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PGA CHAMPIONSHIP

May 17, 2019

Ryan Vermeer

Farmingdale, New York

RYAN VERMEER: I thought 4-over would be fairly safe going into the afternoon, 5-over would be fairly iffy. To hit it up six feet under the hole was huge for me.

Q. What was your last thought over the putt?
RYAN VERMEER: Just gave it enough speed. It wasn't going to break very much. As long as I had enough speed on it, it was going to go in.

Q. You're director of instruction at Happy Hollow Club in Nebraska and you qualified for a bunch of tour events that prepared you for today, but this is different. This is not a regular TOUR event. This is the PGA Championship. I know your director of instruction and you have a ton of duties, but how do you prepare yourself, not only with playing in tour events but to play in a PGA Championship and actually compete?
RYAN VERMEER: I try to practice when I can. I don't get a lot of time anymore to practice but I've had so many years of tournament golf in my history that I feel like when I get to a golf tournament, I know how to play. I know how to compete, so that stuff isn't anything different. It's just a matter of whether I'm prepared physically for it. As much as anything, getting my body ready to walk long golf courses like this, I ride in golf carts all the time. That stuff alone is pretty important for me. But really, I think with the age that I have now and the fact that golf is not my every day end all, be all, I can roll with the punches a lot more and I don't put so much pressure on myself and I have had some experiences in some big tournaments lately, and that 100 percent has helped me to get ready for seeing the crowds out here and whatnot.

Q. Heading into the weekends with all that experience, what are you going to do this afternoon?
RYAN VERMEER: I'm going to hopefully take a nap. 6:45 this morning was really early for me. I'm not a morning person, so that was early.

I'm going to relax. Hopefully I'm going to watch some golf this afternoon, enjoy watching the guys and see what they are doing out there and hopefully I have a tee time out there tomorrow and can go out there and free-wheel it a little bit.

Q. You were able to keep it under control, and knew what you had to do to keep the mistakes down. Can you go through what happened on the final nine?
RYAN VERMEER: I mean, the back nine, obviously is harder than the front nine. The wind got up harder to make the tee shots pretty difficult, and I don't know that I was swinging at it bad today or if I maybe was a little tentative on some of the shots as it got more difficult. But I hit it in the rough and this is not a place where you can play out of the rough. I had to scramble and I take my hat off to myself being able to make bogeys and not make anything worse than a bogey. I made a couple of putts that were good and I had to make a couple 4-footers to save bogey which I was able to do.

Hit a good shot into 14 and was able to make a birdie there. Unfortunately I just kind of went brain dead on 15. I hit two great shots, slippery little putt and ran three feet by and missed it and came back up the hill. That was unfortunate.

Honestly, coming down the last few holes, outside of a couple of drives that weren't awesome, I hit some pretty good shots that didn't end up in ideal spots. The shot I hit into 17 wasn't what I was trying to do. I hit it a yard and a half too far and

I was in the rough chipping as opposed to putting from the back part of the green. Really, I tried to make sure that when I hit it in trouble, I was able to have a putt at a par and just made bogey at worst. I think it's just the way this golf course is. If you can play from the fairways or the first cut of rough, you can play it. You get in the long stuff, it's 80/20. 80 percent of the time you're chipping it out and 20 percent of the time you might have a go. That's pretty rare.

Q. I didn't even notice what you did on 18. Can you help me with what you did on 18?
RYAN VERMEER: I actually hit what I thought was a really good drive just down the left edge of the fairway and it stayed really straight expended up in the long grass on top of the sand trap. If I had a better stance -- I think I would have had a better lie to get it, but I had an awkward stance. So I whacked it up to the top of the hill on the fairway and I had about a 35-yard pitch from the fairway to the green and made a nice shot, six feet under the hole and was able to make it.

Q. As you know, this course will come back and bite some people and we'll see what the field will be like. I know you had a lot of good goals in your mind for the great year you had last year. You're a first in Nebraska for so many different things.
RYAN VERMEER: It's cool to lead our section and do this stuff. There's been a lot of good players that have come through there in the past, and to be able to do what I'm doing, obviously I had a goal at the beginning of the year to win national Player of the Year again. I get to play TOUR events where I can earn points where other guys don't get a shot at it. If I can make the cut here, I get to earn points. Obviously that's a huge step forward in my quest to get back to Player of the Year.

Q. And the PGA Cup team?
RYAN VERMEER: That's something I'm really looking forward to. Obviously to make that team and to be able to play a team event with fellow club pros, it's something I've never done before. I turned town a chance to play in the Palmer Cup when I was in college, something I regret now 20 years on down the road but at the time I was 22 years old and ready to get out and be a pro golfer.

You know, it will be cool. The fact that they operate it a lot like a Ryder Cup, I'm really excited to go through it and see how the pageantry goes and everything.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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