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U.S. SENIOR AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIPAugust 30, 2017Paul SimsonMinneapolis, Minnesota Q. I chatted briefly with Frank, and he was a little disappointed. He didn't play his game today. PAUL SIMSON: No, he did not. Well, part of it, you know, he had a long match -- Q. He played seven more holes than you this morning. PAUL SIMSON: That's not that much. We're riding carts. But then he kind of -- you know, sometimes your karma is off after a long match like that, and he's got to come in here, have a quick lunch, and then get ready to go out again in a hurry, whereas I had, gee whiz, two and a half hours. You know, it can work against you, though. Sometimes you can get stiff. Q. Sure. PAUL SIMSON: And then, I mean, I start right off with making a spectacular birdie out of the right bunker on the first hole. I didn't hit a good tee ball, and hit a little knock-down 9-iron in there about 15 feet and drained the putt to go 1-up, and then he kind of gave me the second hole, put me 2-up, and I just got ahead, and he was always pressing trying to catch up, and every time he'd miss a shot, he'd lose a hole, he'd get himself in a bad spot, where some of my bad spots at least I was below the hole and could chip up close. And so it got further and further, and I got 5-up through 13, and that's pretty tough. All I have to do is tie two holes coming in, and that -- so it was a waiting game after that. Q. Yeah. You know each other from playing -- PAUL SIMSON: Mm-hmm, yeah, Northeast Amateurs, some of the Mid-Ams we've played. Q. This isn't the first time you've locked horns? PAUL SIMSON: Very nice man, but somebody has got to win, and match play, you know, you start out with two, and there's one left every match. That's the way it is. It's eat or be eaten. Q. That's right. There's no question about that. It does come right down to the basics, doesn't it. You've won a couple of these before, and you also got knocked out by Dave Ryan last year with an ace on a par-4, and when you got to the semifinals, I believe that's your furthest advance since you won in '12; is that correct? PAUL SIMSON: Yes. '13 I lost my second match as defense. '14 I didn't play. '15 we were -- I think I lost in the third round, and then last year I lost in the third round. So yeah, this -- the quarters is as far as I have been since winning. Now, I will say this: Phillip has come up with an interesting statistic. Q. I heard about this this morning, I think. PAUL SIMSON: Yeah, that everybody that has beaten -- since I've been playing, either I have won or the person that beat me has been in the finals since like 2006. Q. Wow. That's impressive. PAUL SIMSON: And so that's -- there may be one year off there. I didn't play in '14, and there may be like 2007, I can't remember what happened that far back. But -- Q. Can I ask why you didn't play in '14? PAUL SIMSON: Yeah, I had a congenital aneurysm in my aorta, and they decided that it needed to be taken care of. That was taken care of in 2013 after the golf season, and then in '14, I ended up getting an infection. We don't really need to go into -- Q. That's fine. PAUL SIMSON: But I got an infection in my sternum, and it put me out for like four months. The operation was easy. The infection was, oh, my God, it was brutal. Q. Thank goodness you rebounded from that. PAUL SIMSON: And you know, I've been playing pretty well all summer and have been on the periphery of having a really good year. You know, I've done a lot of good things, but it's just been a little bit off, and it has pretty much come together this week. Q. I know you mentioned this morning your affinity with Donald Ross. Obviously Mountain Ridge was a Donald Ross classic. PAUL SIMSON: I've had a lot of success down at No. 2, which is Donald Ross. I think I've won three or four state ams on Donald Ross courses. I have a lot of championships that I've won on Donald Ross. I seem to perform well on his courses, and I seem to understand what he as an architect is trying to do, and one of the things that's great about Minikahda is they've basically preserved the golf course the way he originally had it intended. Now, there may be a tree here and there that has encroached a little bit, but that's fine. Trees grow. But it's just a fantastic Ross course, and it's pretty special for me to be playing well at a course that Bobby Jones won an Open and Chick Evans won an Amateur -- Q. Other way around, Evans won the Open, Jones won the Amateur. But still, that's quite a pedigree. PAUL SIMSON: That's pretty cool. They've had a Curtis Cup, they've had a Walker Cup. It's a very storied history. You can go out to the putting green and you read about their pro who was here for, what, 32 years or 28 years, something like that, and it's a club that has a very guarded tradition, and they're proud of it, and you can tell there's pride in ownership at Minikahda. Q. And you're absorbing that as you go along for sure? PAUL SIMSON: Oh, yeah, it's great. When you think about the Open was here, what, 101 years ago? Q. That's right. PAUL SIMSON: I mean, how cool is that? I mean, that's really cool. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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