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PGA TOUR MEDIA CONFERENCEJanuary 13, 2009Geoff OgilvyDOUG MILNE: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Doug Milne, communications manager with the PGA TOUR. I'm here today with Geoff Ogilvy, winner of the 2009 Mercedes-Benz Championship. Geoff, quite a convincing victory on your part. How about just a couple of comments as we open up on how kind of things have changed for you as you're off and running in 2009. GEOFF OGILVY: Yeah, I mean, what do I say? That's the perfect way to start my TOUR season, to go out and win the first event of the year. Obviously, you can't start a TOUR year any better than that. I've made the perfect start possible. The way I did it, too. I've never won a golf tournament by a long way. To kind of start with a big lead, have it go away, really finish off on the back nine was a really satisfying way to win. You get a big win, good confidence, just start the year really well. I'm really happy. DOUG MILNE: One of the things you mentioned was that you more or less said you felt more comfortable with a one-shot lead as opposed to a six-shot lead. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? GEOFF OGILVY: Overnight, waking up in the morning, I felt really comfortable with everything with a six-shot lead. Wasn't so bad. When I bogeyed the first two holes, I felt a little bit uncomfortable, I guess. Wasn't an ideal start. Just kind of made me feel a little bit uncomfortable about it. Went all the way down to a one-shot lead. Walking down to the ninth fairway, when I saw the leaderboard, I knew my lead had gone, but I didn't know how much. When I saw it on the 9th hole, down to one shot, it snapped me back to reality, showed me this is a real golf tournament now, you go to get stuck in, play proper golf. From then on I felt much better. DOUG MILNE: At this time we'll open it up for questions for Geoff. Q. Geoff, you got a major, the Mercedes-Benz, two World Golf Championship titles, the Australian PGA, is there an inner tuning fork in your head on these big events that's enabling you to play as well as you do? GEOFF OGILVY: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, people have asked me that. I'm not really sure actually. I think maybe I enjoy the challenge of the bigger tournaments - for sure especially on the tougher golf courses. I seem to enjoy the challenge and the big fields, I guess. I don't know. I think I just enjoy them more. I'm not saying that I don't enjoy any golf tournament, but I think there's something that really piques my interest a bit more in the bigger tournaments. I just go that extra, I don't know, level of commitment or something in the bigger tournaments. I'm not really sure. I don't want to analyze it too much because it's kind of like, How do you putt like that, Geoff? If you start thinking about them, you're going to miss them. I don't want to analyze them too much. I think I just probably apply myself a little better, get a little more enjoyment out of the bigger tournaments. That's the only thing I can think of. I can't think of anything else. Q. Where does the Australian PGA rank in your list of accomplishments so far? How good a feeling was that? GEOFF OGILVY: That was a pretty nice feeling. That was the first professional tournament I won in Australia. That was nice. There's always some questions that come from the press down there. When we arrive down there, any of us who have played decently overseas and not won in Australia, there are always questions there. That's a nice one to kind of not get the monkey off the back, but to get mission accomplished a little bit in that way. The Australian PGA, that's right up there because it's one of our oldest tournaments. It's a hundred years old. It's a trophy that has incredible names on it. It's been around for a long time. Historically it will go down as one of the bigger tournaments I've won just because I think of how old the tournament is. Q. I'm going to throw a stat at you. The last eight winners at Kapalua, only three of them have gone on to win one more event, and none have won a major, going back to Tiger in 2000. Now that you've won there, I'm wondering if you can put a finger on whether it's a sense of complacency? A coincidence? How come the guys who start the year pretty well don't go on and win more events during the year? GEOFF OGILVY: I don't know. Hopefully that's not true with me. Hopefully I can change the trend. But I don't know if it would be complacency or not. I don't know. The golf you play here is so different from the rest of the year. That's probably not it. We're all good at adapting. I don't know. It's probably just a coincidence. Might be a bit of complacency. When you get to the top of the Money List after one week, you get all excited, maybe you take the rest of the year for granted. Stuart would have been three of those years. He wouldn't have done that. Ernie wouldn't have done that. Vijay definitely wouldn't have done that. Yeah, I don't know. It's probably just a coincidence. Hopefully I can change the trend so the coincidences go away. Q. I'm wondering if you felt that by winning