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SANDERSON FARMS CHAMPIONSHIPOctober 25, 2016Peter MalnatiJackson, Mississippi THE MODERATOR: Peter, thanks for joining us and congratulations. Welcome back. This is obviously a place near and dear to your heart. So with that said, just a few comments on being back here and kind of how your game is feeling as you're heading into the week. PETER MALNATI: Yeah, it is great to be back here, obviously. Do have really good memories. So it feels different coming back this year. Last year I was this a category on the PGA TOUR, called the Web.com Tour graduate's category, and there were a lot of things on my mind when I came here to this event. It was my third event of the 15-16 season, and I was wondering which events I might get in looking forward on the schedule and which event I might not get in because in that category we don't always get to make the starts we want, don't always get in the fields for some of the bigger or nicer or better venues, so coming back this year in the winner's category I don't have that thought anymore. But I certainly have a different set of expectations now, and obviously the win changed things in a lot of ways for me. But coming back here reminds me of playing some really, really good golf which I didn't always do last year after the win. So that's really good. And I'm excited to be here, and being in Jackson feels in a way like home because the community really did adopt me last year during the tournament and in the period thereafter. So it's great to be back here and I'm excited to have a really fun week. THE MODERATOR: I know you've been working hard, as you've told me, in the past couple of weeks. Is there anything that's really come around as far as the technical part of your game, anything you're feeling really comfortable with right now? PETER MALNATI: Yeah, definitely. Having a little six-week break -- so I got knocked out of the PLAYOFFS after Barclays, so that was bad obviously because I would have loved to have gone on and played more events and gone farther in the PLAYOFFS, but in a way it was really good for me because that gave me a nice sizeable break. It was basically a six-week off season for me, and I was able to tackle some things. You know, just my golf swing is very much a work in progress. I was very small-town, kind of home-made kind of golfer for the biggest part of my career, and definitely have started -- after my rookie year on TOUR in the 2013-14 season started to kind of fine tune my swing a little bit and work on some things, and this six-week break was good for me because it helped me -- I played a lot during the year, last year during the 2016 part of the 15-16 season I played a lot, and probably got a little sloppy and fell into some not great habits. So having the break allowed me to really focus on what I was doing and tried to tidy up a few things in my golf swing. I feel like I had really good work during that time. And I really do feel a lot more consistent with my ball striking now than I did for most of the 2016 part of last season. So that's really good, and I'm excited about that. I'm excited to continue to build on that. But I definitely feel like my swing is better now than it has been for most of 2016, and my ball striking therefore is a lot better, too. THE MODERATOR: Okay. With that we'll take a few questions. Q. Could you talk about coming back (inaudible)? PETER MALNATI: Yes. So yes. The Boyles family, even though Durr was halfway across the world last year, the Boyles family fully adopted Alicia and I last year, and so it's been fun. You know, Robin sent us the first text message a few weeks ago to say, when you guys coming, when you guys coming in for the tournament? She was really excited to see us. So when we told her we were coming in from Malaysia, she was, oh, okay, okay, so you won't be here until at least Monday. I get it. Okay. But last night we gave her an update when we got back to the States. We were in Houston. We landed in Houston, and the whole time as we were driving from the airport here in Jackson to their house, she kept sending texts saying, when will you guys be here? And Alicia would be in the passenger's seat and say, well, Google Maps says we're 12 minutes away. "Well, drive faster, get here in ten." So she makes us feel loved and welcomed and very much at home. And it was great to meet Durr Boyles, who is now the highest ranking officer in the Mississippi National Guard. So he's still really busy. He was in Kosovo last year during the tournament, so we didn't get to meet him. We did meet him via Skype. We didn't get to meet him in person. And last night we did get to meet him in person, and we went to Amerigo's, which fed us all during the tournament last year, so we figured we better keep that tradition alive. So we went to Amerigo, last night. The Boyles, that's something that'll make this tournament -- there are several things that'll make this tournament unique and special for Alicia and I. I'll never ever forget it being my first one on tour. There's lots of other things, too. The golf course is really special. But staying with the Boyles will make this event always, always, always have a special and unique feel to us. So it's a really cool relationship there we were lucky to form. Q. (Inaudible). PETER MALNATI: Yeah. I mean there's no doubt about it. It's life changing. You know, probably the biggest, most obvious difference is the, you know, the little bit of job security that it brings, you know, knowing I'm going to have my card for this year and next year as a bare minimum. And the opportunity that that presents. That gives me the opportunity to play more events and have more life-changing experiences. So the exemption and obviously winning early in the year made it more or less have the feel of a three-year exemption because I got all of last year plus these two seasons. So that would be the first thing. Then the second thing which is also very, very important is just from a scheduling perspective, you know, as a young player -- or not even young because age doesn't matter. But as a player, fitting in the Web.com graduates category on TOUR, you don't know what events you're going to get in or not. So you can pinpoint probably 14 or 15 events that you know you probably will get in, but then you've got another 12 or 13 events that are kind of in that middle ground where some of the guys in the Web category get in and some guys don't. So you're left wondering how much you're going to get to play. In that Web category you feel like you can never skip an event that you're in because you don't know how many you will get to play. So now being in the winner's category, I still chose to play every single week last year, which probably wasn't the smartest move. But I don't really regret it either. But now I have that luxury, I guess I'll call it, to be able to look at the calendar and pick which event I want to play. And with the exception of the World Golf Championship events, majors and a couple of invitationals, if I want to play an event, I can. You know, I'm in. I'm in. And that's a really -- that's something that the win changed and made different, because that's a big difference when you look at the calendar and say I