad, it had better be over by tomorrow, when the teams play six alternatematches.
Weir seems anything but concerned, though. He loves this competition.
“ The last event [in 2003] gained so much momentum in South Africa,” he said. “I mean, it’s done the right way. The intensity and pressure is still there, big time. Ernie and Tiger [playing off for the Cup], that’s the most nervous I’ve ever been on a golf course and I wasn’t even playing.
“It’s still very competitive, but it’s friendlier than the Ryder Cup. We want to win, obviously, we want to win badly, but it’s just not as personal. I think the Ryder Cup has gotten too personal. It seems like the guys can’t even talk to the players on the other side.”
The American public, someone noted, doesn’t seem to have bought into the concept of a friendly international match.
“Unfortunately, that’s our society nowadays,” Weir said. “We try to make things bigger than they are, and attach more meaning to things than they really have. I think it just gets out of hand, and I still feel this is done the right way. You see Jack and Gary shake hands, call it a tie … and when Jack Nicklaus says it’s the greatest event in golf he’s ever been a part of, you know it was something special. He’s seen everything there is to see in the game of golf.”
CanWest News Service