the Australian PGA, you mentioned it was a little bit of a mission accomplished, did that provide much of a springboard for you to bring into the PGA TOUR season? GEOFF OGILVY: Yeah, I think for sure, 'cause usually the last four or five years, I've kind of finished the main part of the season in the U.S. and kind of gone back to Australia and played quite poorly. I kind of treated it a bit like an off-season. This year I actually had quite a bit of time off between the Australian tournament, between the FedExCup and the Australian tournaments. I felt really ready to go. I set about trying to play well in them. I only finished about three weeks ago or four weeks ago now. I set about playing really well in both of the tournaments I played down there. I did play really well. That was a really, really nice way to spend Christmas. Made me really look forward to getting to Kapalua, because I played quite well. So, yeah, I don't know about a springboard, but it was definitely a big confidence booster for sure. Q. Going back to the big event thing, I know you don't want to analyze it too much, but have you ever thought what you can do to treat the other events like you do a big event and get into the mix in those events, as well? GEOFF OGILVY: I have, to be honest. I'm not sure what it is. It's obviously something between the ears because your physical game doesn't change when you turn up to a big tournament. I think about it all the time. It's a work in progress. Obviously golf's a really hard game. It's a mystery. It's very hard to work out. Hopefully I'll get there slowly. I'll work it out. I'd love to play well every week. The best players in the world, they play well every week. They contend every week. I'd really love to become one of those players. I'm sure I'll work it out. I'm a slow learner. I'll get there slowly, but I'll get there (laughter). Q. In regards to the feeling on winning on the PGA TOUR, being consistent, would you rather win two times a year and have an up-and-down year or finish in the top 10 every year without winning? How do you measure your success? GEOFF OGILVY: I measure it both ways actually. Obviously winning is what we're here to do. If you gave me a choice of those two, I'd take the two wins and the rest up and down for sure. I've had a few six and seven top-10 years. They're very satisfying years because you sit down at the end of the year and say, I was there quite a lot of times. If you're having top 10s, you've been with a shout to win tournaments quite a lot of times. I measure myself both ways. You'd love to do both obviously. But if you gave me the choice, it would be the wins for sure. Q. I know you're very interested in golf course architecture. I saw a quote recently where you mentioned that after Florida, a lot of courses sort of feel the same for the next several weeks. What's your take on how important it is or what it would take for a wider variety of venues to be played on the TOUR? GEOFF OGILVY: It wasn't really a comment about the architecture of the course we play; it was more about the setup we play. The last few years we've got stuck in this narrow fairway, long rough kind of setup that's really quite similar every week we play, I think. Kapalua is the exact opposite of that: wide fairways, rough is really not in play, big greens. Everything is just different about Kapalua than we play a lot of the year. I just think a bit more variation in the setup. The TOUR, there was a big player meeting at Charlotte last year where the players and the TOUR got back on the same page about how we think we should set our golf courses up. Maybe we've got a bit off track trying to set them up as extremely narrow, as extremely hard as we can recently, kind of chasing the U.S. Open model, can we add a bit more interest back into our courses? Over the next few years, the TOUR is already talking about a bit more interest in the setup, maybe a little bit less rough. They've already done it at Sawgrass by cutting the rough down and changing the course. I think we're on the right track. I think for a while we got stuck in the narrow fairway, long rough kind of golf course. I think, to be honest with you, there's definitely a time and place for it, but every week it kind of gets boring. That was my point. It's more of a setup thing than an architecture thing. Q. The AT&T Pebble Beach is coming up. I see you've only played that once back in '01. Is that the courses? The weather always is kind of iffy and long rounds. Why have you skipped that and if there's anything that would bring you back to that? GEOFF OGILVY: It's just a combination of things that hurt me there. I live in Scottsdale, so I play quite a lot of West Coast tournaments. I can drive to most of them. That's the one I can't drive to. The weather is a bit iffy. The year I played it was very cold and very rainy and I didn't enjoy the weather to much. I love the golf course. Ironically I'm all about good golf courses, and they're probably some of the best golf courses anywhere in the world. But it's not the ProAm aspect of it. It's the cold weather. I didn't come off feeling too good about my putting after the week I played there. I'll definitely be back there for sure. At the moment, it's been hard to fit it into the schedule. I'd love to go back, but we'll have to fit it in. Q. Tim Finchem is planning to play in this year's AT&T ProAm. Any advice for him? GEOFF OGILVY: No, I don't know. Just relax and don't take it too seriously. I think people who enjoy the ProAm formats the best are the ones that just go out and enjoy it. Q. You just mentioned diversity of setups or courses. Is that the main reason why you chose to be a member of the European Tour? GEOFF OGILVY: That's definitely a reason. I'd lie if I said money wasn't a reason. There's a lot of money to play for now towards the end of the year. