Talk about nervous!
Hosting the Masters Champions dinner gives last year's winner Mike Weir food for thought, Ken Fidlin writes
By KEN FIDLIN -- Toronto Sun
AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Back in Roman times, the story goes, the emperor used to have a bit of sport by putting convicts into an open arena with hungry lions just to, you know, see what happened.
If the prisoner survived, he got his freedom. If not, well, you can guess the gory outcome. And the lions always prevailed.
Once, however, instead of passively allowing himself to be mauled and eaten, an enterprising prisoner walked directly over to the lion and whispered something into its ear.
Instead of attacking, the lion fled and cowered in a corner, whimpering like a frightened cub. No amount of coaxing could get him to do his lion-ly thing.
As he was leaving the arena, the emperor summoned the convict.
"You are free," he said, "but I am very curious. Just what did you say to the lion?"
"I just told him," said the convict, "that he would be required to say a few words after his meal."
Funny, the things that scare the bejeepers out of us.
Put him on the most challenging golf course imaginable, against the greatest players in the world and Mike Weir is fearless. He has nerves of steel.
Ask him to be host of a dinner for those same players (throw in a handful of retired legends) and give a little speech and Weir's throat goes dry, his hands become clammy.
"I am nervous," Weir said yesterday afternoon, a few hours before the champions dinner, an intimate soiree of about 30, open exclusively to the men who have won the Masters.
"I really have no idea what I'm going to say to all these great men."
CARIBOU
For starters, he had to explain that the caribou the champions had all been promised had morphed into elk, a much more readily available source of protein, as it turns out. Who knew? Seems Weir and his helpers couldn't get their hands on a big enough supply of caribou to fee the hungry champions.
But that was just a minor glitch. The fellowship, not the food, is the important part of the evening.
"Just to be in the room with all those great champions and get to rub elbows with them and trade a few stories, it's going to be a special night," Weir said. "Something I'll always remember."
Weir's childhood pal, Alastair MacKay, put together an all-Canadian menu that he hoped would satisfy the various palates in the room.
"I don't want to run through the whole menu," Weir said, "but Al has ingredients from across the country, pretty much. I think it has been well-documented that there will be Canadian beer there, too."
The only man younger than Weir, 33, in the room last night was Tiger Woods, 28, who was attending his seventh champions dinner.
"As far as the dinner goes, I just love it," Woods said. "To go in there and just rap and tell stories and listen to all the jokes, all of the stories that go around, it's very special.
BANTER
"We always used to hear Byron (Nelson) and Sam (Snead) go at it. It was always so much fun to hear the banter back and forth, all those stories that you're not privy to. If you're not in that room, you never hear those stories."
Somebody pointedly asked Phil Mickelson, who has not won a Masters, what he'd be doing last night. He thought the question a bit curious and then, the light went on.
"Oh, you mean the champions dinner is tonight," he said. "I didn't know that. Well, there's a good reason I don't know that."
Mickelson, like every non-champion in the field, would crawl naked across six miles of broken glass to get into that room.
Why? Because it's one of those priceless rituals that make the Masters the Masters.
Arnold Palmer is playing in his 50th and last Masters this year but he recalled his first champions dinner, in 1959, as if it was yesterday.
"I was speechless," Palmer said. "To be in the room with that gang -- Hogan and Nelson and Snead and Sarazen -- the whole scene was one you couldn't copy. You can't duplicate it, you can't reproduce it.
"It was a thrill of a lifetime, one that, today, after all the accolades, my greatest thrill was back then when those people were here and I had a chance to win the tournament and be with them."
Weir earned that chance last April and, one day, he probably will recall last night's proceedings with the same reverence.
In his own shy way, Weir has become a gracious and quite eloquent public speaker just because he must. His knees were probably shaking when he rose to speak but we'd wager that the lion in his heart was stronger than the lion hiding in the corner.
