Mike Weir releases his club and winces after teeing off on the 11th tee during Pro-Am day at the Canadian Open golf tournament at St. George's Golf and Country Club in Toronto Wednesday July 21, 2010. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren CalabreseDarren Calabrese/The Canadian Press
Tom Kite once called golf the "onliest" game because of its very nature as an individual sport in which playes must perform on a vast landscape in front of thousands of curious spectators who bear down on them closer than is possible in other sports. But it's also a sport in which players help one another, as Mike Weir learned when Scott McCarron approached him on the practice green during the Wyndham Championship last weekend in Greensboro, N.C.
Weir had been playing with a sore right elbow since the Open Championship at St. Andrews in July. He'd winced afer hitting shots, and heard unfamiliar clicking and popping sounds. McCarron had torn a tendon away from the bone in his elbow in January of 2006, played through the pain for seven months, and then had a magnetic resonance imaging exam that led to surgery. It took 18 months for his injury to heal.
McCarron was aware that Weir was having elbow problems, and he didn't want him to go through what he'd experienced. That's why he thought he should speak with Weir.
"He told me about his troubles," Weir said Tuesday from his home near Salt Lake City. "He was doing the same thing I was the last couple of months, seeing physiotherapists, getting treatment, playing, and doing that over and over. He played through his injury those seven months and then he found out what was going on with the MRI. He suggested I get one. It got me thinking."
The PGA Tour helped arrange an MRI for Weir afer he shot 67 in the first round at the Wyndham. Weir got the results that evening. What he had thought was tendinitis, and may have been, had developed into a torn ligament on the outside of his right elbow. Weir is a left-handed golfer, and so the injury was to his leading elbow through impact.
"That was the hard part, to steel myself for the pain at impact," said Weir, 40. "The doctor in Greensboro said it was my decision if I wanted to play the second round, but that he'd advise me to shut it down."
Weir was in 128th place on the FedEx Cup points list, and needed to get into the top 125 to qualify for The Barclays in Paramus, N.J., that starts the PGA Tour playoffs on Thursday. He had a decision to make.
"I figured I might as well play the second round," Weir said. "I'd been doing this for two months, the plaing and getting the elbow worked on."
Weir made bogeys on three consecutive holes early in the back nine of the second round, shot 71 and missed the cut by a shot.
"In hindsight, maybe tha was better," Weir said. "knowing myself, if I'd gotten into this week, I'd probably have played."
Weir now has no choice but not to play, or even hit balls. He was scheduled to appear at the Toronto Golf Club on next Monday at a TaylorMade-sponsored day, where he would conduct a clinic for members and play 18 holes. The club's general manager John Gravett said Tuesday that the event will be rescheduled for next year. Meanwhile, Weir is likely out for the season.
"I'll talk to the doctors and get advice on different types of therapy," said Weir, who wants to avoid surgery. "The two guys I've talked to say I shouldn't sit still, though. After a week or two I'll want to get some movement in the elbow. Otherwise there can be a lot of atrophy."
"The kind of injury being described can be quite painful and drag on," Marvin Tile, the former chief of orthopedic surgery at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto said Tuesday. "But surgery would be the last resort."
Weir, the 2003 Masters champion and the winner of seven other PGA events, was having his worst season since 1998, the first year of his very impressive career, even before his injury. He's now missed the cut in eight of 19 tournaments, and his only top-10 finish came in his first event.
"I'll have time now to sit back and think about what changes I need to make [to improve]" Weir said. "I need to evaluate things. Sometimes it's hard to evaluate while you're playing."
Weir didn't want the time off, but now, thanks to McCarron's intervention, he has it. He's hoping to repair his elbow, and to recover his game. As he said, "I've seen better times."
He's looking forward to 2011, and better, injury-free times then.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca .