SENIOR PGA CHAMPIONSHIP

June 7, 2002

Wayne Levi

WAYNE LEVI: I played fairly well, really. Early on I played a couple of bad shots early there, on No. 3 and 4. The second shot on -- well, the tee shot on No. 3, the second shot on No. 4, and then a poor chip on No.5. That stretch right in there was a little shaky, but after that I started to settle down a little bit more and started hitting the ball quite well. I putted a little bit better today than I did the day before. But I played better the day before, the first day. There's a lot of tough holes out there. You have to keep at it. And once in a while you're going to get in that high rough and you have to hack it out of there and just do the best you can from there.

WAYNE LEVI: The second hole, I drove into that right bunker off the tee again. It's hard for me to hook that ball around that dog leg, kind of. I laid it up. I hit a good wedge shot beyond the pin, spun it back to about 3-feet and made birdie there. The 4th hole, like I said, I drove it perfect there and I hit a poor iron into the right trap, right front trap. It was a long trap shot there and I blasted it out there about 12 feet short, hit a really good putt. It didn't go in, so I made bogey. The next hole, I hit a good shot with a 4-iron right at the flag, and it landed six inches short of coming out of the rough, just over the trap, and it stayed there. I don't know how it stayed there. I hit a poor chip about 6 feet short, missed it, so a bogey there. No. 7, par-3, there I hit a 4-iron, hit it in there about six, seven feet left of the hole, made that one for a birdie. No. 9, I hit a good drive there, I hit a 7-iron about, I would say, 18 feet or so to the right of the hole, made that one for birdie. No. 12, Par 3, hit a good 6-iron there right even with the hole about 15 feet, made that one for a birdie. And then I came all the way -- No. 14, hit a good drive there, put it in the middle of the fairway, hit a 5-iron just right of the pin, probably 20 feet, 22 feet, something like that. Made that one for a birdie. The next hole, the Par 3, I hit a 4-iron to the right, to the right trap. Hit a poor bunker shot. The ball was kind of sitting way up high and it was on the upslope and I got under it too much and left it in the fringe. Chipped it down four feet and made that for a bogey. 16, the Par 5, I drove it perfect, just perfect drive right down the middle. I pushed my second shot just a little and it kicked and it run into the right rough, and it was under the tree. I had a heck of a shot. I only had about 110 yards to the hole over the water. I hit a low punch out of the rough and it hit just beyond the pin and skipped over the back edge by about three feet maybe to the higher fringe, not the short fringe. I hit a terrible putt. I just looked up on it, quit on it, and about six feet short, missed it. So there was another bogey. 17, I hit a perfect drive right in the middle of the fairway, good shape. Hit a 6-iron just perfect, about five feet behind the hole. Made that one for a birdie.

WAYNE LEVI: It's great. I mean, if you're going to win one, this is probably the one to win. I've played reasonably well all year really. Putting has been fairly poor, so that's what probably has kept me from doing better than I have. This poor putting has killed me, but I'm out here to win golf tournaments. I was fairly successful on the regular tour. I won 12 or 13 times. I won't count the other one, but 12, let's say. There are not many guys playing currently that have won as much as I have, and everybody talks about playing mediocre, I was making all this money and this and that and the other thing. But when it comes down to it, winning is what it's all about. You come out here to win. And when you go back and look at people's records, you want to know how many tournaments they've won.

WAYNE LEVI: Kind of. You have to hit a few shots that are going to go -- they moved the tees a little bit so they are different than they were before. Some of the more dog-leg holes, it's hard to hit it in the fairway on those holes, if you take a driver out, which most everybody probably is. So that made it a little bit tougher. And the greens were deceptively slow, I thought. They didn't look that slow, but every time you hit them, if you didn't really think about the pace that you needed to put on it, you probably just came up short.

WAYNE LEVI: It's playing really long now because it's wet and you're not getting much roll. Even the holes you would take a 3-wood out, to make sure you hit it in the fairway, you're still pretty far back because you don't get any roll. And I think it's a little harder now because some of the greens are a lot more bumpy than they used to be. When I played here in the early '90s, we didn't have much of that. The greens were fairly flat. For instance, 18, all those bumps all over to the place over there to the left. I don't like the way that looks, to tell you the truth. I liked the green better before, where it was before, but I guess they had to toughen it up a little bit. Same with 10, you have that hump, the tabletop to the back right-hand side of the green, it wasn't there before. That was a little easier hole before, I guess, than it is now.

WAYNE LEVI: It's hard to say. It's been a long time. I don't recall, but it's pretty similar. I think now you're probably, with the technology, you're hitting the ball farther, and pretty much -- we haven't played the back tees, so it's hard to tell. When we used to play the World Series, we were on the back tees most every hole. But pretty much the par-3s seem generally the same, and I'm generally hitting the ball in the same areas I used to hit.

WAYNE LEVI: No, I think it will pretty much stay the same. I don't think we're going to get a lot of wind. The course is still fairly soft and the greens are -- the greens are getting to where before they were too wet. When we played yesterday, every shot you hit, especially with a short iron, you had to play way beyond the pin, because the spin was unreadable. So now the greens are getting a little more firm. So when the ball lands on the green now, it's going to stay relatively close to where it lands, not getting all this backspin.