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but I'm saying that's one of the factors. More diversity. My schedule had kind of got very similar every year, just going to the same cities, playing the same tournaments. I wanted to add a little bit more of a dimension to my schedule, a bit more cosmopolitan, and play a few more international tournaments, which I think is really good for your game and really good for golf. I'm really interested to see how this whole European Tour is going to step up with its Race to Dubai and I really wanted to be involved. Just a lot of reasons, yeah. But definitely part of the reason for sure is to add a bit more variety to the golf courses I play and variety to the places I play in. Q. At this point of the season, how big is The Presidents Cup on your radar? Any key you see to get the internationals past the Americans? GEOFF OGILVY: Firstly, The Presidents Cup, yeah, it's rights there on the radar. Pretty excited about it. You kind of play The Presidents Cup and then you really enjoy it, then you kind of put it in the back of your mind. When you watch the Ryder Cup the year before, it gets you all fired up about the team thing. That was such a fun Ryder Cup to watch, it got me fired up about The Presidents Cup. It's going to be fun that Greg is going to be captain. He's still pretty excited about it. We're getting notes all the time about plans, stuff he's thinking about for the event. He's right into the tournament already. He's pretty excited about it. So it's going to be fun. We're going to all sort of have some lead-up from the British Open all the way up to The Presidents Cup. He's going to get right into it. Hopefully that helps with us winning. Apart from that, I don't know what we didn't do right last time. We just got hammered last time. I don't know. Normally the U.S. has been losing the Ryder Cup and winning The Presidents Cup. Now the U.S. had such a good Ryder Cup, maybe The Presidents Cup trend will flip around. Q. Mike Weir and Stephen Ames, how might they help the task? GEOFF OGILVY: Weirzy was one of our best last time in Montréal, for sure. He obviously beat Tiger on Sunday, which is a big deal at that time. That was a really fun day, especially for Weirzy. They're both great guys in the team room. I haven't been on the team with Stephen Ames. He's a fun guy, always good for a laugh. He's played really well in some really big tournaments. He'll be able to handle the stress. Weirzy obviously can handle the pressure. They'd both be a great addition to the team. Q. A couple months back in an interview you described an incident that happened sounds like a few years ago about you had steel shafts in your driver and apparently toward the end of the round you had bent the driver enough to where you had to disqualify yourself. Does that sound familiar? GEOFF OGILVY: I remember that. Q. Do you remember when that was, what tournament? Can you walk through what happened again. GEOFF OGILVY: It was the Byron Nelson. I'm sure you can look back at the history to see what year I was disqualified from the Byron Nelson. It was probably '02-ish, maybe '03. I had a steel shaft in my driver. That was a while ago because I haven't been to the Nelson for a while. I definitely have not been disqualified the last two or three times I played there. It was probably 2002 or 2003. I'm sure the records show when I got DQ'ed from there. I'm sure I must have firmly lent my driver against my bag or something. There was no throw or smash of the club or anything. I must have done something to do something to damage it. Damage that was unnoticeable. I didn't do anything like you would think there was any damage to the golf club. I remember at the time I couldn't even remember what I did. I might not have even done it that day, but it happened. Gradually I must have had a kink in the shaft or a bend in it because by about, I don't know, the middle of the round, the club was markedly bent. The act of hitting the shot was bending it more and more. All of a sudden I looked down at one hole, That's not right. If you use a club that has changed, you get DQ'ed. That's the way it is. It was a weird one. Q. Last year it looks like you were second in approaches from about 50 to 75 yards out. Do you have any kind of tips or a good practice for amateurs that would help them stick a green with a wedge from that kind of distance? GEOFF OGILVY: Yeah, that's probably the part of the game I practice the