“It just got harder to travel with two kids instead of one,” Weir said. “So, I tried to cut my schedule back a little bit to be home more.”
For a third straight year he won a tournament, and, once again, it was an important one. This time it was the Tour Championship, the season-ending event open only to the top 30 money winners on tour. He shot 68 the last day to get into a four-way playoff with Ernie Els, Sergio Garcia, and David Toms. Els was a two-time U.S. Open champion; Toms had just won the PGA Championship; and Garcia, at twenty-one, was one of the game’s rising stars. Pretty good company. (Tiger Woods finished tied for 13th.)
Weir won by birdieing the first playoff hole, becoming the first non-American to win the Tour Championship, and jumped to sixth in the world rankings. He was playing so well at that point that there was no reason to change anything in his game. But, like most golfers, he wanted to improve even more.
Going to Palm Springs to work with Mike Wilson had become an annual off-season ritual. As well as he had played, making just under $8 million in three years, Weir felt as though he needed to improve his ball striking a little bit more if he wanted to contend—seriously contend—in the majors.
Since the 10th-place finish at the ’99 PGA, he had played in eight majors and hadn’t matched that performance, his best finish being a tie for 16th at the ’01 PGA. Having won on tour, having beaten the best players, having given himself financial security at age thirty-one, there was just one truly important goal left: win a major championship.
“I think every kid who ever picks up a golf club fantasizes about the majors,” Weir said. “Maybe nowadays there are kids who stand on the putting green by themselves late in the day and say, ‘This is to beat Tiger Woods,’ but I think most of them probably say, ‘This is to beat Tiger Woods and win the Masters or the Open.’ I think that’s the way the game has always been. I’d gotten good enough by then that it wasn’t just a fantasy anymore. But I felt like I needed something more to make it reality.”
That winter, he and Wilson worked on changing his preshot routine, cutting back on the waggle with the hope that it would somehow tighten up his swing just a little bit and make him more consistent off the tee and with his long irons.
His first round of the year suggested that he might have been on to something. He shot 63 on the first day of the Mercedes Championships, tying the course record for the Plantation Course at Kapalua. But he couldn’t back up the start and slid to a tie for 14th place on Sunday. That proved to be a harbinger for the whole year: he would come up with a good round, even a very good one, here and there, but he couldn’t put four good rounds together.
“Early in the year I got into contention a couple times, but my swing didn’t hold up under pressure the way it had when I was winning the previous three years,” Weir said. “I realized after a while that, for whatever reason, the waggle was the trigger that got me into position and made me feel the most comfortable. I went back to it midway through the year, but by then I’d lost confidence in my putting. I just never could put anything together all year.”
He wasn’t awful; he simply wasn’t as good as he had been. He made twenty-two cuts in twenty-five tournaments and was in the top 25 on eleven occasions. But, after making the top 10 in twenty-one tournaments from ’99 through ’01, he didn’t have a single top-10 finish. Nine of those top 10s had been top threes, including his three victories. Needless to say, he didn’t come close to finishing that high all year.
He ended the year with $843,000 in earnings, which dropped him to 78th on the money list and left him wondering what he had to do to get back to where he had been prior to the ’02 season. He again went to Wilson during the off-season looking for answers.
“Nothing was working,” he said. “Mike was trying, I was trying. We just couldn’t make any progress. Finally, one afternoon I got so frustrated I just left Mike on the range, jumped on a cart, and drove out to an empty spot on the golf course. I needed a break from grinding, hitting balls, talking about the swing, hitting more balls.
“I finally stopped on a long par-three and just sat there for a while. Finally I took out my five-wood and decided to just try to relax and remember what my swing felt like when I was playing well. I hit one shot and liked it. So, I hit another. I ended up hitting six balls, shaping each shot a little bit differently, kind of telling myself, ‘Okay, just hit this shot, no pressure, just hit it.’
