Moment of Glory

by John Feinstein

  The putt sped past the hole, moving faster and faster as it went, and didn’t stop until it bumped against the fringe 18 feet away. The crowd gasped, stunned that Mattiace, who had been so brilliant all day, was suddenly looking like a weekend hacker.

  Mattiace was still away. He now had to make the bogey putt or Weir would only have to two-putt from seven feet to win. By that point, Mattiace was mentally and emotionally gassed. He had been so good for so long all day and had waited so long for the playoff, only to see his second shot put him in an almost impossible position. His bogey putt looked for a split second as if it might have a chance, but it slid by the hole, stopping three feet away.

  If it had been true match play, Mattiace would have told Weir to pick up his ball at that point and congratulated him. But in stroke play, the winner has to hole out to make the result official. Weir had been stroking putts that hit the back of the hole all day. He wasn’t about to do that now. He cozied the putt up to the hole, stopping it about 10 inches away. He walked up to the ball, looked at it for a moment, and tapped it in. Both his arms shot into the air, and he walked over to offer his hand to Mattiace.

  A couple of green jackets came onto the green to shake Weir’s hand. He was now looking for Bricia, who suddenly appeared, sprinting from the crowd to run into his arms for a hug and a kiss. It was the first time they had seen each other up close all day.

  At most PGA Tour events, the winning player’s wife and kids are encouraged to charge the 18th green as soon as the final putt goes in the hole, for a family TV photo op. That’s not the case at Augusta. In fact, one of the members is assigned to make sure that the wife and kids of any player in position to win are escorted to the back of the 18th green and also is given the job of explaining to the wife that she is to wait for her husband to come to her as he exits the green, not the other way around.

  Bricia Weir had walked down the 10th hole escorted by one of the members. When Mike’s last putt went into the hole, she completely forgot about Masters decorum and charged onto the green, thus becoming the first wife of a Masters winner to kiss her husband on the green.

  “A couple of years later, I was at one of the pre-Masters parties, and the member who had been escorting Bricia came up to me and said, ‘You know, your wife got away from me when your last putt went in,’ ” Weir said. “He was laughing about it, but I’m pretty sure it won’t happen again anytime soon.”

  “I’m glad I got to go out there,” Bricia said. “Not because I wasn’t supposed to, but because of the look in Mike’s eyes when I got there. I remember he just looked at me and said, ‘I did it,’ as if he couldn’t believe it. It was an amazing moment for both of us.”

  Once the handshakes and the hugs were over, both players were taken by cart back up the 10th fairway. When they got to the top of the hill and reached the putting green where Mattiace had watched Weir make his putt on 18 a few minutes earlier, they went in opposite directions—literally and figuratively.

  Mattiace’s cart turned left to go past the clubhouse and down the hill that leads to the press building. There he would conduct one of the most wrenching and heartfelt post-Masters interviews anyone had ever witnessed.

  Weir’s cart veered to the right and went down the path that leads to Butler Cabin. Waiting for him there were Woods, the 2002 champion; Jim Nantz; Ricky Barnes, who had finished in 21st place and had been the low amateur; and Hootie Johnson, the club chairman. Not to mention TV cameras that would show this version of the green-jacket ceremony to people watching around the globe.

  There may not be a more awkward awards ceremony in the world than the Butler Cabin ceremony. For years, the club insisted that the chairman be present but also that he ask the first question of the new champion. That tradition was finally done away with when then-chairman Hord Hardin opened the champion’s interview in 1983 with Seve Ballesteros by saying, “Seve, there’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask you…. Just how tall are you?”

  To be fair to Hardin, he was also the chairman who said in the wake of the corporate takeover of golf and sports in America, “This will never be the Pizza Hut Masters. If it ever came to that, we’d just shut her [the tournament] down.”

  Nowadays, the chairman still starts the ceremony. But he quickly welcomes “my good friend Jim Nantz,” who takes over from there. Even with a TV pro in charge, the brief interviews are about as stilted as you can possibly imagine.

