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GOLF CHANNEL MEDIA CONFERENCE

August 20, 2019

Roger Maltbie

Orlando, Florida

Q. Roger, does the scoring, the staggered scoring present any challenges to you guys as broadcasters on Thursday?
ROGER MALTBIE: I think it makes it simpler. And please understand, I don't have to deal with that. It's not my job. It's the guys in the towers and stuff. I don't have to deal with any of that thankfully.

Q. Why do you think it's --
ROGER MALTBIE: Because there's going to be one trophy, one winner, and there's going to be a leaderboard that people can understand. Someone is going to have the lowest score. That makes things much simpler for the viewer to understand. The points, the projected, the back and forth and this and that, gee whiz. That's a lot, even for people involved in the game.

Q. Can you imagine sleeping on a lead for four days as Justin has or will have?
ROGER MALTBIE: I do expect a lot of pressure here. That would be my expectation, that on Sunday I'm expecting a very exciting finish. Let's put it that way. And you have to look at this event as the tail end of a year long tournament. That's all it is. You're on the 14th hole now or something, you know. It's really the way you have to look at it, and it's absolutely the most fairway to decide anything.

If we played 18-hole tournaments, there would be all kinds of first time winners. You play two rounds, there wouldn't be as many. Three, not as many. Four, fewer yet. The longer you play, the bigger the advantage to the better player. That's all there is to it. Keep playing, the good guy's going to win at the end. The best player's going to win.

Q. The cream will rise to the top, you're saying?
ROGER MALTBIE: Yeah, that's just how it works. Face it, this whole PGA TOUR is built to support stars.

Q. And yet two of your stars aren't here?
ROGER MALTBIE: Yeah, it hurts. That hurts, but that's the playoffs. At some point, the Patriots will miss the playoffs (laughter), and people are going to go what the hell happened? But it's going to happen.

Q. What do you think about -- do you think it's a good money player -- if the Tuesday guys that go out and play matches for money, because this one is really, if you win the FedExCup, it's $15 million.
ROGER MALTBIE: Right.

Q. At some point you choke over the size of the purse.
ROGER MALTBIE: You know, I don't know how to answer that. Being a player from yesteryear, this is an ungodly amount of money. These guys, not so much.

Q. It's not going to ruin their lives if they don't make the playoffs?
ROGER MALTBIE: And it's not going to make their lives because, if somebody in 30th comes back from ten shots behind, maybe it will change his life, but a lot of these guys it's not.

Q. How many guys in the field don't have at least $15 million in the bank? Not many.
ROGER MALTBIE: I couldn't answer that, but I don't think there's a ton of them.

Q. Roger, the way the points are distributed, you have your Majors as legacy events, and yet they're worth 600 points, not that much more than a regular Tour event, same as THE PLAYERS, far less than the first two playoff events. Is that problematic to you? Is that sending the wrong message about what the Majors mean in this world?
ROGER MALTBIE: To me, it's a complicated situation in that you want to certainly advance and reward those that played the best throughout the season, but you can have the best record in football and lose your first playoff game. You know, if you don't perform in the playoffs, you're gone. That's very consistent with every other sport.

So while it may present what appears to be an aberration, that's just the nature of playoffs, to me.

Q. With this new format, this is now the first year that's really happened.
ROGER MALTBIE: Right.

Q. In the past, it didn't matter. You were here no matter what, final leg really. Now you've got that playoff element in place.
ROGER MALTBIE: Absolutely. For me personally, the match play in Austin, come on, with that round robin little thing. Oh, come on. Match play, you go show up, you lose, you're gone. That's the nature of the game. Playoffs should be the same way. You qualify to get to them through regular season play. Once you're there, you've got to perform. If you don't, it's over.

Q. For the guys that are starting in the back, the guys that are ten strokes behind, basically they can be as aggressive as they want. How do you think they'll go into this week starting ten strokes behind? Just super aggressive?
ROGER MALTBIE: It's like being a couple of shots behind with four holes to go. You've got to make decisions on how the scoreboard is. Then again, as an old fart, I don't understand these kids that deal with sports psychologists and don't look at scoreboards and stuff like that. That had everything to do with what decisions were going to made next.

