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U.S. SENIOR OPEN CHAMPIONSHIPJuly 10, 2014Scott DunlapEDMOND, OKLAHOMA Q. What was the reason for the good play? Was it more one part of the game than the other? SCOTT DUNLAP: Chalk it up to preparation. Got the perfect amount of fatigue, jet lag, and the fact I didn't play one practice hole this week. Why wouldn't I have played well? (Laughter.) Q. Tell us the real story about that. SCOTT DUNLAP: Well, I went and did the British Open qualifying last Tuesday and then was tooling around Ireland with my buddies for the rest of the week. Back on Monday. Here Tuesday at 10:00-something, planning to play hopefully nine Tuesday afternoon, nine Wednesday. I'm a soccer fan. I wanted to be in front of the TV watching the World Cup each of those days. Got the tee sheet. I played at noon, so can play at like 1:30. Well, I don't want to do that. Okay. I'll play 18 tomorrow. What do you have then? 1:10. Well, I guess I'm not going to get to see the second game. Wake up on Wednesday, and those tee times are delayed two hours and 40 minutes. I'm not going to wait till 3:40. I just grabbed my putter and walked around. I had the course record here for a day back in 1984 until Verplank beat it the next day in the U.S. Amateur. Not that I remembered the golf course exactly, but like good, solid Pete Dye golf courses, it's tough but right there in front of you. It's not something tricky. It's just hard. Q. But being a tested competitor, probably walking the golf course was better use of your time? SCOTT DUNLAP: Listen, I have won a Nationwide event on a course I never seen before. Walked out on Wednesday. I'm of the opinion the stuff that goes on before Thursday before the gun goes off counts for about that much. We have all hit it a million times. If your game is in order, you go and shoot a score. If it's not, all the local knowledge and putting and chipping around the greens on Tuesday isn't going to do you any good whatsoever. Q. Given that, when you got up this morning, did you feel like you were going to play well? SCOTT DUNLAP: Yeah. Yeah, it started to feel pretty good. I like it when it's testing, you know. You know you'll probably have a couple good chances. If you're hitting the ball solidly, you'll hit it to 30 feet and two-putt when maybe some of the other guys are getting blown around a bit. I get a little bit happy when I see the flags like that, but it's not a guarantee of success. But some of my previous successes have been in conditions that resemble this, so I took it and ran with it. Q. Pretty breezy out here today to just have the one bogey. What do you attribute that to? SCOTT DUNLAP: Good off the tee. I don't remember trying to gauge too many flyers, so I must have been playing out of the fairway. I missed the par-5 fairway over there, hacked it out of the right rough, chip it out. If you don't put it in the fairway, things can happen. Without going back over it, I couldn't have missed more than two or three, I don't think, if that, yeah. I think I might have missed maybe just the one. Certainly not any more than two. Q. Obviously you had three birdies, but was there an up-and-down or a situation that kind of kept the round going? SCOTT DUNLAP: Well, I did miss the first fairway and got up and down in the bunker, but then I hit it to give on the next hole. Then a nice up-and-down the next hole and I was into the round. There's nothing better than -- like I said, the best way to start a round is to get up and down for par. The next-best way, just go ahead and make the bogey and get it over with. So, you know, you test yourself early. But I hit a good shot like that on the next hole. I didn't have to mark it. So I wasn't sweating it too -- well, like I said, I was tested early and overcame that hurdle. That's always nice. But it was a lot of fairways and a lot of greens, reasonably unstressful if you can call playing in a USGA event on a tough golf course with the wind blowing 20 not stressful. Q. Given that you think the preparation time before the event starts has little effect on you, what do you do during competition time to tinker with that? Do you have the same approach? SCOTT DUNLAP: You know, I would think all of us at this stage, 50-some-odd years old, we might have some idea what our shortcomings are, what our tendencies are. If you have those under control rather than the other way around where they are a bit of a thorn in your side, you play golf, you shoot a score. It's not a secret, you know. I mean, when you're in your 20s, you can kind of fool yourself, be excited about things and maybe they aren't that good. When you're in your 50s, you know what you got. That can be a real bummer sometimes when you know you just don't have it and you just want to retire to the couch. But when you do, it's as exciting and fun as it ever was or is. But days like today when the balls, you seem like you've got it under control and good testing conditions, it's a lot of fun. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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