  Weir could have cared less. All he knew was that he was sitting next to Woods, who had one green jacket on and another draped over his arm. When the questioning had ended, everyone stood up, and Woods stepped behind Weir to put the jacket on him.

  “Great playing, Weirsy,” he said, as a chill ran through the kid from Sarnia.

  MATTIACE WOULD BE ADDING $648,000 to his bank account but nothing to his wardrobe. He had locked up a spot in the 2004 Masters—the top 16 and ties are all invited back the next year—but knew he had been inches away from a place in the Champions Locker Room, for life.

  He was predictably emotional talking to the media, breaking down as he spoke about what the day had meant to him and how he felt about playing so superbly, only to come up that much short of victory. He had kept his emotions in check for the entire day, but as it hit him what had happened—or perhaps, more specifically, what had not happened—the tears came in a flood.

  Kristen had left the Jones Cabin and been taken to the press building as soon as Weir’s final putt went in. But she’d needed some time to get the girls organized, and when she got there Len was a puddle. She wasn’t surprised.

  “He’s Italian,” she said. “He’s a cryer. He cried when the girls were born, and I was pretty sure he was going to cry, win or lose, after this. But when I saw him, my first thought was, ‘Oh God, they asked about the TPC and his mom again.’ That was the first thing they had asked him about after he won in Los Angeles. But it wasn’t that. It was just the whole day.

  “When I think of that day, I really don’t think that much about the playoff hole. I think about the fact that he shot 65 on Sunday at the Masters and came so close to winning. I was as proud of him that day as I’ve ever been.”

  This time, Kristen Mattiace didn’t need Amy Mickelson to remind her to tell her husband how proud of him she was. That was never in doubt.

  Weir had little time to think about his emotions. As soon as the ceremony in Butler Cabin was over, he took off the green jacket and then was escorted to the putting green where the official awards ceremony took place. The other three majors require that the runner-up take part in the ceremony. The Masters is merciful enough not to require the presence of the runner-up.

  The bad news about the Masters award ceremony is that it takes forever. Virtually every golf official in the world is recognized, along with the club membership—all decked out in green jackets of course—and those who work at the club, in addition to all the volunteers who work the tournament. Then the green jacket ceremony is reenacted, and the winner speaks briefly.

  Once the ceremony was over, Weir was taken by cart to the press building. Mattiace was long gone by then, and Weir first did TV interviews outside the building, then went inside to speak to the print media. From there he was escorted to the clubhouse, where he and Bricia joined the members for the “champions dinner.”

  It was closing in on eleven o’clock by the time all the toasts and speeches were finished, but Weir still wasn’t finished with his workday. Several TV outlets are always granted a one-on-one sitdown with the champion at the end of the champions dinner, so Weir had to go through that before he was finally allowed to leave.

  “I was fried by then,” he said. “Honestly, I barely remember the dinner. I know I had a smile on my face the entire time because it was starting to sink in a little bit, but if you asked me anything that was said or anything I said in the interviews afterward, I couldn’t possibly tell you.”

  From the club, he and Bricia drove back to the house where the group that had been there all we
ek had already been celebrating. They joined in and watched the sunrise a few hours later. It was at that point that Weir remembered that he had to get to the airport, where a chartered plane was waiting to fly him to Toronto.

  “I had made plans months earlier to unveil a clothing line in Canada through Sears on the day after the Masters,” he said, laughing. “They were sending their plane for me, and they had a whole day lined up in Toronto. I just about had time to take a shower, pack, and get to the airport. I wasn’t in the best shape of my life when I got there.”

  He managed to sleep a little en route to Toronto and was whisked into a car to head to the Sears store in a downtown mall, where he was going to make the announcement and sign a few autographs.

  “We walked into the mall on the upper level and had to go down an escalator to get to the entrance of the store,” he said. “I was still a little bit groggy, but as we headed down the escalator I saw this line of people coming out of the store and snaking down the hallway there for as far as the eye could see.

