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WGC ACCENTURE MATCH PLAY CHAMPIONSHIP MEDIA CONFERENCEJanuary 8, 2014Matt KucharLAURA NEAL: We would like to welcome Matt Kuchar today, the 2013 Accenture Match Play champion. Joining us from Hawaii from the Sony Open. Like to welcome him. He will be defending his title shear shortly in the next couple weeks in Tucson. Matt, if you would open up by talking a little bit about the win last year, kind of that was a crazy week with the weather, but obviously coming out on top set you up for a pretty remarkable 2013. Give us your comments on coming back to defend your title. MATT KUCHAR: I got to say, starting off last week at Kapalua and being announced as the World Golf Championship Accenture champion was a pretty cool way to start my year. Last year's victory was fantastic. Match play is such a fun, unique format. I love Tucson and Dove Mountain year after year. My wife gets asked time after time what her favorite event of the year is and she never has a really good answer, but every year we're out at Accenture at Dove Mountain Resort, she always says that that's her favorite. I think coming from a tennis background, that match play format she loves, the people up there at the Ritz Carlton take such good care of us. It's a special place. And I've had some pretty good success and last year certainly was my best success. It's an awesome feeling to be the last man standing at a match play event. You just, you feel like you conquered the field, you feel like you've gone the whole week without losing. It really is a great feeling. I'm still amazed at what Hunter Mahan did a couple years in a row now, having won I think 11 matches in a row is just a spectacular feat. I look ahead to my defense and think that, golly, to try to go that deep in the field again would be an incredible feat. I'm certainly ready, my game is in good form and I'm looking forward to getting back to Dove Mountain and the Accenture Match Play. LAURA NEAL: Thank you. We'll open it up for questions. Q. You said it's a fun format to play match play. Could you expand a little bit on your strategies about match play and why you like it so much? MATT KUCHAR: My strategy doesn't really change much from stroke play. It's rare that the occasion pops up where I deviate from how I would play a stroke play event. And I can't tell you that it's the right or wrong way to go about it, as far as a strategy goes, but I look at every situation and if there's an appropriate shot for that situation, I take it. I think you always have to count your opponent in the hole. Even if he's out in the desert. If you think that you can play it safe now and that par is going to be fine or maybe even bogey might win a hole, I think you're making a bad assumption there. I think you got to try to hit the best shot for the situation, just like you would in stroke play. There are pins that aren't ever worth going for. You may occasionally have to change a strategy or maybe be more aggressive if you know that the opponent is in with a tap in birdie, but for the most part my strategy stays the same. I'm very much playing a game where I play to my strengths. I know there are some pins that I'm not going to fire at and I think that there's a best shot for each situation. And it may be a 20‑footer, but that's the way I play. The same way I play stroke play. Q. Going into this year, 12 of the last 15 Majors have been won by first time Major winners. We had three last year. And your name keeps popping up when people are talking about who can be the next first time Major winner. Is that on your mind and will it have any affect on how you schedule your year, how you will go about your practice when you go close to a Major Championship? MATT KUCHAR: Yeah, I certainly am happy to be part of that conversation. I feel like my game's at a point where I definitely can be a guy that can win a Major Championship. I don't think I'll change my schedule much. I feel like I'm pretty pleased with the way my schedule is working out as far as the tournaments are going. But I feel like I've made strides in my game, I feel like I'm steady enough, I'm consistent enough, I feel like I've got good tools to win a Major. I don't know that much about this year's rotation, the new redesign at Pinehurst, I don't know how that really, what that course will play like now. I think that the British is Royal Liverpool, I don't know anything about Royal Liverpool. And I forget where the PGA is ‑‑ it's at Valhalla, I've never been to Valhalla. So I really have no idea how those courses fit my game. But that being said, I feel like I've got a game that has proven itself to be able to play some good golf on those courses. So I'm looking forward to the Majors this year, looking forward to having a chance to win and hopefully put my name on one of those. If you get a chance to mark your name down in history, I mean winning a Major Championship, it goes down in the history books forever. It's one of the great events and that's what we all aspire to. I try to approach all the events, all the PGA TOUR events that I play all year, I try to treat just as big. I try to come out to this week's Sony Open and I come out here not to just kind of get warmed up, I come out here to win this event. And I feel like that mentality should help with going into a Major Championship, just having that sort of comfort level. And I think that the more winning you can do, it just