That's not exactly consistent golf. Then again, a 63 is tough to follow.

So even though he faded with a final-round 76 and tied for 13th place in the Mercedes Championships, the Draper resident appears primed for a big season.

It's a Presidents Cup year, and Weir tends to play his best golf when he knows he will be competing as a native Canadian for the International squad against the Americans in the late-season event.

Weir won the Nissan Open, finished in the top 10 in the U.S. Open and the British Open and placed 14th on the tour money list in 2004 with nearly $3 million. Yet he was not happy with his swing, which is actually encouraging. As those results illustrated, "I'm able to play with the best in the world, even when I don't have things where I want them to be," Weir said in his annual review.

Weir was disappointed to miss the 36-hole cuts in the Masters, where he was the defending champion, and the PGA Championship. In the other majors, he overcame his swing struggles by battling to score well in difficult conditions, which is one of his trademarks.

Brennan Little, his caddie, said Weir did not have his best stuff in those major tournaments where he finished high, which "makes me believe that if his game comes together for an extended period of time that the results could be scary."

Statistically, Weir had a below-average year, which made his overall performance more impressive. His response was to spend much of November and December working with Mike Wilson, his California-based swing coach in a process Weir describes as "breaking things down and putting it back together so it's better than before."

The results were fairly encouraging at the Mercedes Championships, where Weir hit 78 percent of the fairways and 80 percent of the greens in regulation, while ranking 10th overall in the 31-player field.

Weir did not stay in Hawaii for this week's Sony Open. He also plans to take next week off before playing four out of five weeks - in the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, the Nissan Open and the Accenture Match Play Championship.

Hawaii native Dean Wilson, Weir's former Brigham Young teammate, hopes to launch his season today. As of Wednesday, Wilson was No. 2 on the alternates list for the Sony Open. He should have access to most tournaments as a high-ranking graduate of the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament.

Other Utahns will be able to play only when there's considerable room in a tournament field. Farmington's Boyd Summerhays, whose rookie season was derailed by a back injury, has a major medical exemption for 2005. In terms of access, he ranks slightly ahead of Provo's Dan Forsman and St. George's Jay Don Blake, who will get into 15 to 18 events as former tournament winners.

Summerhays' uncle, Bruce, will start his 11th Champions Tour season earlier than usual. As a 2004 tournament winner, he will play next week in the MasterCard Championship in Hawaii, where the full schedule begins the following week.

Summerhays will be joined on the tour by Orem's Mike Reid, who played nine events last season after turning 50 in July, and Pat McGowan, Reid's former BYU teammate. McGowan played the PGA Tour for 15 years but still had to go through the National Qualifying Tournament in November to earn Champions Tour access.

The only LPGA player with Utah ties is Marisa Baena, who spent her senior year of high school in St. George as an exchange student from Colombia.