I would think, yeah, these guys have got to come out playing aggressive. They have to. That's the job they have to get done or try to get done. What the heck, if it doesn't work, they're not walking out of here busted.

Q. Theoretically, the way that they structured it this year is kind of akin to how the Preakness format was in terms of the odds for each slot, right? If you were 29th last year, you probably had about the same odds as the 29th guy this year. But it seems like it might be easier to --
ROGER MALTBIE: I really haven't looked at it this way. I like it this way because I'm a simple person, and it makes it simpler for me. I know that. When they start talking about all the numbers and projections, I start going -- you know. You start losing me. It doesn't matter. I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't want to know.

Q. If it's the U.S. Open in 1965 and you're an average guy on TOUR, don't you go in there that week kind of at the back of your mind, I'm already ten shots behind Nicklaus? It may not be much different than that situation.
ROGER MALTBIE: That would be pretty much every time he played.

Q. That's what I mean.
ROGER MALTBIE: Yeah, kind of. But you still have to play to win.

Q. Ten shots over 72 holes sounds like a lot, but it really isn't that much.
ROGER MALTBIE: As we were talking about, you've got to get the ball on the fairway. That, to me, is the big question mark, as Justin pointed out. You cannot play this place from the rough. It is greens -- now, I have not been on the golf course yet, so we don't know, and we're here a month earlier. August, obviously, is a hotter month and a wetter month than September will be, so I don't know how soft the greens are or anything out there.

Once these greens get firm, as we've seen them in the past, you can't play as much from the rough. You can't. You've got to get the ball in the fairway here. There's nothing from the rough. You can't spin it. You can't control the ball. So that will be a huge determinant factor of this one.

If the greens are softer and more receptive -- they've got the SubAir system, right?

Q. Yes, they do.
ROGER MALTBIE: They've got all that. It takes that really a couple of days to get cranked up.

Q. Is it easier or harder for a drawer or a fader on these greens?
ROGER MALTBIE: Well, that would depend on the shot. It would depend on the hole location. By and large, a fade --

Q. That's what I thought, a softer --
ROGER MALTBIE: Than a shot that's higher will stop quicker.

Q. Roger, you walked a lot of rounds with Rory this season. How would you assess his season?
ROGER MALTBIE: You know, he's playing great. In a lot of ways, you'd have to say he's playing better than he's ever played by a lot of measures. But somehow it seems on the weekend things kind of go away, and I can't speak to or answer -- once you see that stuff over a period of time, kind of like Rory's going through, Jordan's going through, something's going on up here that I can't speak to. It's not physical. Physically, he's the same guy Saturday than he was Thursday, but when it happens enough, there's no way it comes out of your head.

And God bless all of you guys, they're reminded every week. And us too, you know.

Q. To your point, in the 18th suites, there's a big picture like this of Rory in just full emotion, and the one thing is you don't see that from him anymore. Very rarely do you see him with that kind of display, and I'm wondering how you read that. Could that be he's a person who wears his emotions -- used to anyway -- on his sleeve?
ROGER MALTBIE: Well, that's in some ways a product of youth. He's now a married guy and great player, has got all kinds of money. He finds himself in contention a lot, so it becomes more of an every week sort of experience.

Q. It never seemed to get old for Tiger, though.
ROGER MALTBIE: Well, he's a different animal. He lived to win. That was his purpose. He was built to win, lived to win. That's what fed Tiger. And only what fed Tiger. That's all he dined on.

Q. Yeah. In that respect, what has it been like for you to first off see him win the Masters, see the kind of emotion that he had, not just at the moment, but that he's expressed weeks and months later, about having his kids there to witness that? It almost feels like he's not just being fed by that anymore.
ROGER MALTBIE: No, now he's a very different guy in many, many ways. I think all of us will probably agree for the better, and he's showing -- he's revealing more about himself. He's sharing more in his way of feelings. He's humanized himself. For years, I just wanted to tell him -- not that it would be my place or not that he would listen -- people love you. They want to love you. Let them love you. Let them love you. That's all you got to do.