continues to breed more winning. So I try to play my best and hopefully win as many events as I can, in hopes that winning breeds more winning. Q. I wanted to just gauge your feeling about the Match Play coming up. There's been talk about a number of high profile players that might be missing it. Names that have been thrown out there that could skip it, Justin Rose, Rory's kind of up in the air, Adam Scott, Phil Mickelson hasn't played in a while, just wonder, over the years, what your impression is of the event and why maybe some of the bigger name guys are skipping the tournament. We have obviously seen snow there in the past, but I wonder what other factors you might think guys could be skipping the tournament for. MATT KUCHAR: I don't have a great answer to why guys skip it. I think that it's such a fun, unique event. We play a 72 hole stroke play event every week of the year, I think it's great to mix it up and have some different events. I really wish that the Stableford event that we had at Reno was, I wish it was a regular field event and not an opposite field event. I think that would be a lot of fun to play in. I miss that event. We used to have it at Castle Pines as a regular event and then of course it got moved. But I always liked doing something different. I can't speak for why any of the other guys choose to skip it. It could be just a scheduling thing, it could be trying to prepare the best for the Masters coming up. Those are all hypothetical guesses. But I really don't know, without talking to those guys. Q. Follow‑up on that, does it matter to you personally at all when you're playing a tournament on who is going to be there, who is not going to be there? MATT KUCHAR: No. No. Not at all. Q. And some guys always say they want to play against the best competition, but for you it's a tournament that fits your schedule and you're going to stick with it, is that what you're saying? MATT KUCHAR: Yeah, yeah. You hope to get the strongest fields every time, but I come out to Kapalua to win the tournament it might not have the toughest field and yet I think it's an awesome event. I'm certainly not basing my schedule based on strength of field. Q. You were talking about the strides in your game and how you have become a lot more steady and consistent, the tools that you have more for a Major. And when you look at Augusta now, how does that course fit your game and you've had success recently there, how does the attributes of your game and the way the course is set up, explain how those things come together and the success that you've tasted thus far? MATT KUCHAR: You're referring to Dove Mountain? The Match Play course? Q. No, I'm referring to Augusta National. You talked about how you you've been consistent and how do you explain how your game plays well at Augusta, with your recent finishes? MATT KUCHAR: I think that I've made improvements with long irons, which has been a big help. I think that you hit so many now 200 yard approach shots that you got to be hitting a long iron there. And what you got to do is you got to be able to hit it high with some spin. And that's a thing that required some improvement in my swing, some improvement in my technique to be better with the 4‑irons, 5‑irons, that type of club, into a green. But I think that course management is a huge piece of the pie around Augusta National. Knowing pretty much where you can miss it. There are places where you can get up‑and‑down and there are places where you feel like you stand a good chance of saving par if you are going to miss a green or even to get up‑and‑down for birdie around some of the par‑5s. I think that there's some of those places where you just, you just kind of try to be aggressive, but on the par‑5s, when you miss the greens, there are certain places where you can't get up‑and‑down from. 2 as an example, if you go for it, most of the time missing left is just no good, you kind of bail out, missing right, but there's the occasional, you know, you may think that a left bunker is a good place to get up‑and‑down from. So there's kind of some of those learning things that go on around there. I think my short game's an advantage, I think I have a pretty steady consistent, creative short game that's worked really well around there. Q. As a follow‑up, how special is the Masters to you as a whole? MATT KUCHAR: The Masters is really special. From my career at Georgia Tech, having won the U.S. Amateur as a freshman, having got to play the golf course as a freshman in college and having all the teammates of mine snooping around the clubhouse and finding the Crow's Nest and thinking how cool it would be to one day possibly stay up there and play in the tournament. And the following year to actually be staying up there, staying in the Crow's Nest, being the defending U.S. Amateur champion, the Bobby Jones Georgia Tech ties.  