KITCHENAID SENIOR PGA CHAMPIONSHIP

May 25, 2022

Mike Weir

Press Conference

Harbor Shores

JOHN DEVER: Welcome back to the 2022 KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship.

We are pleased to be joined by 2003 Masters Champion Mike Weir. Mike, congrats on capping off a really strong season last year as a rookie on the PGA Tour Champions. This year, you maybe are not matching that form but I feel like you're working toward that.

MIKE WEIR: It feels good. A little stale start of the year so to speak. Haven't got a lot going and I think I've figured out a couple of the issues holding me back and excited about this week. Feels a lot better.

JOHN DEVER: Your first tour around Harbor Shores, how does that golf course fit in for a left-hander? Is there any difference?

MIKE WEIR: Tough to tell, the practice round has always been this north, northeast wind and I think it's kind of changing today a little bit and going to change. So I don't know if it favors a lefty or if it's a disadvantage for a lefty but I really like the course.

I think it's definitely challenging around the greens and it's a really fun layout with the wind being on the lake. I grew up on Lake Huron, similar bentgrass conditions. Golf course is not the same but conditions of the types of grass around the greens and on the greens and stuff like that. I'm very optimistic about this week and hopefully we can get off to a good start this week.

JOHN DEVER: How is the putting?

MIKE WEIR: It's feeling really good right now. That's been a bit of my issue so I put a lot of work in here the last couple weeks to get that sorted it it's feeling a lot more comfortable. So you never know in this game but I hope to putt a little better this week.

Q. Last year, 36-hole leader by three or four strokes and didn't come to pass. What did you enjoy about your first Senior PGA Championship last year and the way Kerry Haigh lays out the golf course?

MIKE WEIR: Yeah, it was very fun. I really enjoyed Southern Hills. Enjoyed the layout that Kerry setup. I thought it was very fair but very challenging for us guys who we didn't play it the same as the guys had last week, especially on some of the par threes. But it was still very challenging.

Yeah, I was right in the mix. Let a few things slip away a bit. That was disappointing. But all in all, first time around there was good and hopefully build on that this year and this week.

Q. You're on the verge of the 20th anniversary of your win at Augusta. Is it hard to believe it's been a couple of decades and just what that moment in time meant for a career going forward?

MIKE WEIR: It doesn't feel that long. I guess that moment in time is very special. It's special for me. When I talk to different Canadians it was special to a lot of people. It was one of those ones people tell me where they were when it happened. It's fun to hear those stories. When I go up to the Canadian Open in a couple weeks, it's always great to get the hometown fans behind me. They have been with me for a long time and supporting me for a long time, so it's been really special to represent not just myself but the country as well.

Q. There's been a resurgence of Canadian golf in the last few years, almost twenty years after your victory, some of those kids, seven, eight, nine years old that their parents pointed to your victory that week and they have rose to prominence, Cory Connor, MacKenzie. Do you take pride in that?

MIKE WEIR: It gets brought to my attention a lot and I do take pride in it. They put their own work in, but if I inspire those young guys and inspire the young girls to believe that, you know, they can achieve -- if they are from a small town in Canada that they can reach their dreams.

I said that in my acceptance speech that night. That was my goal there when I won in 2003; that if this can inspire the next generation, that will be good for me.

JOHN DEVER in the year leading in to joining this tour, you're 49 years old, the last, let's say, year, 18 months, you're not playing as much on the regular tour, what did you find in your game? Did you find anything new in your game that allowed to you thrive last year as you did? That's a time for tinkering and preparing, isn't it?

MIKE WEIR: It is. I did play some on the Korn Ferry Tour and even though I did not have great success, it was important to play and when you play a few weeks in a row, you figure things out.

There was one year I would play a week and have a month off and it's hard to build any competitive momentum. A lot of the times that I had success on Tour in my regular days I may have missed the cut but two or three weeks later after playing consecutive weeks you get that competitive flow.

You tinker, you figure things out and you have another week to play, where when you don't have status and you don't, you just kind of get in and you may be playing pretty well but you might miss a cut and you don't have anything for a month to kind of keep that momentum.

That was nice for me in those couple years leading up to the Champions Tour that I got that competitive momentum again and that helped me a lot last year.

JOHN DEVER: This is a talented tour, is it not?

MIKE WEIR: Oh, yeah.

JOHN DEVER: You're part of the newer batch of talents but there's still some good golf going on out here.

MIKE WEIR: Oh, very good golf. I tell people all the time, the skill level is very, very high level, very comparable to the regular tour on all the skill shots, the distance, the power is the big difference. But outside of that, I mean, I'd put Steve Stricker's wedge game against anybody in the world or Bernhard Langer putting against anybody in the world.

You know, I think that's the big difference is the power but it's still very competitive out here. You have to play very well. You have to get off to fast starts. We have a four-day event this week but in some of the three-day events, if you shoot 1- or 2-under, you're playing big time catch up and likely not going to be able to have enough time to catch up. So that's a bit of change of strategy, too.

So super competitive out there and it's really fun.

Q. Jack Nicklaus designed this course. Talk about what that throws at you? Obviously he has a unique style, doesn't usually trick thing up, but still, his courses are challenging?

MIKE WEIR: Yeah, it's challenging. It's visually challenging on some tee shots to pick a line, hole is doglegging around water and severe bunkers and picking line in the distance to commit to is sometimes tough in crosswinds. A lot of the wind is blowing across some of these fairways.

So that's challenging and then being on the right spot of the green, I think to your point, very challenging greens to putt the ball on the right spot of the hole, the right section is key to good scoring out here and I think you see the guys have shot some really low numbers out here, really good scores, they are putting the ball in the right spots, put in the right section. Otherwise, you're playing defense all the time. That's a sign of a good golf course I think.

Q. You to play alongside PGA professionals this week. Some of the guys this week said it might be a bigger deal for them, but what the are the conversations?

MIKE WEIR: Yeah, a lot of my really good friends are PGA club pros, and I know the hard work they put in and for them to find time for their own games and put time into their own games to try to get last year is a big challenge for a lot of them in club golf.

They have got big responsibilities at their home club so it's great to celebrate them, have them here, have them competing and there are a lot of really good players, too. You'll see a couple of guys, if not more, in the mix, and hope that they are in the mix.

It's great. It's great to have the interaction between us and the PGA pros.

Q. How important is it to have KitchenAid as a sponsor but also supporting the community for a big event like this?

MIKE WEIR: This is my second year with them; they did such a wonderful job for me at Southern Hills last year. And so the great job that KitchenAid does with the volunteers and seems like the community in Benton Harbor gets behind, it all the signage in the staff, it's wonderful for this town.

I played the Western Amateur here years ago in the area and haven't been back in a while and being from close to the border in Michigan. I know Michigan golf pretty well and it's great to have an event here.

Q. The Alfred S. Bourne Trophy, it's a big trophy.

MIKE WEIR: I saw it inside, yeah.

Q. Talk about how cool that trophy is. 36 pounds, one of the biggest ones in golf.

MIKE WEIR: Yeah, it's like the Stanley Cup of Champions Tour golf. I didn't want to touch it. I have the hockey superstition, I didn't want to touch it but a beautiful trophy, one of the best trophies that we are playing for out here.