And he would build this wall, and the wall's kind of come down. I think that's great. And he had such a special relationship with his father, and now that he's gotten older and his body's become more frail, he is more vulnerable, and he wants to share those moments with his kids. I think it's great. I think it's wonderful.

Q. Did you see the Tiger with the wall down at any point when you would just go up to him mid-round and you guys would have those little conversations?
ROGER MALTBIE: I didn't make eye contact with him too much.

Q. Really?
ROGER MALTBIE: No. He was there for another reason.

Q. Wow.
ROGER MALTBIE: I used to have -- you know, there's been guys along the way, when we used to do the U.S. Open, you know, it would be my job to do arrival interviews.

Q. So you're out in the parking lot?
ROGER MALTBIE: Yeah, you're out in the parking lot. That was my job. Jack wouldn't do them. Watson wouldn't do them. Tiger's not going to do it. Tommy, he's not going to do it. Ask him anyway. So I asked him one time, I said, Hey, Tiger, I hate to bother you, but they pay me a lot of money. They asked me to do this. They paid me a lot of money. I don't mean to be a pain. He looked at me and said, they pay me a lot more to not do it.

(Laughter).

Bingo! I said, you're right.

Q. Did he have a smile on his face?
ROGER MALTBIE: Sure, he did. He's a good guy. I've never had a problem with Tiger, never, ever, ever, ever. But I know when to leave him alone. And it's not that we don't have the occasional word on the golf course, but I'm not seeking it. I'm not approaching him for anything. I mean, if he walks by and makes a comment, great, but those are few and far between, and that's fine.

Q. Of all the things you've seen, covered in golf, where does 18 last year rank for you?
ROGER MALTBIE: I've never seen anything else like it. I assume there was a time when gallery ropes weren't up, but as hard as that may be to believe, that was before my time. You know, I wasn't in any of those scenes.

I told this story last week to a fellow. You know, on 18, they drive over that hill down on that plateau. So I'm down on that plateau, and I'm looking toward the green, looking at my yards book and looking toward the green and figuring out what's going on up there, and I turn around, and I kind of bumped into a police officer, and he's looking back up the hill, and I'm looking up, and I see all these people on the ridge, on the top of the fairway there.

Oh, no, he says, what are we going to do now? I said, well, an old colleague of ours had a great saying, Dave Marr. He said, you know, once that dog gets out from under the porch, it's real tough to get him back under there. I said, I don't think they're going anywhere, buddy.

Q. (No microphone).
ROGER MALTBIE: Oh, geez. So now he plays his second shot, and all the people up in front of the green on the left there see all these people coming down the fairway, and they go, well, the hell with that. So they storm the fairway. And now you've got the Tiger sandwich, right, as the thing marches closer. So I got the hell out of there and went around. I wasn't going to get on. Those things make me nervous. I wandered up by the green and looked and saw him come busting through the crowd and all that. Come on.

That was -- to me, that's a perfect case that people want to love him. People want to love him. And in that moment, they had their chance to tell him, and I thought he was pretty receptive and gracious back to them. Those are nice moments, really nice moments.

Q. Kind of like when Arnie came out of the crowd at the Open, and (inaudible) pretended that he was -- you know, they just love me.
ROGER MALTBIE: To another extent, it's the same with Jack and Arnie. I mean, everyone loved Arnie, and it became clear that Jack was the better player, then he became the Golden Bear, and they wanted to love him. They wanted to. What the hell? Let them love him. It doesn't seem hard, but for some folks I guess it is.