  “I turned to the guys I was with and said, ‘Hey, what do you think that’s about?’ I remember one of them gave me a funny look and said, ‘Mike, that’s about you. They’re all here to see you.’

  “That was when it really hit me. You’re so focused on the task that you don’t even think about how people on the outside are reacting to what you’re doing. I’ve always known that Canadians love their star athletes. A lot of it is because we’re a small country in terms of population. If you win an Olympic medal as a Canadian, you’re a hero. The star hockey players, obviously, are huge. And I’d gotten a good deal of attention, especially after I won at Vancouver and started having success on the tour.

  “But this was like nothing I had ever seen. I just hadn’t thought about the notion that my winning was the lead story in every paper in Canada and what it meant to people. When I came down that escalator, it was as if a light went on in my head. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God.’ I walked into the store, and people were cheering from every direction—the employees, everyone.

  “It was an unbelievable feeling. It also made me understand something I hadn’t thought about until that moment: my life was now completely different. I was no longer ‘Mike Weir, successful golfer,’ I was ‘Mike Weir, Masters champion.’ I was in a new world.”

  With a brand-new set of challenges. But that would all come later. That night, as planned, Weir and some of his friends went to a Stanley Cup playoff game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Philadelphia Flyers in Toronto’s Bell Centre. Leafs officials asked Weir if he’d like to drop a ceremonial opening puck before the game began. Needless to say, Weir was thrilled. Since he’d been wearing the green jacket all day, he wore it onto the ice.

  “When I walked out there, the place just went nuts,” he said. “The players were all lined up at their blue lines, and they were all tapping their sticks [hockey player applause] on the ice. I got out there, and I was standing between Mats Sundin [Leafs] and Jeremy Roenick [Flyers] who are each about 6 foot 5 in street shoes, which makes them about 6 foot 8 on skates.

  “I looked up at the two of them and thought, ‘Boy, did I make the right call choosing golf.’ ”

  At that moment, there was absolutely no doubt about that.

  7

  Best Player to Have Never Won

  MIKE WEIR’S VICTORY AT the Masters was heartbreaking for Len Mattiace. For Phil Mickelson and Jim Furyk, it was only disappointing, but it did force both of them to go through yet another round of “How does it feel still not to have a major title?” questioning.

  It was more acute for Mickelson for obvious reasons: not only had he won twenty-one times in eleven years on the tour, he had been achingly close in majors on several occasions, most notably at the 1999 U.S. Open when Payne Stewart made a 15-foot par putt on the 18th hole to beat him by a shot, and two years later at the PGA Championship when David Toms made a 12-foot par putt on the final hole for a one-shot win.

  Furyk was five weeks older than Mickelson and had been a model of consistency since arriving on tour in 1994. He had won nine times and had finished fourth in majors five times, missing playoffs by two shots on three different occasions. He didn’t get asked about not winning a major as often as Mickelson did, but it certainly came up in conversation.

  “The first couple times I seriously contended in majors was 1998,” he said. “I had chances at the Masters and at the British Open that year and couldn’t get it done. To be honest, I’m not sure I was ready for what comes with winning a major back then, although I’m sure I thought I was ready, and both times I was extremely disappointed. By the time 2003 rolled around, I thought I was ready.”

  There was another difference between Mickelson and Furyk: Mickelson had been a prodigy, a top junior player growing up in San Diego who had won on the PGA Tour as a twenty-year-old junior at Arizona State. In 1990, he had been the first lefty to win the U.S. Amateur, and he was the first player to win both the Amateur and the NCAA individual title in the same year. He was one of four players in history to be a college All American for four straight years. His bio in the PGA Tour media guide began with the phrase, “started hitting golf balls when he was eighteen months old.”

  Furyk’s father, Mike, was in the golf business. He worked as a club pro and then as an equipment representative and began teaching Jim the game when he was seven. But he didn’t want his son to play too much at a young age, and Jim was at least as interested in football and basketball anyway, so he didn’t really get into the game until he was twelve.

