ADT SKILLS CHALLENGE MEDIA CONFERENCE

December 17, 2003

Peter Jacobsen

Mark McGwire

MARK McGWIRE: It was definitely fun. It was definitely amazing. It was an honor to play alongside these fantastic pros that I've watched for quite some time. And, you know, first of all, it was an honor that ADT and NBC asked me to join and be in the Skills Challenge. I know last year they had John Elway and they saw me play up in Tahoe and they asked me to play and I said yes. That was like three months prior to flying down to Florida, and as the day got closer I got more nervous and more nervous. Mr. Jacobsen, he made me feel at home, and so did the other pros, and it worked out really well.

PETER JACOBSEN: I don't think anybody was really that shocked. I had played with Mark before. We had played a few times and I know all of the other guys have seen and played golf and obviously watched him perform his magic on the baseball diamond. Everybody knew that he had the talent. Golf and baseball are very much alike. The golf swing is exactly the same as a baseball swing. It's just on a different level different plane. Mark understands the golf swing. The fact that he competed so well under the pressure didn't surprise me because he's been in that situation many times. 3-2 count, bottom of the ninth, two men on and he needs to hit a home run or needs to get a base hit and he did that. So I don't think the pressure was there. I think what surprised all of us and impressed me with was his short game, the skill that he handled his wedge shots, recovery shots, bunker play and his putting. Because that's generally the area that separates a very good amateur and a tour professional is the short game. You can go play golf with Tiger, watch him hit it and he's very impressive. But what's most impressive is his short game.

MARK McGWIRE: Well, my index is zero which -- see, I didn't pick up a golf club for the last seven years of my career because of my back. Then when I retired, I picked up the golf club again. Actually it was my first love anyways. It was the first sport I ever played. But I didn't think it was so difficult to pick it up. As a kid you just think golf, you pick it up, hit it, walk and hit it. It turned out where it's a little different today I just love playing the game of golf. Since I've been away from baseball it's my new love, my new addiction, along with my family. I just had a great dime down there with the ADT. It was wonderful.

MARK McGWIRE: The Boca Raton Resort.

MARK McGWIRE: I usually do something almost every day because I live right here. So my wife is expecting in the next week or two and we have a 14-month old. So, you know, that's my first job. And then when I can get an hour or something away from that, I go down and usually work on my game. I might play once or twice a week depending on how my buddies are doing.

MARK McGWIRE: I'm here to talk about the ADT and that's really it.

PETER JACOBSEN: I'll answer that question. It's been really tough. I've been looking for baseball games on television last couple of weeks and I haven't found any. It's been tough. I follow baseball, but boy, I've been shut out of it here the last couple of weeks and couple of months. I can't understand it. When we hang up here I'm going to call somebody at the Major Leagues maybe my cable provider is the problem.

PETER JACOBSEN: You know, I would have to ask Steve if he had it there but I think it was maybe 290. I think I finished third or fourth.

PETER JACOBSEN: Yeah. Quite honestly, the first skill is the long drive. That's always the toughest part of the game in that whenever I give a clinic or myself when I go warm up, I start with a wedge and move up to the driver. In the ADT Skills, we jump right out with a driver, and we had a cross-wind from right-to-left of maybe ten miles an hour and it's a pretty tight fairway. So I think there were like two or three pros that missed the fairway entirely. I think Dudley Hart and Colin Montgomerie missed the fairway completely. So as it got closer to my turn I thought oh, good, if I miss the fairway with all three, I'm in good hands; I'm in good company. But I happened -- I think I got all three of my balls in the fairway which earned me the Hale Irwin Consistency Award.

PETER JACOBSEN: You know, I don't know. I'm still waiting. I hope it comes sometime soon.

MARK McGWIRE: I was five years old. It was the first sport I ever played. My dad had polio and so the only sport my dad could play was golf. So all of us kids used to battle for him to drag us down to the golf course and five years old was basically the age that he started all of us in. I actually quit baseball my sophomore year in high school to play on the golf team. I won a high school tournament, too. But I went back to baseball my junior year and it worked out.

PETER JACOBSEN: Let me just talk a little bit about Mark's golf swing. I think he's got one of the finest golf swings in the game. All of us were obviously scrutinizing his swing quite a bit at the tournament and we really couldn't find much wrong with his golf swing, not that you're always looking for something wrong. But when you're looking at a player and you're sizing up a player, whether it's in a tournament round or a practice round, Mark really has no flaws in his golf swing obviously because it's so much like baseball. It's a side-arm game. Golf is a side-arm game. It involves a rotation of your trunk, and the arms and the club follow. And Mark's driver swing and his irons and his short game, I can't tell you how impressed I was. If he worked hard for the next few years, I think he could probably go to the Q-School and get his card. Not that he's going to do that. He's got a young family and other business interests. But I was very, very impressed with Mark as a player.

MARK McGWIRE: Thank you, Peter. I really appreciate that.