“I’m not sure why, but something clicked at that point. The ball started going exactly where I wanted it to go. It was such a relief to see I could still do it. For some reason, after that I just felt more relaxed about my swing. I stopped grinding and started playing again.”
Golfers often talk about the key to improving being the ability not to make golf work. Tom Kite once said, “You have never heard someone say, ‘I’m going to go work golf.’ You say, ‘I’m going to go play golf.’ You need to take that approach to your swing on the range. When it becomes work, you almost never get any better.”
At some point during that session on the long par-three, Weir found his way back from working at golf to playing it. The Bob Hope Chrysler Classic was his second tournament in ’03, since he had not qualified for the Mercedes Championship (for the first time in three years; tournament winners only), and he arrived feeling relaxed, confident, and fresh after starting the year with a solid ninth-place finish in Phoenix.
He played solidly all week but trailed leader Tim Herron by four shots entering the fifth and final day. The weather was windy that day, making the golf course unusually difficult. But Weir shot 67 and won the tournament by two shots over Jay Haas.
“Even if I hadn’t won, I’d have come out of that week feeling really good about things,” Weir said. “I felt like I was back to hitting the ball the way I had before ’02. Plus, I made putts. You have to make lots of putts to win at the Hope [Weir’s winning score over 90 holes was 30 under par], and I did. I made putts from all over. It had been a long time since I had done that.”
If he had any lingering doubts, or if he wondered whether he could also win on a truly difficult golf course, they went away a few weeks later when he shot a five-under-par 66 on Sunday to catch Charles Howell III from seven shots behind (winning in a playoff) to win the Nissan Open at Riviera Country Club, one of the classic golf courses played on tour. That gave him two wins in four starts and put him on top of the money list early in the year.
It did not, however, make him a favorite going into the Masters. For one thing, he had never finished higher than a tie for 24th in three starts at Augusta. For another thing, there was only one favorite as tournament week began, and that was the two-time defending champion—the one player who had surpassed Weir in victories on tour in 2003.
Tiger Woods had three wins—in San Diego, in the Match Play Championship, and at Bay Hill. He hadn’t yet named a swing coach to replace Butch Harmon, but everyone knew he was spending time with Hank Haney, working on trying to take his swing more to the outside to avoid getting stuck coming down.
If Tiger was showing any signs of trouble because of the swing changes, no one had really noticed them yet. And even though Weir had won twice in 2003, he, like almost everyone else in the field, was able to fly under the radar during tournament week, which was fine with him.
“I’ve always had a pretty good relationship with the media,” he said. “I get along with most of the guys I’ve dealt with quite well. But I’m fine if I’m not getting a lot of attention, especially the week of a major. I really want to get off by myself and work to get ready.”
ANOTHER PLAYER WHO ARRIVED at Augusta unnoticed but full of confidence was Len Mattiace. While Weir had slipped in 2002, Mattiace had pieced together his best year, winning his first tour event in Los Angeles in February, then backing it up with a second win in Memphis in June.
Like a lot of players, Mattiace was a relatively late bloomer and had gone through the ups and downs that so many players go through before establishing himself as a sol
id moneymaker.
He had learned the game as a kid growing up in Mineola, on Long Island. His dad had started him playing right-handed at age six, even though he was a lefty, and he took to the game immediately. “I think it’s fair to say I’ve loved everything about golf since I was eight,” he said.
By the time he was thirteen, he was good enough to make the team at Jericho High School as an eighth grader. When he was a freshman, his family moved to Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, which happens to be where the PGA Tour is headquartered. Given a chance to play year-round, Mattiace blossomed into an excellent junior player at Nease High School.
As a sixteen-year-old, he was one of the youngest players to qualify for the Northeast Amateur, which was played in Newport, Rhode Island. During the week, Mike Felici, one of the board members who helped run the tournament, introduced him to his eighteen-year-old daughter Kristen. Len was dazzled. Kristen was not.
“He was kind of a little kid to me,” Kristen said, laughing. “I mean, I was getting ready to go to college. He was sixteen. He told me later that it was love at first sight.”
