T&L Golf Magazine: The Year of Weir - Mighty Mike, The Canadian Tiger
09 Sep 2003 - 09 Sep 2003"Pretty Good for a Canadian, Eh? North of the Border, there's no one like Mike Weir."
Here's one of the distinctions: for you Americans, Mike Weir's left-handedness is just a quirk, good for a joke about standing on the wrong side of the ball. But for us Canadians, it's no laughing matter. That's because we take pride in the little things that make us different: buying gas by the liter, parlez-ing francais in half the country, living in igloos. When we see Weir's waggle—still trying, after all these years, to get the hockey out of his swing—we see ourselves, or what we like to imagine we are.
By whatever cosmic fluke or genetic defect, more Canadians per capita play golf left-handed than do hackers in any other country—reportedly about 30 percent, compared with something like 10 percent of Americans. No one knows why, exactly, but as with life's other great mysteries—why your own lefties can't win majors, say—there's no shortage of theories floating about.
The best one traces its roots back to the early 1980s, when Canada was consumed by two things: a very bad band named Glass Tiger and a very good hockey player named Wayne Gretzky. A brand called Titan was smart enough to put out a Gretzky signature-model hockey stick—white with red lettering—but only in a lefty model, true to his hand. Right-handers got stuck with the Mike Bossy edition, red with white lettering. Trouble was, Bossy was a heck of a hockey player, but he wasn't the Great One. So lots of hockey-playing kids taught themselves to shoot left-handed, because they really wanted to use the white stick, not the red one. And when they grew up and made the almost inevitable switch to golf, they tucked their newly dominant left hands below their gimpy right ones and slap-hooked the ball onto the adjoining fairway.
Somewhere along the way, a few of us Canadian righties learned how to hit it straight from the south side. Weir went one better—another natural righty, he learned how to hit it straight enough left-handed to win the Masters. In that cotton-mouthed moment, the country had found itself a new sporting hero, and there wasn't any tape on his stick. For today's Canadian kids, it's now Mike Weir, not Wayne Gretzky, who's worth twisting yourself up for.
Which brings us to a second, more important distinction. For you, Weir's Masters moment was a sepia-tinted story, recalling a time when America's heroes were ordinary men who rose to whatever extraordinary occasion they found themselves in, usually by accident, without the burdens of hype and hope and expectation. Then, all of a sudden, they're put at the heads of parades, proud and perfect.
Not our heroes. In Canada, we don't trust them without flaws. We want them to be quirky like the rest of us, and that includes staying almost ridiculously humble—the moment anyone even thinks of getting to the head of our parades, they get cut down before they can get there. We even have a name for that little tendency of ours: Tall Poppy Syndrome. But the great thing about Weir is that, despite his suddenly becoming the biggest jock up here since a certain Los Angeles King ne Edmonton Oiler, he's remained beyond reproach.
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