MARK McGWIRE: Do I have any goals? Not really. I like just -- I like playing. I enjoy it. I might enter some amateur tournaments. I might try the Southern California Am and the U.S. Amateur. It depends. The one thing I do like after playing up in Tahoe, the celebrity Tahoe tournament (American Century) this last summer, the one thing I really, really enjoyed was the competition and it was something that I just love. I love working with my mind, and when you get in competition, rather than just playing in a club game every weekday or every weekend, there's just something about grinding and taking one shot as it comes and working that putt and trying to get up-and-down, and it's just something I really enjoyed. I don't know where this is going to take me but I actually love the game of golf. It's something that I've been playing since I was young and it's something I'll play till the day I die.

MARK McGWIRE: No, not at all. I mean, when you retire, you retire. You're supposed to go away. You get away from what you used to do. I'm not doing anything different. I'm just doing what I want to do. I have a new job and my new job is being a father and a husband and I'm absolutely loving it. I'm catching up on all of the lost time that I had with my 16-year-old, Matthew, and now with my new family, I'm absolutely in hog heaven. It's just something great and I get to play the game of golf now that I have a couple of hours a day after that. So I'm just really enjoying life.

MARK McGWIRE: I do. But there's a lot of travel and there's only a couple on the West Coast. The rest of them are travel. You know, that's just to be seen. I mean, I won't say no to it. I love the competition, so I would have to say I probably will be playing a few more. When and where, I don't know.

MARK McGWIRE: No, because that's really not competition. That's just for fun. I enjoyed it when I was playing golf when I was a younger baseball player and I was invited to those things. But that's on a different level compared to when you have to really keep your score and you're battling to the guys out on the Celebrity Tour.

PETER JACOBSEN: Winning in Hartford was awesome and I'm glad Mark McGwire was not in the field because I would have finished second.

MARK McGWIRE: Are you giving me an invite?

PETER JACOBSEN: I'm giving you the title. I think at the age of 49, I've battled through my share of injuries and, Mark knows exactly what I'm talking about. When you play your chosen profession or your chosen sport for so long, you're going to go through injuries. I've had just about every injury imaginable and culminated in hip surgery in 2001. But I've always had a burning desire to get back to the level that we all search for. I worked very, very hard, not only mentally but physically to get my game back to where I could compete again on the Tour. Culminating with a win at the GHO this summer was a dream come true. I won there in 1984 and I feel like Hartford is a second home to me. I feel so close to everybody up there. I've got great friends. When I go there, I know I'm going to be spending every evening out with friends, and I think that helps to contribute to the success that I've had there at Hartford. I've always played well there over the years. And now as I look forward 2004, the conflict that you spoke of is with a tournament here in my hometown of Portland, Oregon called the JELD-WEN Tradition. I organized and ran a tournament here for 17 years always called the Fred Meyer Challenge. Kroeger store has bought Fred Meyer and ended the tournament sponsorship. So we endeavored to find a replacement sponsor. In stepped an Oregon corporation, Klamath Falls, Oregon, called JELD-WEN. They are the world's leading manufacturer of high energy efficient windows and doors. They came in and wanted to keep the tournament in the state and give it a higher profile. So we ended up with the Champions Tour Tradition which is a tournament that used to be in Scottsdale, Jack Nicklaus and Lyle Andersen started it. We moved it to Portland. Tom Watson won it this year in dramatic fashion. Next year it happens to fall the same week as the Greater hartford Open, which is now the Buick Championship. So I'm stuck with my: Do I defend my title or do I continue the work we've done here in Portland for 18 years. Unfortunately or fortunately, however I want to look at it, that's a very difficult decision. As much as I love Hartford and have played there and have been committed that event, I feel it's very important for me to play in my hometown next year. Again, it's a 50/50 choice. One of them is going to be the loser and one of them is going to be the winner, for me, and it's been very difficult. But I will -- we worked with the Tour to try to change the date, but we couldn't do it because of television commitments. So next year I will be in Portland playing in the JELD-WEN Tradition. I'm going to come back to Hartford to do the Media Day in May. And obviously as I'm playing in Portland I'll be thinking of everybody in Hartford and will hopefully come back in 2005 if we can get the dates switched. So that's the situation as it exists read now.

PETER JACOBSEN: Yeah, the JELD-WEN, the Champions Tour, obviously has a little more flexibility than the PGA TOUR. It was a week later this year and they moved it a week earlier. I'm sure there's going to be people in Hartford that are very upset about it and there's nothing I can do. I'm kind of stuck here between defending a title and a city that I love or playing in a championship that I've organized run for 18 years in my hometown. It's a tough call.

PETER JACOBSEN: Absolutely. In 2005 if there's no conflict, I'll be at both events.

