Soul & ice : Mike Weir is a left-handed hockey player from Canada

Golf Digest, July, 2001 by Bob Verdi

By this time, Weir had watched Jack Nicklaus appear in an exhibition at Huron Oaks. Weir wrote a letter to the Golden Bear, asking whether he should switch and try playing right-handed. Nicklaus wrote back: Stick with what you are. Weir did. That meant focused. When he snagged a golf scholarship at Brigham Young University, his parents were pleased, but cautious. Don't forget to get an education, they implored. Not gonna matter, said Mike, a good student. He would be a pro golfer someday. In 1992, Bennett organized a fund-raiser at Huron Oaks, where members each kicked in enough to send Weir off to the real world with $10,000.

"A lot of people didn't think Mike hit it far enough," Bennett recalls. "I said that night he would become Canada's greatest golfer ever." Not so fast. Mike found himself beside Nick Price on the range at the 1994 Bell Canadian Open. "The sound his shots made off the club were a lot different than mine," says Weir. "I knew then I was a long way away."

Thinking big picture, as always, Weir studied the swing. Over the course of years, he developed that unique preshot routine: a two-part rehearsal in which he draws the club back, then cocks his wrist, cupping the right one. You wouldn't teach that to anyone, but Mike had to overcome his hockey slap-shot tendencies that resulted in his trapping the golf ball. He used to hit it low, sometimes with a smother hook on it. "The move is a lot the same in hockey and golf," Weir says. "But at point of impact, you don't rotate in hockey, you don't roll your wrists."

The early years overseas

Weir annually went to Australia for the short tour season there. He lugged his tour bag through 105-degree heat in Perth to qualify for one event. In Asia, his cab got stuck in a muddy, odoriferous river. The driver asked him to push. Mike headed for a highway a mile off to hitchhike. In Canada, the life was better, especially if the 20-hour drive from Winnipeg to Toronto was without blizzards. He married Bricia in 1994, and Utah was their base, but every golf season meant packing up and every off-season meant finding a new apartment. He couldn't afford the luxury of a full-time residence or a caddie other than Bricia. He went to Q school five times, made it the sixth, lost his card, won Q school his seventh time, in 1998, and stayed.

By then, Bricia had long since relinquished her role carrying the clubs. Two years was quite enough, she says, particularly in the searing climate Down Under. Not that there weren't certain perks. "Whenever I worked for him, my reward was getting to buy something after each tournament," recalls Bricia, a California native who met Mike at Brigham Young. "Like in Vancouver, I went out and got a ceramic seashell salad bowl for all of about $19. We still have it here somewhere. Packed in a box, I think. I hope."

Indeed, Mike and Bricia and their two girls--Elle, 311/42, and Lili, 15 months--are on the move to a new home, a couple of miles from their present address in Draper, about 20 minutes from the Salt Lake City airport. Money, or lack of it, used to concern Bricia, even before she became a mother. "But Mike never worried; he always felt it would work out, and it has," says Bricia, proudly.