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KITCHENAID SENIOR PGA CHAMPIONSHIP

May 22, 2019

Shaun Micheel

Rochester, New York

JOHN DEVER: Good afternoon from the 2019 KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship here at Oak Hill Country Club. I am pleased to be joined by our 2003 PGA champion, who won right here, Shaun Micheel. Shaun, thanks for joining us today.

SHAUN MICHEEL: Happy to be here for sure.

JOHN DEVER: Welcome back to Oak Hill. It's been 16 years since your victory here. I don't know if time has flown for you, but just how did that victory, that special Sunday for you, the shot, how did that impact your life? How has it changed things for you the last decade and a half?

SHAUN MICHEEL: I mean, it changed things a lot. I was kind of going through this process, I think, of playing PGA TOUR golf, and every year was something, whether it was trying to keep my card or whether it was trying to get my first win and everything else, and as far as this tournament, I had been in the field, I had been out of the field, I was in the field, I had missed the cut, I was out of the field, and then finally on Sunday I played with Jay Haas at Hartford, and I think that was one of the last few weeks that you could qualify, and I played well and finished 10th and kind of solidified my position.

But you know, there were a lot of things going on afterwards. I was kind of getting pulled in a lot of different directions. My wife gave birth November 20th of '03, so talk about life changing.

You know, when I got onto the green on 18 and I had marked my ball and my caddie had come over, and I said, wow, I can't believe I'm about to win my first PGA TOUR event, and he quickly reminded me that it wasn't just a PGA TOUR event, it was a major, and I certainly felt that pressure. And I don't carry it with me so much anymore, but for a long time I did. I carried a lot of the -- I described it in a -- I used a terrible analogy last year in an article that I did for Golfweek magazine -- it was one of the golf -- Golfweek magazine, I think, and I described my win and that trophy as being the Pigpen's dark cloud that followed me around. It was a horrible analogy, and when I read that, I couldn't believe that I said that. I just didn't describe it the right way.

The pressure that I felt afterwards, I felt the next week from being introduced as the PGA champion to having other Hall of Fame golfers congratulating me, Jeff Sluman and Bob Tway, come up to me, both PGA Champions. It was a tough time in my life because I didn't really know how to navigate the waters. I knew I still needed to try to be a good golfer, but I wasn't sure that I was at the stage of my life or my career or my ability to have one of those trophies.

So I battled that for a long time.

JOHN DEVER: That's interesting. This is your -- let's segue to the PGA TOUR Champions. This is your first year of eligibility. You're playing a pretty ambitious schedule. What are your thoughts on the Tour, the competition that you're facing week to week here?

SHAUN MICHEEL: Well, I got to 50 as quickly as I could. The last couple years, I wasn't blessed with great genes and I look at Vijay, I look at Davis, I look at Steve Stricker, and there's probably a few other guys that I'm not mentioning that have had really good careers. I mean, Steve is still playing great in PGA TOUR events, and unfortunately that kind of -- my play ended a little bit sooner.

But I was really eager to get out and play golf with my contemporaries. I've been spending a lot of time, I played two years on the Web.com with the young kids out there, and oftentimes I was the oldest person in the field, which was -- I didn't like, because I remember in my 20s when I was playing what was then the Nike Tour, and I saw guys like Larry Rinker and Lee Rinker and some of the other players that I knew about, I saw having what I saw were great PGA TOUR careers, and I saw them on the Web, it was like, why is he still playing here, what happened to him? I found out, the family life, losing both of my parents, being interested in my children's activities, those types of things, they don't weigh heavily on you, but it's just a choice that you make. And I think if you're not all in on golf, particularly PGA TOUR golf, you're not going to be very successful, and I kind of fell pray to that.

But they were all good things. It wasn't negative, it was just that I wanted -- I kind of wanted my career to end on a really good note. Everybody wants to walk away from their job knowing that they did the best that they could, and that didn't really happen in my case.