Len was recruited by most of the top golf schools but chose Wake Forest, a program that had produced, among others, Arnold Palmer, Curtis Strange, Jay Haas, and Lanny Wadkins. As a freshman in 1986, he was part of a team that won the national championship coming from way behind on the last day to beat Oklahoma State.
A year later, Mattiace made the Walker Cup team, playing in the amateur equivalent of the Ryder Cup. The U.S. team easily defeated Great Britain and Ireland that summer, and the next April, at age twenty, Mattiace found himself playing in the Masters.
These days, only five amateurs—the U.S. Amateur champion and runner-up, the British Amateur champion, the U.S. Public Links Champion, and the U.S. Mid-Amateur champion—are automatically invited to play. In those days, as part of its commitment to amateur golf (Masters cofounder Bob Jones being the greatest player never to turn pro at any point in his career), the Masters invited the entire Walker Cup team to play. In 1988, all ten members of the ’87 Walker Cup team were in Augusta.
Mattiace would talk later about how he just assumed back then that, once he turned pro, he would be at Augusta every year. “I was a young college stud at the time,” he said. “I thought I’d be on the tour, be in the top 30 on the money list every year, and play the Masters every year.”
Life is never quite that simple. Unlike a lot of top college golfers—including Palmer, Strange, Haas, and Wadkins—Mattiace graduated, getting his degree in sociology in the fall of 1990. While he was finishing his degree work, a friend of his named Barry Fabian, who knew Kristen, told him that the girl he’d had the crush on back in high school was now living in Jacksonville, where she had gotten a job as a teacher after earning her degree in elementary education. She didn’t know anyone in town, Fabian said, and he suggested that Len give her a call. He did, and she agreed to have dinner with him. He was en route to Florida from Wake Forest, planning to pick her up to go out, when—unbeknownst to him—Kristen was taken to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy.
“I called his parents to tell them what was going on,” she said. “I said, ‘Look, you don’t me, but I’m supposed to be having dinner with your son tonight, and I have to go the hospital.’ Except they couldn’t reach him. There were no cell phones, and he was in the car.
“Len got to town and called my apartment to let me know he was ready to pick me up, and he got my answering machine. He finally left a message saying, ‘Well, I guess you’re blowing me off.’ My parents went to my apartment to get some things for me later and heard the message. They tracked him down and told him what had happened, and then his parents told him I’d called. He felt horrible and came to the hospital every day to see me. We started dating when I was better and just went from there.”
Mattiace spent most of the next five years of his life wandering the backwaters of professional golf. He did make it through Q-School in 1992 and spent 1993 on the tour. He didn’t even play all that badly—he had two top-10 finishes, but one was at an event played opposite the Masters where the prize money was relatively low, and he finished the year 160th on the money list.
Injuries were frequently a problem. During ’93, Mattiace was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome and was often awake half the night because the pain was so bad he couldn’t lie down.
He had gone back to Q-School at the end of ’93 and again at the end of ’94. Each time, he failed to make it back to the tour. He spent ’94 playing minitours after he recovered from wrist surgery and ’95 on the Nike (now Nationwide) Tour. He made it back through Q-School at the end of ’95 and managed to stay on tour from 1996 on, even though he had to have carpal tunnel surgery on his other wrist at the end of ’96.
Late in 1996, he was in a five-way playoff at the Buick Challenge after the last 36 holes of the tournament were washed away by rain. Michael Bradley won the tournament, but the money Mattiace made from his second-place tie, combined with a tie for fourth a few weeks later in Texas, jumped his earnings to $238,000 for the year and allowed him to finish 92nd on the money list and keep his card. The following fall, a tie for third at Disney solidified him again, and he moved up to 77th on the money list.
His first real brush with fame and with a serious chance to win came a year later at the Players Championship. His story was well chronicled that week. For one thing, he was a local boy making good. Beyond that, his mother, Joyce, dying from lung cancer, was there in a wheelchair. A Mattiace victory would have been a remarkable feel-good story.