wonder if I'll be in that week and look at the calendar and you say, well, I have to decide if I want to play that week because I am in. So that's really, really cool. And lastly, more intangible things, just you know, to be a PGA TOUR winner is, you know, it's just a title. But it really does mean something. It carries me like, you know, even though I struggled a lot with my game during this 2016 portion of the 15-16 season, you know, I can still look back on that and say, you know, I was able to and I missed a lot of challenges here with the weather and everything else and distractions, I was able to kind of overcome that and win a PGA TOUR event against -- you know, I know this is what the TOUR calls an opposite field event, but it gets a really, really strong feel. It gets a great field for an opposite field event. And to win against that field of competition with the challenges that we had is a huge confidence boost. Even looking back on the year that I would characterize as largely disappointing after the win, my confidence is still extremely high right now. And that is due to the fact that, you know, I beat obviously not the best players in the world; not all of them were here, but I beat a field comprised on the strongest tour in the world, and I won, and that's really big. Q. (Inaudible). PETER MALNATI: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean what a cool deal. I've never -- I've been to Hawaii before but I'd never flown across the Pacific ocean. So that's my first time doing that. And that's a really cool opportunity. It was just a great door that was opened to me, and yeah, it was -- obviously the win didn't guarantee me getting to Malaysia, but it did get me the position on the FedEx points list, which got me into Malaysia, so yes, that's a door that opened. Q. (Inaudible). PETER MALNATI: Yeah. That's a good question. I do enjoy -- I enjoy things other than golf, too. I did -- I did a lot of the first week kind of resting, which is hard for me. I'm not good at that. I'm a bad rester. But I did that. But I'd say -- I'll give you a couple of highlights. First, most obvious, easy answer is my sister, who I'm really close with, got married. And she had a beautiful wedding in our hometown where we grew up, small little town called Dandridge in East Tennessee. And she's older than me by three years, and for a long time she was married to her career. She's a physical therapist, and she works incredibly hard at that. And for her to kind of find someone that she loves and wants to spend her life with was really happy for me to see. And to be at her wedding and share that with her was -- it was really emotional. But I didn't cry, and my wife thought I would, and I didn't, because I bawled at our wedding, but I held it together at my sister's wedding. Q. (Inaudible)? PETER MALNATI: No. They did the most casual they didn't have a wedding party or anything like that. So I literally had zero responsibility except to show up, which is good. That's a good thing for me because wedding responsibilities aren't really a strong point of mine. So there was that. And then another thing, and we kind of did it as like a pre-wedding thing. Alicia and my sister and I climbed to the highest mountaintop in East Tennessee, a place called Mount Le Conte, about a 14-mile hike round trip up and back, so it was definitely a physical -- it wasn't a restful day. But it was really, really fun. We'd done the hike before, my sister and I. I think Alicia had done it once before, too, but it was really cool. We took a beautiful trail on a beautiful day and climbed up to the top of this mountain called Mount Le Conte, and it was really, really beautiful. And I've always connected with the mountains in East Tennessee. That's where I'm from. That's where I grew up. So to do something like that does remind me of the fact that -- I get into my golf. Like I probably care about it more than I should a lot of times, and going on a hike and seeing kind of the vastness of nature and what I grew up in, that's good for me because it kind of reminds that golf shots are fickle little things and they come and go, but those big mountains have been there for a long time. Q. (Inaudible)? PETER MALNATI: Yes. There's a lot of truth in that. Q. (Inaudible). PETER MALNATI: Yeah. So you know, for me statistically -- statistically, I had an okay year, better than okay. I had a good year of putting. But for me, you know, for me to -- if I putt -- if I putt average, I've got no chance on this tour, and I putted slightly better than average statistically, but I need to putt a lot better than average. And I did here. My stats here were quite, you know, definitely no matter how much work I put into it, I mean you can't sustain the way I putted here over the course of the season. But I need to putt extremely well. And even though my stats would show that for the year I was definitely an above-average putter, I did not putt very well, to my own standard, to what I expect of myself. So my putting definitely held me back. And my ball striking didn't do its job either. I need to strike the ball well enough to let my putter do good things for me, and I didn't do that. I was constantly putting for pars. And that's no good on this tour. You can't be putting for pars. You gotta be putting for birdies. And so yeah, I would say that neither were extremely good. Both sort of held me back at times. But if I can putt more consistently, which I think I can, it allows the weeks when the ball striking is on to be weeks that are special like it was here. Q. (Inaudible). PETER MALNATI: No. I got up this morning, and I have hit a few balls, but I haven't been out on the course yet. Q. The course you played last week (inaudible). PETER MALNATI: One thing that was kind of strange last year, as wet as it was, was the rough was still pretty playable. And I've heard from Jason, the head pro, and Steve, the tournament director, I've heard that the rough is going to be thicker and longer this year. And if the fairways are firm and the rough is thick and long, that will create tremendously fun challenge. So that's something that I will really much look forward to. And then one thing about country club of Jackson that I just know will never -- last year I think -- I heard it was an unbelievable number. Like the week before and week of tournament there was like 16 inches of rain or something here, and they were still the best greens we putt on TOUR. So with good weather -- now, to say they're the best greens on TOUR, I mean we putt a lot of good greens, but none that are better than these. There might be some that are equally good, but none that are better than these greens. So I mean I'm definitely not scared. I like fast, firm, difficult greens. But I'm excited to see what they're like this year when they've been able to control the amount of water they put on them. They could be really, really, really a treat. I'll say that. THE MODERATOR: Anybody else? All right. Well, Peter, we appreciate your time, as always, and hope to see lots of you back in here again throughout the week. PETER MALNATI: I'd like to be back here a lot. Thank you very much. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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