most. At the back of the range where I practice in Scottsdale, they have probably seven or eight target greens between 30 and a hundred yards. I spend quite a lot of time just alternating, not hitting too many in a row to each one, but one to a short one, one to a long one. I kind of vary it around. I spend quite a lot of time hitting balls to those little targets. You can't replicate that everywhere, but you can definitely find four or five different distance targets to hit to, even if it's just a sprinkler head you can see 40 yards away, a brown patch of grass, just vary the distances all the time is pretty much all I do. There's no real science behind it. I don't get scientific. Mickelson lays out towels out every five meters for 120 yards. He gets like the Dave Pelz method, really scientific behind it. I just kind of have five or six different distances and just vary the distances. I just do that a lot. Every time I practice, every time I hit balls, I'll do that for half an hour, have been doing for it five or six years. Gradually it's really been good. Q. Is that kind of to replicate, because you don't have the same kind of shot during a round every time? GEOFF OGILVY: Yeah, for sure. It gets quite easy to land your ball at the 50-yard flag if you do it 50 in a row. If you do one, you go back to 30, then back to 80, it's more like golf, definitely. Q. I'm wondering if you and other TOUR players have conversations over dinner, in the locker room, on the range about the economy, the worldwide and that in the U.S.? Do you have a sense of how it's affecting golf, how it might affect the TOUR in the future? Do you think the TOUR is positioning itself, as the commissioner says it is, to deal with any possible downturns or further downturns? GEOFF OGILVY: Firstly, we all talk about it. I'm sure it's no different from where all you guys work. Everybody has a theory on the economy, how to fix it. So everybody talks about it. I don't think any of us really have much of an idea about what's actually going to happen relative to golf. I think we know we're quite safe in the short-term. This year seems to look pretty good for us. It's obviously going to change a bit with such a struggle in the car markets, financial markets. A lot of our sponsorship comes from car companies and financial stuff. At this point in the really short-term it seems like it's going to go well. I wouldn't have the faintest idea about what we should do. But that's why we have someone as experienced and as good as Tim to work it out for us. I think he's probably got a pretty good handle on it. I'm sure we'll come out as good as we possibly could come out of it under the circumstances because there's a lot smarter people than us golfers working it out. So hopefully it works out. I'm sure it will. Q. Do you think the strength of this sport, PGA TOUR, professional golf on a worldwide basis, do you think the strength of this sport is the image of its athletes? There are very rarely controversial situations, guys aren't getting arrested, in trouble with the law. Do you think the image of this sport and its athletes are your strength right now in dealing with whether people want to be involved from a title sponsorship standpoint or other corporate marketing standpoints? GEOFF OGILVY: Yeah, I think one of our biggest selling points for the corporate world is that we are relatively controversy-free. We don't generally have too many golfers getting into trouble like some other athletes in other sports do. We're pretty squeaky clean like that. It's been like that for a long time. It doesn't really seem like it's going to change. That's just the way golf is. That's really a great selling point for us. Too, I think so many people love playing golf in the corporate world, have a lot of business meetings on the golf course, a lot of the world spends a lot of time on the golf course. It's a very popular sport to everybody. I think one of golf's appeals is that people like to see what they do every weekend, they like to see that done well. I think that's different from a lot of other sports, because not everybody goes home and plays football every night. I think this appeals from a couple different levels. But our clean image is definitely a big selling point. Q. On The Presidents Cup, it's in San Francisco. I see you didn't play in the American Express Championship in '05. Have you ever played Harding? Do you know anything about it? Much chatter among yourself and other potential Presidents Cup members? GEOFF OGILVY: I didn't play Harding, no. Everyone came back from the American Express pretty excited about the course. I think they really enjoyed it. Yeah, it's also a great place. I think everybody who's potentially involved with The Presidents Cup is pretty excited about getting there. The TOUR doesn't go to San Francisco enough. There's so much good golf in San Francisco, I think it's pretty exciting that we're going there. DOUG MILNE: I'd like to thank everybody for calling in. I'd like to thank Geoff Ogilvy for his time and our congratulations. GEOFF OGILVY: Thank you. End of FastScripts |
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