  “To be honest, when I was young, the major attraction of golf for me was driving the cart,” he said with a smile. “If I’d been good at football, I probably would have stuck with it.”

  Jim’s favorite golf-course trick as a little boy was to put the cart into reverse while Mike was hitting a shot. Mike would jump back into the cart, hit the gas, and find himself going straight backward. “He never got mad at me for it,” Jim said. “He figured if he wasn’t smart enough to check, it was on him when it happened.”

  When his father first began giving him lessons, Jim had what would politely be described as an odd-looking swing. It looked sort of like a roller coaster, the way it looped and rolled en route to the top and then back down to the ball. His dad never tried to change it.

  “Almost from the beginning, he hit the ball solidly,” Mike said. “I knew it looked funny, but I also knew he was comfortable with it, and he could repeat it. Until that changed, I wasn’t going to try to make him change.”

  When Jim did start to play golf more regularly, he improved rapidly. Even so, he still liked football a lot too. Fortunately for golf and Furyk, he went to a football camp run by then–Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski when he was thirteen. Jaworski took one look at Furyk’s throwing arm and suggested he find another sport. Which may explain why Furyk grew up to be a fanatic Pittsburgh Steelers fan.

  Regardless, Jaworski’s advice was sound. Within two years, Furyk was one of the best junior golfers in Pennsylvania, and he was widely recruited by the major golf schools as a high-school senior. He chose Arizona, where he often encountered Mickelson over the next four years, and had a solid college career, making All American as a senior.

  By then he knew he wanted to take a shot at the tour. He made it through the first two stages of Q-School in fall of 1992 (Mickelson went straight to the tour with a two-year exemption, when he graduated that same year thanks to his win in Tucson two years earlier) but failed to make the 72-hole cut at the finals. He struggled for most of 1993 with partially exempt status on the Nike Tour before breaking through late in the year with a win at Gulfport, Mississippi. That helped him finish 26th on the Nike money list, but he still had to go back to Q-School in the fall.

  At the finals he made the 72-hole cut on the number and then made it to the tour—also right on the number. From there, Furyk never looked back. He tied for seventh in his second tournament of 1994 at Tucson—a homecoming
for the Arizona grad—and went from there to finish 78th on the money list as a rookie. He had only gotten better after that, finishing fourth on the money list in 1997 (while making his first of six straight Ryder Cup teams) and third the next year. Going into 2003, his worst finish on the money list in the previous six years had been 2000 when he made just under $2 million and finished 17th. In short, he was a human ATM machine.

  But he hadn’t won a major. He had been extremely consistent and often very good. Just not quite good enough. Through the ’03 Masters, he had played in thirty-one majors and made twenty-six cuts. He had finished in the top 20 on eighteen occasions and in the top 10 twelve times, six of those in the top five. That was an admirable record, except for the one glaring omission.

  He knew how frustrating it was for Mickelson, who had become a friend during their years on tour, and seeing players like Weir and Rich Beem win majors added to his sense that something in his career was missing.

  “I don’t think it was something he ever lost sleep over; he’s not that way,” said his wife, Tabitha. “But when you’ve made a good living on tour, and you’ve won on tour, there’s one thing left to do that’s really important, and that’s win a major.”

  Jim and Tabitha had met at the Memorial Tournament during Jim’s rookie year on tour. Jim had been signing autographs after his first round when he noticed a pretty blonde watching him, or at least he hoped she was watching him. He took a leap of faith, stepped out of character (“I never did stuff like this”), and walked over to introduce himself. It turned out that Tabitha, a schoolteacher, had been watching him, impressed by the way he handled himself with the kids as he signed for them.

  They have been together ever since, and Caleigh, their first child, was born shortly after the end of the 2002 U.S. Open. That had been a frustrating week for Jim, a rare missed cut at a major. He had shot 73–80, the 80 coming on a miserable, rainy Friday afternoon. It was the first time in eight Opens that he had failed to make the cut. Perhaps he had been distracted by the impending birth of his daughter.