He came close.
On Sunday, he arrived at the infamous island-green 17th hole trailing Justin Leonard by just one shot. The next fifteen minutes were brutal to watch. Mattiace put his tee shot in the water. He walked to the drop area, hoping to salvage a bogey and hit his third shot into a front bunker. Then, from the bunker, he flew the green back into the water. By the time it was all over, he made a quintuple-bogey eight. What many people forget is that he somehow shook off the disappointment to birdie the 18th, one of the tougher finishing holes in golf.
He finished tied for fifth—his biggest paycheck up until that moment on tour but, no doubt, his biggest disappointment. Three months later, his mother passed away. In stories written about that day, it is frequently pointed out that the last time she saw her son on a golf course, he was making a quintuple-bogey eight on national television. They forget to point out that, in truth, the last thing she saw him do was make a gritty birdie on the final hole.
“To this day I have people come up to me and say, ‘I remember Len at the island green in ’98,’ ” Kristen Mattiace said. “ ‘What did he make, eight?’ I say, ‘Yes, he did, but did you know he made a birdie on the 18th hole?’ I know people don’t remember that because it hasn’t been shown a million times on television the way the eight has been.
“What I remember vividly about that day is that Phil Mickelson was playing in the group behind us. Amy [Mickelson] had walked ahead to get to a good spot to watch and saw me as we were leaving the 17th. I was in uncharted waters. I had no idea what I should say or do when Len finished. Amy just looked at me and said, ‘Just tell him you’re proud of him.’ She was right—and I was proud of him.”
MATTIACE HAD GONE TO work on his swing with Jim McLean, one of the game’s best-known teachers, after losing his card five years earlier in 1993. McLean had told Mattiace then that he had two options: try to get his technically imperfect swing to work for him—players like Jim Furyk and Bruce Lietzke had done that very successfully—or tear down his swing and rebuild it completely.
Mattiace opted to go back to square one.
“I knew there were guys who’d done well with unorthodox swings,” he said later. “But the vast majority of guys who have been consistent players and winners have very technically sound swings.”
His improvement was gradual. Each year he seemed to get a little better and a little more confident. He was consistently in the top 100 on the money
list from 1996 to 2001 but was never really close to winning until 2002, when he came from behind on the last day at Los Angeles to catch Scott McCarron (who helped by bogeying three of the last six holes, including the 18th) and win for the first time in his 220th start on tour.
A gentle soul by nature, Mattiace couldn’t help but feel sorry for McCarron when the tournament was over. “I wouldn’t wish that finish on anybody,” he said. “I especially wouldn’t wish it on a guy like Scott.”
Unfortunately for Mattiace, that win came during a period when the Masters had abandoned its long-standing tradition of granting an automatic invitation to anyone who had won a tournament on the PGA Tour. That change had come during a time when the Lords of Augusta were trying to “make over” their field. Selected past champions were sent letters informing them that although they were exempt into the field for life, the club was “suggesting” that they stop playing in the tournament. This came after Doug Ford, the 1957 Masters champion, continued to use his champion’s exemption long after he could play the golf course competitively.
In his last five Masters before the letter was sent out, Ford’s scores were 81–88, 85–94, 89–withdrew, 88–withdrew, and 94–withdrew. By the time he shot that last 94, he had played in a then-record forty-nine Masters, and people were screaming to find a way to get him off the golf course. Traditionally, past champions had sensed when it was time to stop playing in the tournament, usually sometime between ages sixty-five and seventy. Ford turned seventy-eight in 2000 but still teed it up that April.
The decision not to invite all tour winners beginning with the 2000 Masters also had a good deal to do with a push made by the powers that be in golf to reward long-term results rather than a hot week. Prior to the change, players who finished in the top 30 on the PGA Tour money list at year’s end were exempt into the Masters the following April. Under the new setup, the top 40 were invited.
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