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U.S. SENIOR OPEN

August 13, 2016

Billy Mayfair

Columbus, Ohio

BILLY MAYFAIR: Hi, guys. Nice to have the sun out now. My pants are still wet, but I survived.

Q. Treacherous day for everybody. Very few under par today?
BILLY MAYFAIR: If you shot under par today, you had a heck of a round. It was blowing out there. I played Thursday afternoon, and we thought the wind was blowing pretty hard there, and it was blowing at least anywhere from eight to ten miles an hour, probably even harder. It turned some of those holes really hard.

Seemed like to us, either the wind was right in our face or right straight down. There was no side breezes or anything like that. So it definitely played hard, and I double bogeyed the 1st hole. That wasn't the way I wanted to start my day, but fought back, made some birdies coming down the stretch, and still in contention tomorrow.

Q. It's anybody's game now, right?
BILLY MAYFAIR: Absolutely. We'll see what the weather does tonight. We'll keep an eye on that. I'm sure the golf course might be a little bit different tomorrow than it was today, that's for sure.

Q. How would you regard the leader right now, Miguel? Crafty player?
BILLY MAYFAIR: He's a good guy. He's a good guy. He's been all over the world. He's played all over the world. You want to talk about someone who just wants to go out and have fun when they play golf, that's Miguel.

He'll be hard to beat tomorrow. Hard to beat.

Q. How much is taking your medicine, staying in the fight, just avoiding the big numbers really the key to the round today?
BILLY MAYFAIR: You had to today because you knew everyone was struggling out there. You see the leaderboard -- and I'm not a leaderboard watcher, but it was just hard out there. Especially when you play a USGA event where you're not playing the golf course every year, where it's a brand new course for all of us. We saw a different wind today, much harder. It's going to trip people up. It's the nature of the beast.

On the Tour, we go to a place, play it four or five times in five years, we kind of get used to things. Here, this is our first time out here. So this is the first time a lot of us have seen this wind.

Q. A lot of you guys from the PGA Tour to this Tour, you've been transformed. Your bodies are so much different. Because I'm not out here every day covering the Senior Tour, you and Joey, for instance, how big a change is that for you, and how has it helped?
BILLY MAYFAIR: Well, three years ago, I made a decision -- after not feeling very well, got a case of the whooping cough, I knew I had to make a life change. It wasn't just to play the Champions Tour, to play golf, it was just for my own general health.

And I really worked hard the last three years to get my weight down. Like I said, to play on the PGA Tour, you have to with those young 23, 24-year-olds. It's probably helped me transition into being out here on the Champions Tour.

Listen, Bernhard Langer is out here. He's in great shape. Miguel doesn't look like he's in, but he's in a lot better shape than people think. These guys can play, and I knew this wasn't going to be something to just come out and cake walk, that's for darn sure. I knew these guys can play.

Q. How much difference is it? What do you weigh now?
BILLY MAYFAIR: I was about 210. I'm at 175. I feel a whole lot better. I've had, knock on wood, very few back problems, and my joints aren't as stiff as they used to be. So when you're not carrying around a 30-pound bowling ball, it helps.

Q. How did you do it?
BILLY MAYFAIR: Biggest thing, I just cut out certain things. I cut out soda pop, sugar, wheat, dairy and just watched my diet and exercised, which I'd already done, but I really had to change with my foods, and that was my biggest thing I did.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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