Q. A lot of people have spoken about the difficulty of Oak Hill this week. How was playing the Black Course at Bethpage for you in preparation for a week like this?
SHAUN MICHEEL: You know, I wasn't -- I probably shouldn't have played last week. I wasn't feeling great, although I've been playing some decent golf, but when I got out there and just saw the length of it, I was really a little bit overwhelmed.

I went out -- so Monday we finished at the Regions Tradition. I had to play on Monday. I didn't get there until Monday night. Tuesday was a 50-degree day with light rain, and I just felt like I needed a day off. I haven't had a lot of days off the last four, five weeks, but I had heard about the course.

On Wednesday I went out just to play the back nine. I sent my caddie out to walk the front on Tuesday. Pretty straightforward. And then I get out there and I'm going to play with Phil and Zach Johnson. So I went out there, and of course Phil hits it forever, and I had to hit a wood into the first hole. Zach and I both had to hit a fairway metal into the first hole, the 10th hole. The wind was blowing. It just was a lot of golf course.

The way that the golf course is set up, there are a lot of bunkers out there and rough lines that if you can carry those, it's really the way to attack the golf course. But unfortunately I'm at a point now where I didn't really want to take that on, and so I was basically having to play to different sides of the fairway, and it just left me such long shots into the green, I couldn't really compete.

And I didn't play well. I putted well. I got up-and-down for par from 100 yards a couple times, but that only can take you so far. And interestingly, I had a conversation with Rory at our locker on -- must have been Wednesday, Wednesday afternoon. And we were talking about Daly, me, and maybe a few other players that are in their 50s that were trying to play that week, and I asked him, What do you think about a guy like me coming and playing this event? And he just told me, he said, Look, first of all, you earned the right to be in this event. If the time comes that you feel like you can't make the cut, you know you're not going to make the cut, then maybe you decide not to play. But you don't have to feel like you have to come win.

And it really made me feel pretty good after he said that because I think I could have made the cut. Last year at Bellerive I missed by two, and I messed up a couple holes and I should have made it. So that's why I came back to Bethpage this year, to play and to make the cut. I feel like it's entertainment. I don't play because I feel like I've earned the right. Jeff Sluman and I talked last night, he didn't play -- he quit playing the PGA Championship in his 49th year. He didn't play when he was 50. Even when he came back to Oak Hill in 2013 -- you know, he's from here.

I felt really good talking about it. But in the end, maybe I shouldn't have played and should have maybe just kind of given my spot to someone else because it just was -- it was just too much golf course for me to play to really feel like I was going to play well.

I'm beginning to see the writing on the wall now, and whether I can hold out to 2023 when it comes back here, I think it would be special for me to maybe finish off my PGA Championship career here. If I can make it four more years, then I'll do it. I will definitely be back in '23. Whether I play or not is a different matter.

JOHN DEVER: I want to ask you about your thoughts on Oak Hill, what you've seen out there this week and how it compares to what you played in not only '03 but '13. There's a few less trees and such, we're playing in a different time of the year. Just your thoughts on what's different from when you actually won?

SHAUN MICHEEL: Yeah, so I was back in April. I came back for a couple days to kind of kick off the junior golf program. They have a great program here, and when I drove up Kilbourn Avenue and got onto the property, that was the first thing I saw. There were no leaves on the trees, either.

But the fact that when I drove in I could see from 7 tee box basically all the way to the clubhouse, the 9th tee box, I could see across the golf course towards 5 and 6, 12 green. So there were a lot of differences that way. And I think a lot of that has just been -- well, they needed to do that, I think, to kind of keep the golf course and the greens the way that they needed them.

But it's amazing. The routing hasn't changed yet. That's going to change here before too long, they're going to redo the greens and everything. But yeah, and just the difference from April 2nd to 3rd to now, just the green, the color of the golf course, the lushness of the rough, you know, the proper shaping of the fairways, the proper mowing patterns on the greens, those are the things that I notice that I didn't notice even six, seven weeks ago. I think they've done a great job.

