Wealth & Money Quote by Mike Weir

Mike Weir is doing two things at once here: defending ambition and quarantining guilt. The line is built like a preemptive rebuttal to a familiar sports-morality play, where “chasing money” gets framed as selling out, losing focus, betraying the craft. He doesn’t deny the chase. He denies the superstition that the chase automatically corrupts performance.

The phrasing matters. “If I thought” keeps the whole controversy hypothetical, a mental trap he refuses to enter. He’s not confessing; he’s setting a boundary around what he’ll allow himself to believe. Then there’s “just because,” which shrinks the accusation down to something petty and simplistic. It’s not that priorities can’t clash; it’s that the armchair narrative - money equals distraction equals failure - is too neat to deserve his anxiety.

“Kicking myself” is the tell: the real opponent isn’t the leaderboard, it’s the internal spiral athletes live with when every career decision gets retroactively judged by the next result. Weir is describing a kind of psychological risk management. If you let the money story become a curse, you carry it into every swing.

Contextually, this fits the era of golfers navigating a sport where endorsements, appearance fees, and global schedules turned “focus” into a brand expectation. Weir’s intent is to normalize the reality: elite athletes are businesses without wanting their competitive identity reduced to a balance sheet. The subtext is a refusal to let fans and media set the terms of what “serious” looks like.