Q. Almost as exciting as Roger Maltbie winning the World Series of Golf.
ROGER MALTBIE: Oh, geez.

Q. When you were playing, how big of a deal was slow play, and how do you have to handle it?
ROGER MALTBIE: Now, this is kind of a subject you can wind me up with. We had our slow players in the day. I could name them for you now, not that it's worth it. We know who they are. But when I was on the policy committee in the early '80s, we hired a guy named Byron Ferguson. Remember Fergie? He came out and did the time studies. So he developed the time par, what it takes to play this golf course in threes and twos. That's how they developed that whole system.

Back when Jack Tuthill in the day was running everything, we would have these meetings about how they were going to combat slow play, and it's a warning and the timing and the whole deal. I argued with Jack vehemently. I said, okay, here's the scenario. You're driving down the freeway on the way home. You get pulled over by a state trooper who says, I'm warning you. I'm not going to give you a ticket, but I'm going to be on your bumper all the way home. How many tickets are you going to give away? So you're creating a system that never, never catches or penalizes the perpetrator.

Now, his contention was all we care about is getting players back in position. We want them filed up one by one. We don't want gaps, this and that. That's all they were interested in, and that's basically how the system we use to this day was founded. The officials don't want to be in the business of having to time. They don't want that, and I understand that.

Q. Never hire officials (inaudible)?
ROGER MALTBIE: Yeah. So in my twisted way of thinking, I said, if you want guys to play fast, I said, why don't you hand them a scorecard on the 1st tee and say, if you come back here in less than three hours and 45 minutes, you can take two shots off your scorecard. You'll have a track meet, right?

Q. For sure.
ROGER MALTBIE: If you're going to use time par, say this is the amount of time you get to play today. Come back sooner, we'll help you. But at any rate, so you go along, and there are real consistencies, to me, between slow players. One, it's not a crime. It doesn't make you a bad guy. But being known as a slow player, there's a stigma to it.

Players get offended when they're called slow, even though, in fact, they are. I was interested in Bryson's comments on Instagram or Twitter or whatever social media deal it was, and he took on this defiant tone, and I've heard that before from slower players. And in some of his written, or when I read the comments he'd made involving I guess it was Brooks when Brooks named him, and he said, you don't realize the damage you're doing to me and so on and so forth. What the slow player never, ever realizes is the damage he does to those that he plays with. They don't look at it that way, and the other guys have to accommodate the slow player.

Now, there used to be a guy on the TOUR named Ronnie Black, who was very slow, and if you got paired with Ronnie, you were going to get timed. Great guy. Love Ronnie Black, but slow. So now they come and warn you. Fine. Now all of a sudden, Ronnie Black hits his shot. He walks over by the ropes, and he's walking up the side of the fairway, and you're trying to play, and he's moving up here, and he's doing all these things to help make himself quicker and get the group back in position, but who has to adjust their own style and pace of play to accommodate him? The other guys. You're accommodating him.

Now, in any round of golf, damn near any round of golf, a player's going to hit a ball someplace where it takes longer than 45 seconds. You're trying to figure out are you going to pitch out? Are you going over that tree? What's the number here? If I lay up over there, where's the water? How far is it to that? It takes some time. But if you're already on the clock because of this other guy, you can't take more than 45 seconds. Why? Because of him. And the slow player never, ever views that issue that way.

Q. He rarely thinks of himself as slow.
ROGER MALTBIE: They don't think of themselves as slow, and they're going to take the time they need to take because they've insulated themselves from their responsibilities, which they are, just like I'm keeping your scorecard. It's my responsibility to make sure you play by the rules, and I write down the scorecard, and it's correct and accurate, and you sign it. That's my responsibility to the field. Same thing's true. Players have responsibilities to others, and a slow player doesn't give a darn.

So I didn't get all of it, but the European Tour is now going to do their deal, and it sounds like -- their player committee -- is David Howell, the head guy, I think, chairman or whatever they call him. They have compiled a list, the players have, of the slow players. You think our field staff doesn't know who those guys are?

Q. Of course they do.
ROGER MALTBIE: Of course they do. They're easily identified, and those guys are going to get greater scrutiny, as it should be.

Q. Speaking of which, on Saturday, the final twosome of Patrick Cantlay and Hideki were two holes behind.
ROGER MALTBIE: Apparently inside of time par?

