Canada's Mike Weir reacts after his approach shot onto the sixth green during the second round of the British Open Golf Championship on the Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland, Friday, July 16, 2010. (AP Photo/Tim Hales)Tim Hales/The Associated Press
It was amazing to see how poorly he'd been driving the ball. Mike's always been a driver, wedge, putter guy. But his driving stats the last couple of years have been horrendous. David Leadbetter on Mike Weir's swing
Mike Weir was once considered one of the best golfers in the game. He was ranked third in the world after finishing third in the 2003 U.S. Open.
But he's 112th now. Weir has lost his form, and recently he decided to consult a teacher acknowledged still to be one of the best in the game. That's David Leadbetter. Weir spent some time with him after the PGA Championship in August.
Clearly, Weir has had one of the most impressive careers of any Canadian golfer. He's won seven PGA Tour events in addition to the 2003 Masters. He's made nearly $27-million (U.S.) in his career, 12th on the career list. He has enough money that he doesn't need to hit another shot.
But Weir, of Bright's Grove, Ont., has no intention of packing it in. He's miffed at how he's been playing, and has been for a while. He returned last year to his former coach Mike Wilson after spending some time with Andy Plummer and Mike Bennett, the fellows behind the Stack & Tilt approach in which a golfer is supposed to keep his weight forward even during the backswing.
But Weir hasn't been getting good results. That's why he decided to see Leadbetter at his academy at the Champions-Gate Golf Club in Orlando. His right elbow was already hurting, although he didn't yet know he'd partially torn a ligament and would require an extended period away from hitting any balls. He's taking that now.
"Mike came down to get my opinion," Leadbetter told The Globe and Mail this week. "It was amazing to see how poorly he'd been driving the ball. Mike's always been a driver, wedge, putter guy. But his driving stats the last couple of years have been horrendous. He can't afford to be a wild driver when guys are hitting the ball 330 yards."
Footage of Weir's swing when he was playing well showed Leadbetter that he'd lost much of the winding and coiling in his swing. "His hands and arms got more active to compensate," Leadbetter said. "His swing looked sloppy."
Weir wanted Leadbetter to tell him straight what he thought.
Leadbetter said Weir also told him that it's "quite hurtful when people say he's over the hill and that he's made all this money. He told me he still has all this desire to play well."
Leadbetter told Weir he thought much of his problem derives from poor posture, which led to the sloppiness. He was shocked to see how long Weir's swing had become, and thinks he needs to get back to a more compact swing.
Weir, Leadbetter said, made some encouraging progress during their sessions and liked what he heard. He went to the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, N.C., following their work together, shot 67 in the opening round and then had an MRI after the first round that revealed his injury. He shot 71 in the second round to miss the cut and that was it for his season because he didn't qualify for the FedEx Cup playoffs. He can't play anyway, given his injury.
"It's a shame, in that his injury almost foreshortened what we were doing," Leadbetter said. "We were on the right track."
Weir and Leadbetter have been staying in touch. But, Leadbetter emphasized, their work doesn't mean he's going to be Weir's full-time coach.
Leadbetter is done with spending a lot of time on the PGA Tour.
"Been there, done that," Leadbetter, 58, said. "Mike's a great guy and he's had a wonderful career. I told him if he would like me to be in an advisory capacity, that's great. He's independent and self-reliant.
"He doesn't need anybody out there teeing up the ball for him."
Weir has had plenty of advice. Now, at what is evidently a crossroads in his career, the man people have called Lord Lead has provided him an analysis. It's up to Weir, as it's up to all golfers, to make sense of what he's heard and to make the golf ball do what he wants it to do.
And that isn't easy for anybody, even a golfer once ranked third in the world.
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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 .