WAYNE LEVI: Today my caddy is standing behind me a little bit more, generally, when I stroked most of these putts, so I can get the putter lined up where I wanted to. Maybe before I wasn't lining the putter blade up exactly where I thought it should be. So kind of manipulating the stroke after this. Now I've got him back there and telling him I want to hit here, and he tells me the face, move it this or that way, and I did, and I would go ahead and stroke it. It's been fairly successful, so I guess I have to do some more of this.

WAYNE LEVI: Tim Thalmuller.

WAYNE LEVI: How far back do you want me to go ?

WAYNE LEVI: I'm a fairly self-taught player. I never played much amateur golf. I kind of developed my game on the mini tours back in the early '70s. That's when I left college and joined the mini tours. You put up your own dough in those days and you played for it. So you played hard. That's where I really kind of developed my game, over those years, that span from probably '73 to '77, '78 when I first joined the tour. Those first years in there is where I developed my game, right in there.

WAYNE LEVI: What do you mean?

WAYNE LEVI: When I came out on the tour, it was a different level. These were the best players in the world. I was just grateful to be out playing with those guys. It's the same guys I'm playing with now. It's like a 25-year revisited type of deal. I was a rookie then, and 25 years later I'm a rookie again. Playing against the same guys I did then. Of course I have more experience now than I had then.

WAYNE LEVI: Incredible. It really is. The reports that I was getting was the courses are -- the fairways are wider and there is not that much rough, and the rough around the greens is not very much, and the greens are a little slower. Yes, I kind of adjusted my game for that kind of thing. I made sure I drove the ball pretty well and practiced putting. My first tournament was at Valencia out there in California. What a rude awakening I got out there. The fairways were fairly narrow, the rough was high. They must have conned me into that thing, because it was totally different. The greens were so fast, I had no chance that first week. I'm down in Florida two weeks before putting on Bermuda greens down there, and I've got a good stroke going and putting nice. I got out there, I couldn't get keep the putt short of the hole. Anytime I hit a putt, I knew it was 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 feet past every time. A lot of these other courses we played, same thing. The greens were fast. So that was all a farce, that type of stuff that they told me.

WAYNE LEVI: Pardon?

WAYNE LEVI: I don't know. Somebody was giving me that. But these guys, you have to realize that these guys play week after week after week, and play four or five rounds a week, week after week. I hadn't play golf in three years basically, hardly at all, goofing around here and there, and you're going to come out and play against guys with all that experience and play week after week and they know the golf courses and they know what to expect and all that other stuff. It's difficult. I think some of the other guys that came out along with me feel the same way. They thought they were going to come out here and just really semi-dominate the thing, but it's not that way, because you're playing against guys that are conditioned to play week after week and they know how to score.

WAYNE LEVI: No. We were a little behind at that point in the round, as far as we were kind of a hole behind, so we were hurrying a little bit. I got a little fast on a couple of shots there and I got out of my playing rhythm a little bit. I came up to that hole, it was only a 4-iron shot to that Par 3. The day before I hit a wood to that hole. Was it 15? It was only a 4-iron today and I just hit it to the right. It was a poor shot. Same with the Par 5. I drove it perfect, and I just botched it up.

WAYNE LEVI: Well, I didn't have any really great buddies. I played Joey Sindelar and I, we are both from Upstate New York, so we used to hang out and eat dinners together and stuff, when we were both on the regular tour. Keith Fergus, when he was out on the regular tour, we hung around and did some stuff together. But he lost his card and he left the tour. It's difficult. You really don't -- it's tough to have guys that you can hang with and do stuff with, because your schedules are so different. You're off one week and he might be playing. And like I say, the guy loses his card. The guys I grew up with all lost their cards, and the guy I came out on the tour originally with, most of those guys that I was good friends with are all gone now.

WAYNE LEVI: Yes. Dennis, our playing partner, did. I think he got one on number -- on the 14th green.

WAYNE LEVI: It didn't take long at all. It took a couple of weeks and you could see -- I thought I was playing respectively well and guys are running right by you.

WAYNE LEVI: Somebody could shoot one. The course isn't -- there are enough holes that you're hitting short irons to and stuff. You just have to play a great round of golf. There's enough chances out there. You can fire it in there. Like I said, the greens are fairly soft, so you can fire a ball at the flag stick. Somebody could get it going and shoot a good score, 5, 6 under, probably.

WAYNE LEVI: Good sound fundamentals, pretty much. I swing the club well, hit the ball solid, even in windy conditions. I don't particularly like playing them, but everybody says the harder it blows the better I should like it, because I hit the ball solid and I always have. That's how you win 12 events, or a bunch of events, you have to have a pretty sound swing and trust what you're doing, have confidence in what you have. You have to have a few guts too. You have to have a few of those. You have to have a good desire, a will to win. That's what it is. There are a lot of great players out there that don't have that.

WAYNE LEVI: Like I was just telling you, there is a lot of courses that we've played that weren't quite as high as this, but close to this. You're not going to be able to knock it on the green at a lot of the courses we've played at where the rough was similar to this.