Painful to watch Weir stumble through first round @ St. George's

All around the golf course, one got the sense of a finely manicured museum--peaceful save for patches of applause, the occasional drifting whine of distant generators, or the bumblebee drone of the Met Life blimp, buzzing overhead. It was, in other words, the opening round of a golf tournament.

But when Mike Weir strode out in the early afternoon, self-contained and brimming with focus, the mood changed. It got just a little electric, a little hopeful. Galleries swarmed after him like ants, and delivered the occasional roar that shook the leaves from the trees, when Weir wasn't doing it himself with a wayward tee shot on the seventh hole.

By the end of the day, however, the museum was silent again, save for patches of sympathetic applause. Weir has three top-10 finishes at the Canadian Open since 2003; he finished second in 2004. He's been like Tim Henman at Wimbledon, the nearly man at home.

This year, though, there's no nearly about it. Yesterday, Weir started out by missing putts, made the turn with an eagle and two bogeys, and then gradually disintegrated. He squibbed chips, his swing loose and uncoupled. He missed off the tee, and began to find the enthusiastic St. George's rough. He finished by knocking the ball into a fairway bunker, then off the front of a grandstand. Once on the 18th green, he two-putted from 12 feet for bogey, and a two-over-par 72.

And other than refusing to blame his sore right elbow, he didn't have much to say about it.

"It actually feels a lot better today. It feels a lot better," Weir said. "I just didn't play well." When asked what he was specifically unhappy with, Weir was unwilling to delve much further than that. "It was pretty obvious. I didn't play well. I mean, all aspects weren't great." When asked what he was struggling with, he just said, "My game."

And that was that, and it made for a lousy day for Canadian golf's patron saint. He had awoken to find the Toronto Sun had taken a perfectly reasonable article noting his recent decline in play -- he is 118th on the PGA money list this year, his driving distance numbers continue to erode in an era of bombers, he has missed the cut in four of his last six events, he hasn't won a tournament since 2007 -- and torqued it all the way up to 11.

The newspaper's front cover showed the 40-year-old Weir clutching at his tendinitis-affected elbow alongside the words, "IS WEIR WASHED UP?" The tabloid choice of words make it feel like a cheap shot at a guy who isn't healthy at the moment, and he was surely unhappy. But there was nothing much Weir could do about it.

"I found [St. George's] tough," Weir said. "It's a tough golf course. You hit it in the rough -- it's tough around the greens. The rough around the greens is very unpredictable, but if you drive it well and get it in the fairway you can score, but if you don't, it's going to be a tough golf course."

Calgary's Stephen Ames then came by to say the course played fair, though he said it was easier in the morning; he was immediately contradicted by an American gentleman named Brent Delahoussaye, who fired a cool 62 despite a 2:15 p.m. start time in one of the last groups of the day. Bad day for sweeping Canadian pronouncements, it seemed.

For the Canadian Open, too. Weir is the biggest name in a tournament that craves them, and while it's nice that David Duval and Trevor Immelman and Retief Goosen shot 67s, and that Camilo Villegas and Paul Casey managed 68s, and that Hunter Mahan got all the way to 65, nobody means more to this tournament than the guy from Bright's Grove, Ont.

But the timing was bad, and his game was missing, and this won't be Mike Weir's tournament, again. In fact, it doesn't feel like he's ever going to crest this particular hill. He is one PGA win from pushing past George Knudson and into first place among Canadians all-time, and it's getting harder to imagine him managing the feat.

Tournament director Bill Paul was talking about the young Canadian kids the other day, and he tried to explain why the next Mike Weir is hardly a foregone conclusion.

"Having three or four Mike Weirs on Tour would be good," he said. "But it's a tough tour to crack. It's tough. So many guys fighting for cards, and it's not an easy sport. I have a 14-year-old that plays Triple-A hockey, and everyone's trying to make the big show. And only one or two kids in his age group are going to make it."

Well, Mike Weir made it, and for that he should be proud. He's made plenty of money. He's done plenty worth doing. And he could find his game again, lurking around the dogleg. He's not done yet.

But this morning, Mike Weir is 40 years old and 10 shots back, and a comeback seems unlikely. It's not fair to write his career off after one bad day in his own country; he might not have blamed the elbow, but his swing said different. And given what Mike Weir has meant to Canadian golf, nobody should be gleefully piling on, newspapers or otherwise.

But the down slope awaits. No getting around it.