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THE GREENBRIER CLASSIC

July 4, 2015

Maverick McNealy

WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, WEST VIRGINIA

Q. What was going well for you today?
MAVERICK McNEALY: Well, thinking back on the round, I got off to a little bit of a slow start. I scrambled from a bad spot on 1, and unfortunately didn't get up-and-down on 2, but I ran into a good stretch right in the middle of the round. I made a great save from behind the green on 9, and then birdied 10, 11, 12, and that kind of got my round going. I missed a short putt on I think it was 15, 14, one of those holes, and then made a great putt on the next hole, and then unfortunately a bad drive on 17. But other than that, I felt like it was a pretty solid round, and I finally got on a roll with the putter today, which was good.

Q. Maverick, on the front nine when you're not making birdies and it seems like if you're not making birdies, you're falling behind, so what are you telling yourself to keep in a good frame of mind for when the putter starts working?
MAVERICK McNEALY: It's the same kind of thing that I've had in college, and in college generally you have to be a bunch under par to win. Here you need to be a bunch under par to kind of be near the top of the leaderboard. I just try and stay patient and then when I start to feel it, press my advantage and try and roll those birdies in. Stayed patient through the first couple holes and didn't really shoot any pins that I shouldn't have, but then the putter got hot and I made a couple birdies there in the middle, which really helped set up my round.

Q. You played with Russell, the previous winner of the Haskins. Did he have much to say to you?
MAVERICK McNEALY: Russell is a great guy. I really enjoyed spending time with him. Young guy who's just been out here a little bit, done really well for himself. Already won on TOUR. He's just a great guy, and it was a really comfortable pairing out there for me today. I learned a lot from him just from watching him, things he says, learning what it's like on TOUR. I really enjoyed it.

Q. The experience of the whole week, what sticks out in your mind?
MAVERICK McNEALY: This has been unbelievable. It's just been so much fun. First TOUR event for me, proper TOUR event. One, to play well makes it really fun, but this place is incredible. The golf course is in awesome shape. You know, with this weather, they've done an awesome job of keeping it really, really well, playable, and the resort has been off the charts. It's like nothing I've ever seen before, so I've had a blast.

Q. What all have you done off the course?
MAVERICK McNEALY: Man, I've just been going 100 miles an hour trying to get all this stuff in, get my practice and golf. But the first night I got here I just decided I'd explore and walk around the resort a little bit. It took me 45 minutes, but I think I saw most of it. I wanted to check out a couple things. I went and saw a little bit of the concert last night, which was pretty cool, so just doing things here and there. There's no shortage of stuff to do.

Q. How do you determine how to manage your time with so much to do off the course but obviously trying to play well on the course, as well?
MAVERICK McNEALY: Well, I'm not short-changing the golf at all. I'm making sure I'm rested and getting my practice in and doing everything I need to do to play my best. But in your spare time, you always have a little bit of spare time that you can allocate to doing some fun stuff, too. I think having fun out here and relaxing your mind off golf the entire time is part of playing well.

Q. To what do you attribute your improvement from last year's U.S. Open to now?
MAVERICK McNEALY: I think that improvement kind of started beginning of my freshman year. I played ice hockey seven months out of the year through my senior year of high school, so my freshman year was the first time I played year-round, and my freshman year I got to learn from some of the best, Patrick Rodgers, Cameron Wilson, my coaches, all my teammates at Stanford, played a great schedule, great practice facilities, and I had a chance to work on my game and work hard at it every day for the last couple years, and statistically the biggest improvement has been the putting. I calculate during the college season my strokes in putting against TOUR averages, and it's gone from -- I averaged about losing three shots a round my freshman year to this spring I gained about a shot a round, so that's four shots a round, and that amounts to about 12 for every college tournament. It's just golf is a lot easier when you feel like you can putt well.

Q. As much as you learned that freshman year, it seems you've made a huge jump your sophomore year. Was the Open last summer the impetus for that?
MAVERICK McNEALY: I think hard work and learning doesn't pay off immediately. It builds on itself, and obviously the U.S. Open was a huge confidence boost, but I think last summer it was generally a disappointing summer, but I say that in that I was very happy with things I accomplished qualifying for the Open. But I missed the cut at the Open after being one off the cut line. I triple bogeyed the last hole of the U.S. Amateur to miss the cut by one there, and just really didn't have that great of a summer results-wise, and I think that kicked off a great start to my college season, won my first two events. So I think that was more of an 'em pa Tuesday of starting to win in the college circuit more than anything, but I think that the work I put in my freshman year and this year just compounded on itself, and that's been the main reason.

Q. The roundtable discussion the other night, it looked like you were really trying to soak it all in. What did you maybe learn from that and what did you take from that experience?
MAVERICK McNEALY: It was just really cool. Obviously those guys have more golf stories than I can remember, fill my brain with, and it's really cool to see the guys that you've heard about, never really got to see -- I never really got the chance to watch them play live and in person, but to see them here, it's really cool to see what they've left in golf and how they continue to pay it forward with our generation of golfers. It's really cool.

Q. Did you overlap with Patrick at all at Stanford?
MAVERICK McNEALY: I did, my freshman year was his junior year, which was his last year.

Q. What's it like for you two of you to both be on the leaderboard at the same time at a PGA TOUR event?
MAVERICK McNEALY: It's awesome. For the record, I've never beaten him in a tournament. Actually up until this week, I've only beaten him once in a round. He's a pretty good player. It's really cool to be in the same sentence or at least within a page of the leaderboard with a guy that I've looked up to, learned so much from. He's become a model for a lot of parts of my game and kind of my attitude and thought process, preparation process. It's really cool.

Q. (Inaudible.)
MAVERICK McNEALY: Well, I had a chance to play a practice round with him and he talked to me a little bit about his experiences last year, a great first round and then found himself right on the cut line on Friday. Things can change out there. But I think I learned more by watching, just seeing how he placed his ball around and where you wanted to be with your shots.

Q. What was the round in which you beat him?
MAVERICK McNEALY: It was actually the last round of that -- it took me the entire year until the last full play round of the year.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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