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The Week: Weir and Weirder

Twin wins in February have made Mike Weir a one-man trend

By Alan Shipnuck

Seven strokes back on Sunday, Weir shot a 66 to steal a win in L.A. Scott Halleran/Getty Images

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There was a time in golf when little Mike Weir -- 5'9", 155 pounds -- had no hope of contending, when big burly men drove the ball fantastic distances and obliterated every scoring record in their path. That time was January.

The outrageous, outsized golf of the season's first month came to a screeching halt during the final round of the Bob Hope Classic, played at PGA West on Feb. 2. When high winds buffeted the course, the game was no longer easy, and the conditions were perfect for a precise plodder like Weir, who made up four strokes on the final day and won by smartly laying up on the last hole.

Things haven't been the same since. Following the Hope, the PGA Tour visited U.S. Open venues in three consecutive weeks, while chastened Tour officials began playing hide-and-seek with pin placements. True, Davis Love III won at Pebble Beach and Tiger Woods prevailed at Torrey Pines, but the sluggers' scores were modest.

At last week's Nissan Open venerable Riviera Country Club became the latest battleground in the war between tradition and revolution. On Sunday it looked as if the winner would come from a two-man race between one of the leaders of the new school, Charles Howell, 23, who attacks courses with a vortex-inducing swing, and Nick Price, 46, a shrill critic of advanced technology as well as a fine practitioner of old-school shot making. Riviera, forever Hogan's Alley, has been lengthened in recent years in a nod to 21st-century realities, but its true defenses are its small, firm and devilishly sloping greens and its doglegs, which send balls skittering into the pesky kikuyu rough.

In the end Howell was unable to overpower Riviera, and even Price was thwarted by its subtle challenges. Price shot a one-over 72 to finish third, while Howell, leading by three after 54 holes, struggled to a 73. That opened the door for Weir, who went from point A to point B flawlessly during a closing 66, forcing a playoff with Howell.

Weir's game is long on moxie -- he chipped in three times last Saturday to salvage an erratic ball-striking round -- and he won the tournament on the second hole of a playoff, making birdie on the 315-yard par-4 10th hole after smartly laying up. Howell, who had gone for the green with his driver, missed a seven-foot putt to extend sudden death, one last yip in an afternoon of shaky putting.

Weir's second victory of the season brought him two more titles: the hottest player in the world (this week, anyway) and the best lefty in the game (so far in '03). In four events this season Weir has finished no worse than ninth; the $810,000 winner's check shot Weir to the top of the money list, with more than $2 million, usurping the previously molten Ernie Els, who was chilling out on vacation in Hawaii. The win also put an exclamation point on Weir's dramatic return to form.

From 1999 to 2001 he was one of the Tour's most consistent performers, finishing 23rd, sixth and 11th on the money list, respectively. But then Weir decided that he had to try to keep up with the big boys. In a quest for more distance he scrapped his trademark waggle, a three-quarter-swing trigger mechanism. "I felt as if it was getting stale," he says. "Without the waggle I had a lot more power because I was swinging with more rhythm and more flow. But I was hitting it with less consistency, and my wedge game was not good at all."

Midway through 2002 -- a lost year during which he failed to have a top 10 finish and fell to 78th on the money list -- Weir went back to the waggle. Over the winter he refined his action in the mirrored basement of his home in Draper, Utah, having accepted that control, not power, is the strength of his game. On Sunday at Riviera, Weir scored another one for the little guys, just the latest unexpected development in what has already been a schizophrenic year.

O.B.

Tom Whalley, the chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. Records, hosted his third annual L.A. Open bash, on Feb. 18, at his five-acre spread off Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Members of the Backstreet Boys, Incubus and Green Day mingled with a dozen Tour players, including Robert Allenby, Robert Gamez, Per-Ulrik Johansson, Jesper Parnevik, Carl Paulson and Pat Perez. The Tour's resident party animal, Tommy Armour III, also made the scene even though he wasn't playing in the tournament.

Michael Campbell, a New Zealander of Maori descent, on Mike Tyson's new tattoo: "The fact that it's on his face is significant. Traditionally only the three or four chiefs of a Maori tribe -- the rangatira -- have facial tattoos. But they never have the kind of spikes Tyson has. The chieftains' tattoos are always circular. They're based on the swirling mana good-luck symbol that a lot of us wear on pendants. Tyson has those symbols on the right side of the tattoo. But the spikes, which indicate aggression, are something only a Maori warrior would have. So the tattoo is his own personal design, and it really suits him."

Who knew that Teeth of the Dog was such a presidential hot spot? In consecutive weeks in February former commanders in chief Bill Clinton and George Bush teed it up at the famed Dominican Republic course. Bush was accompanied by Pete Dye, the Teeth's designer, while Clinton played with Dye's son P.B., who says, "He's still cheating as if he were president."

SI has learned that an administrative snafu at last year's British Open compromised official money lists on both sides of the Atlantic. In the days following the Open, the R&A redistributed earnings for the lowest finishers, 69th place through 83rd, paying slightly less than had been originally announced. (For instance, David Toms, who finished 83rd, actually received £7,200, not the £8,500 that he was credited with following the conclusion of play.) The PGA Tour learned of the problem in November and corrected its money list, but the European tour has not yet updated its numbers. Luckily for that tour, the money differential is modest enough that no spots on the Order of Merit were affected.

Issue date: March 3, 2003

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