It's really special. I grew up in Florida, but I feel like I spent pretty most of my life in Georgia and feel like a Georgia native. And that tournament really is special to me. Q. It's about 70 degrees down here in Arizona right now. How much better would that weather be for you for the tournament this year? MATT KUCHAR: Oh, man we will keep our fingers crossed. Q. What was it like playing in the weather like that last year and do you enjoy playing in those kind of conditions? MATT KUCHAR:  I think that we're all okay playing in different conditions. I mean, it's funny, the game of golf, you just feel like if you haven't had bad weather conditions you just need to schedule a PGA TOUR event for your city and you'll get some funny weather. Last year was quite a strange year on the PGA TOUR for crazy weather. We get pretty spoiled for the most part, but the TOUR does chase really good weather, we kind of chase the sunshine through Hawaii and the West Coast Swing and the Florida swing and generally have it down fairly well with catching good weather. So when the weather turns bad, I think we have gotten enough of it, but I think my mentality may serve me pretty well in bad weather that I'm okay, I'm not dreading it, I think some guys think that it's miserable, it's bad luck. For me it's just a chance to play in some unique, different circumstances. Certainly snow is different for me, being a boy that grew up in central Florida, I didn't see much of snow. I remember going up to Georgia Tech as a freshman and doing some qualifying tournaments for the team qualifications and just having some awful weather in Atlanta. And I was thinking, man, this is not at all what I'm used to. But I learned to deal with it. I think last year I had the cart gloves with the hand warmers in it, figured out the best way around the course and the best way to stay warm and did a pretty good job at managing. Q. The last two years you've gone up against Hunter and had some pretty huge battles with him. How cool is it going up against him and having a third time in a row going for that title together? MATT KUCHAR: I know. Pretty amazing. How impressive is what he did in back to back years? I mean his winning percentage is pretty amazing. And then to have won 11 straight matches, that's incredible. I know that I think people think of he and I are probably similar, when we go up against each other you're going to see some consistent golf. You're not going to get a whole lot of easy holes out of us, Hunter and I aren't going to give away holes. That's such a key in match play is you don't want those freebies where you give a guy a hole by making a silly mistake or hitting one in the desert, taking a double bogey and just giving a guy a hole. You try to avoid that and I think Hunter and I just avoid giving away holes pretty well. Q. Jordan Spieth seemed to pick up where he left off. Finished second at Kapalua I think he has a win and four seconds, he hasn't even played a full year on the PGA TOUR, he's 20 years old, I just wanted to get your take on him and what you see in his game, what's his ceiling? MATT KUCHAR: I played with him on the round three at Kapalua and just was really impressed. I didn't realize how long he hit it. They showed a stat, I was in the locker room later that day and they were doing some replace and they put up a stat who is the longest driver during the week at Kapalua, and it was Dustin Johnson was No. 1, just over 300 yards, but then at number three or four was Jordan Spieth at 292. I just, I mean I certainly knew he was hitting it a lot further than me that day, I didn't know that he was just averaging as one of the longest. I mean he was averaging, heck, longer than Gary Woodland, which I think Gary is one of the longest guys on the PGA TOUR. So there's a lot of ‑‑ but looking again at Kapalua, that's a place that takes some time to figure out, kind of like Augusta National, and places to miss it, it has so much slope and undulation around there, it really, I think, takes some time to understand that golf course. Well, he got it straight away. He played great golf and nearly won the thing. It's impressive. That ceiling is awfully high. There's a lot of talent, a lot of confidence, certainly with the way he could drive it and the way he putted, that's a pretty good combination. Q. You talked a little bit before about how you can be successful playing Augusta National, you probably couldn't find a course that would be much different between Augusta National and the golf club at Dove Mountain, what do you have to do to be successful at the course here and try to win the match play again? MATT KUCHAR: It's funny, you got some similar green characteristics, just a lot of movement, a lot of slope, so approach shots are really key. I think that driving, you got some pretty generous fairways, if you miss in the desert it's no good, but for the most part you got pretty generous fairways to hit at Dove Mountain. It's the approach shots that are show critical. It's all the slopes and undulation in the greens. I see some characteristics to what we would see at Augusta and that it's important to really be in control, really be able to control your approach shots, whether it's with shape or with spin, it's kind of the key part around playing well at Dove Mountain. And then the putting, I think you just have to really be creative and really be able to see a lot of things that go along with speed. I think speed's so critical, with so much slope, at figuring out the amount of break, but I think that getting the speed of the putts down, with that much break, is such a critical ingredient. And again, not that you know similar to what we have to do at Augusta National. LAURA NEAL: We know you have a busy schedule and have to go play in the pro‑am and we appreciate your time. Best of luck this week and we'll see you in a few weeks in the desert. MATT KUCHAR: Wonderful. Thank you guys for everything. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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