Q. Right. But you had fans who were waiting at the 18th hole for a while.
ROGER MALTBIE: Sure. That's Tuthill's argument. All we care about is the players are in order one after another. That supports his argument. But it also points to the fallacy of time par.

Q. Spieth at The Open, when he walked around the range, trying to take that trophy. He took about 20 minutes to plan that whole shot.
ROGER MALTBIE: At the U.S. Open? At Birkdale.

Q. Yeah, just a lot of stuff happened. If he's on the clock, I mean, he's never going to get that shot played in 45 seconds.
ROGER MALTBIE: But once you're over 45 seconds, is there a problem taking 20 minutes?

Q. Might as well.
(Laughter).

ROGER MALTBIE: An infraction is an infraction. You might as well park there all afternoon.

Q. Have you ever covered a group, and I'm sure you have, where you get frustrated as an announcer? You say, come on, just hit the shot.
ROGER MALTBIE: Sure, yeah. Well, only to myself on the sidelines. Come on, let's go. Sure. You can watch different players and determine which way -- most of them are consistent -- but why they're slow.

Q. Do you have a favorite hole on this course, one that you like to watch the action on for any reason?
ROGER MALTBIE: I like 17. Well, now 8. The 8th hole. Where Billy Horschel hit it out of the water. That's a hell of a hole. That really is. Great hole with water all down the left.

Q. They redid it. That was cool.
ROGER MALTBIE: Yeah, I think that's an important hole. What would it be now -- 14? The long --

Q. Par 3?
ROGER MALTBIE: No, the 4. 15 is the par 3.

Q. Downhill?
ROGER MALTBIE: Well, over the hill and just a long par 4. I don't know that I'd call it exciting, just a terrific hole.

Q. When you say terrific hole, to you, what does that mean?
ROGER MALTBIE: That means difficult yet fair.

Q. It's a challenge on the tee shot?
ROGER MALTBIE: Yeah, and the second shot. You've got to play golf. You've got to play golf.

Q. (No microphone)?
ROGER MALTBIE: Yeah. I think potentially it will be a more exciting finish. The 3 par finish is always kind of awkward. It's a fine golf course the other way too. I think it's a little bit better this way. And then you have 15, the 3 par, and then given the right conditions could be very exciting.

Q. Roger, do you have any sense that Tiger himself was surprised by how much he felt winning the Masters, that perhaps that was part of his post-Masters malaise that maybe he felt completed or just felt like what do I do next?
ROGER MALTBIE: I think there's a lot of that involved. I think he faced his own golfing doubt, and he was there. He was looking in the mirror saying, man, I'm probably done. He got to that point.

Then when he realized that, A, he could physically play again and, B, maybe there's enough left in the tank I can really do this, to come back and win the TOUR Championship and then to win at Augusta, you know, you think about it, you hear guys say you never forget how to win. If you're a winner, you don't forget how you do it. If you look at him at Augusta, once everybody started rinsing it in the creek in 12, he put the ball exactly where it needed to be the rest of the day. He knew how to get to the clubhouse. I think there's huge satisfaction in that for him.

Q. Will it be hard for him to reset goals? I mean, is 16 as important to him as 15 was?
ROGER MALTBIE: I don't think so. I don't think so.

Q. Do you think we may look back at Tiger's win as maybe his Jack in '86 moment? Do you think there's a possibility?
ROGER MALTBIE: It sure is. I think there's a real possibility of that. My wife happens to be facing the same kind of thing. She had a lower back fusion. As least how they explained it to me, your spine's supposed to do this. You take two pieces and fuse them as one, this part and this part take a lot more load. That's true for anybody let alone somebody that puts a lot of load on their back to start with, you know, with a golf swing. So I don't think he has a whole bunch of years left, but that's just guessing. I don't know.

There's a certain urgency there, and I don't know that, at least from listening to his comments, I don't know that he has a terrific amount of faith in how he's going to feel going forward because he's dealing with it now.

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