Winning Is Clearly His Province

What Canada is famous for: winter, beer, snow, moose, hockey.

What it isn’t famous for: lots of PGA Tour pros.

Mike Weir said he’s given it some thought and wasn’t sure why, which is fair enough, but here are a couple of ideas. First, golf season in Canada is only three months long and playing in flannel is uncomfortable. Plus, it’s not easy putting on sheets of ice.

Jesper Parnevik’s dry cleaning receipt is a lot longer than the list of great Canadian pros, but there have been a few notable exceptions. George Knudson won eight times on the PGA Tour. Dave Barr, Richard Zokol and Dan Halldorson were regulars.

But Weir is sort of in his own Canadian club, even if he went to school at Brigham Young and lives in Draper, Utah, which is near Salt Lake City, so he can hit his beloved ski slopes at every opportunity.

And he might as well take up residence at Riviera Country Club, because he is already acting as if he owns the place.

Last year, Weir won the Nissan Open and he’s probably going to do it again this year, unless he starts putting with his ski. He shot a 66 Saturday in the rain at Riviera, and when you put that together with his first two rounds of 66-64, it adds up to a 54-hole scoring record for a tournament that has been around since 1926.

Weir said one of the reasons for his success was that his putter was on fire. Obviously, no one told him he needs a permit for that in this country.

Anyway, it’s becoming clearer almost every week that there are few boundaries on this 33-year-old’s talent. He isn’t big -- only 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds -- but he packs a punch. He won three times last year, at the Bob Hope, at Riviera and then at that tournament at Augusta, Ga., where they give you a green jacket when you win.

Thus, Weir became the first Canadian and the first left-hander to win the Masters. It was a rare double. And the way he’s playing, he might do it again.

Ranked sixth in the world, Weir has made himself impossible to overlook. Once he smoothed out a wrinkle in his putting by keeping his lower body still, Weir tied for fifth at Scottsdale and tied for fourth at Pebble Beach in his last two tournaments. He’s already 17 under par at Riviera, where the 19-year-old course record is 20 under for four rounds.

Weir wins with his short game, which is probably the right way to go when you rank 128th in driving distance, nearly a full five yards behind the tour average. But he is top 20 in hitting fairways and second only to Jim Furyk in greens in regulation.

It was probably a good thing that Weir kept his left-handed swing, which he once considered switching. When he was 13, Weir wrote a letter to Jack Nicklaus asking his advice on what side to swing from. Nicklaus advised Weir to stick with the natural left-handed swing.

We will never know what would have happened if Nicklaus had recommended that Weir swing either left or right, as long as he made sure to use a hockey stick.

Weir loves hockey and he is buddies with Adam Oates of the Edmonton Oilers. He has also played in pro-am tournaments with Wayne Gretzky. But skiing is at the top of his list of hobbies, although there is a new pet in the Weir household that will require some of his time.

Weir and his wife, Bricia, thought it would be a good idea to get a dog for their girls, Elle Marisa and Lili, so they got a black Labrador puppy last Saturday. They named it Timp, which is short for Timpanogos, an 11,750-foot peak near Provo that’s their favorite mountain to ski.

It must have been a tough decision to find just the right name for the dog. They probably had a lot of choices, such as Hootie or Molson or Greens in Regulation.

Weir said he doesn’t know much about training a dog but figured the toughest part so far had been to keep it from jumping on his children.

He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s wrong. The toughest part would be teaching that dog to putt.

Actually, the way things are going for Weir, he would probably have that dog two-putting for birdie in a couple of months.