MARK McGWIRE: It's a huge adjustment. When I was a kid I didn't think it was much of an adjustment. In golf, the biggest thing is you can't get away with anything. In baseball you can. I mean, you can look terrible at the plate and hit a blooper and a game-winning hit and a single when your left hip is sitting out and you're driving the other way. In golf, if you're a little bit off, you're behind a tree, you're in the thick rough, you're in a sand trap, and it's just one of those things I've learned, probably the biggest transition is the difference is you can't get away with anything. The golf gods will come and get you in a heartbeat. You know, in retrospect, it is alike because it's muscle memory. When you do a swing, you're out there hitting golf balls it's just like hitting a baseball. You have to get your muscles used to the same swing day-in and day-out and that's what I usually do.

MARK McGWIRE: People have asked me that. You know, ten years is a long time. I don't know what I'm going to be doing in ten years, neither do you. If I'm still playing golf, yeah, I'd take a shot at, why not. I think that would be exciting. But it's a long ways away. I look at myself as a Minor League player right now in the golf. I'm just learning the ropes and learning, getting back into competition again and you know golf can be very, very rewarding but then it can be very, very cruel. It's one of those things that I'm learning again and it's just fun to play.

MARK McGWIRE: Yeah. (Laughing). Yeah, I think so.

MARK McGWIRE: Well, against the competition, we did a little interviews the night before and they were asking me, you know, what's my weakness in the game. I can't really say that I have a weakness. There's areas that I have to work on but there's not a part of the game that I'm really weak at. You know, being in the ADT Skills Challenge, we had three shots and they take your best shot. So it's not a -- I just went out there and, you know, I don't know, Peter kept it fun. I was laughing all day. I just had a great time and I just kept on battling. I had some really good chip shots. I think I remember taking the sandshot and my first two sandshots were at the hole and I remember hearing Paul Azinger say, "Mark, play the break, play the break." And it sort of hit me like, yeah, I should be playing the break. So I hit the sandshot and I think it went about a foot away. And I remember Greg Norman looking over at me and he was sort of puzzled and he says, "Well, what's your handicap"? I said, "Well, I'm a zero." He goes, "Oh." I don't know if he knew anything about me playing a lot of golf or not, but it's just one of those things that I knew that, you know, I'm pretty good at the short game and I just had to do the right shot at the right time and it worked out well.

PETER JACOBSEN: Actually, Mark what he just said, Greg looked at Mark and said, "Oh, how big is your yacht?" Mark watered it down a little bit. (Laughter.)

PETER JACOBSEN: Well, I turned 50 March 4 next year and I'll play obviously on the Tour up to that point. I'm going to play my first event I'm eligible for I believe is the SBC Classic in Valencia, California and I'm going to play there. And the rest of the year is going to be determined by how well I play on the PGA TOUR. Nothing would be more exciting than making the Ryder Cup team again. I don't know where I am on the points list, but if I happen to play well and maybe sneak into the Top-10 a few times and possibly win again, I know that pops me up there on the Ryder Cup point list. I know Jay Haas is going to be -- he's already turned 50. I think Jay turned 50 a couple of weeks ago. He's going to play the PGA TOUR full-time in hopes of making the Ryder Cup team. Jay has been on two of them, I've been on two of them, and I think the older I get and the further away from great competitive weeks as I get, you tend to really appreciate how fascinating it is and how much fun it is to be in competition with players in their prime. I know that when I was competing against Norman and Azinger and Payne Stewart and Tom Watson and Tom Kite down the stretch, there's no times like that. It's the best. So I know I can't compete on a daily, weekly basis with Tiger, Mickelson and Ernie Els, but the thought of maybe jumping in there and playing a few tournaments with them and maybe competing with them a few times is still appeals to me. I've got no visions of grandeur. I think in 2004, I'll ease into it. 2005, I'll probably play a little bit more. And then probably 2006, on through I'll probably be full-time Champions Tour.

MARK McGWIRE: We don't know. Our first child, Max, who is 14 months, we didn't find out, and we're not going to find out now. It's a hard thing to do, especially with all of the technology today. But we've stuck through it, so we're going to be surprised on that day.

PETER JACOBSEN: No.

PETER JACOBSEN: No, we did not do it at the event. We just teed it up and went. Actually Mark McGwire did the clinic. He showed us all how to do it. I just want to say one last thing, the ADT Skills Challenge is probably the most important event that's a non-Tour event that we do all year. You probably wonder why. The reason is, you highlight and showcase great golf. You've got players hitting three shots and having Mark McGwire as a part of it was just fantastic, and the fact that he won was even greater than fantastic. But more importantly, we're all miked. You have a chance to see that Colin Montgomerie is a very interesting, funny and engaging young man. He's portrayed in the media as being kind of a sullen cry baby. He is anything but that. And that comes through in the ADT Skills Challenge. You get a peak into a personality of Rich Beem or Paul Azinger and Mark McGwire. So I think that this event is very, very important for golf. Because when you watch the Skins Game, these players forget that there's a microphone on their lapel for a reason; they are supposed to talk. Everyone knows golfers can hit great shots, but what really, the fans of sports really want to get a peak into is your personality, and this event brings that out like no other.