And I think much like last week, you see these major championships, there's hot button issues, whether it's course setup, whether it's a pin that maybe isn't in the spot that it should be, you don't hear any of that from the PGA of America. I'm not knocking any of the other groups, I'm just saying that I think Kerry Haigh does such a great job of setting the course up.

It's difficult -- much like last week. Last week was overly penal maybe. This one is penal in its own right, and the rough isn't as deep, but it's still just as -- just as difficult for us now that we don't have the swing speeds that we once had.

Course is in fabulous shape. I'm hearing a lot of people -- as a matter of fact, Woody Austin was on the practice tee FaceTiming his son, I think, and talking about how difficult the course was. So it's in the minds of players. It's in my mind, as well, but going back to 2003, it was a golf course I knew that was so difficult that I wasn't worried about somebody shooting a 63 like Jason did in his year.

JOHN DEVER: '13.

SHAUN MICHEEL: The course was different. It was a lot firmer. So I felt like balls were kind of bounding up through the fairways on the angles, so I didn't really have to worry about somebody shooting a low round. And I don't -- Woody didn't seem to think there would be too many low rounds here. It's hard for me to put a score out there for anybody. But I think 2-, 3-under is probably a really good score, depending on the conditions, whether it's windy or whether there's rain showers in the area or whatever.

Q. This week maybe not a good representation, but what's the learning curve been like coming out on PGA TOUR Champions, three-round events, a lot of players talk about how it's a sprint compared to the 72-hole events that you play on the PGA TOUR.
SHAUN MICHEEL: Yeah, so I've been -- leading into this year, I've been practicing at home a lot, playing a lot of golf. I never really thought about it, somebody asked me, a member of the club asked me at home, What tees are you playing from? I said, I don't know. I just go out to my home club and I play the back plates. I've been doing that since I was a kid.

You know, my first event this year was in Mississippi, and it was one of the most difficult courses I'd seen. Greens were 13 on the Stimpmeter and I kind of jokingly said, wow, I thought this was the Champions Tour, I didn't realize we were playing PGA TOUR golf.

But these guys, the competitive fire that they still feel, the nerves that they have, the putting -- look what Bernhard is doing at 61 years of age. Yeah, all of our swing speeds have come down, the distances we hit the ball has come down, but the fire and the drive to win, that never leaves you.

And guys are on the range, they're working at their game, they're in the fitness trailer trying to improve or trying not to lose any more than they already have.

But I've had -- like I said earlier, playing golf with my contemporaries was really something I was looking forward to. The conversations that I was having with the young players on the Web.com were vastly different. I mean, we were talking about games like Fortnite. I heard players talking about Fortnite and Call of Duty, and I just kind of -- I wanted to talk about investing strategies and 401(k), whatever the case may be. I am just kidding there.

But it's just different. It's a younger man's game out there, and these young kids on the Web were very eager, very ambitious. I was quite envious of them really in the way that they approached the game, the way that they played the game, and when I got on to the Champions, the three rounds outside of the Regions Tradition, of course, and this one, you get carts in the practice rounds, so you're playing more golf.

Now, I've played a lot more golf. Michael Bradley told me when I first got out here, You're going to play a lot more golf than you ever did on the PGA TOUR. I didn't understand what he meant until I got to Houston, believable event there at the Insperity, but it was three pro-ams for me, then three rounds of golf. And so it was a lot. It was a lot of golf. But it kept me off the driving range. It kept me from practicing. I was just out playing practice rounds, again, with all the guys, Tim Petrovic and Kenny Perry, and every one of these guys I played with numerous times in my playing career.

It's just a lot more fun. The camaraderie is there, the topics of conversation are quite a bit different, much more enjoyable for me, and it's where I belong. So I'm -- I've enjoyed my time.

The difficult part for me is that I'm not exempt. I'm not fully exempt. So I've been lucky enough, I've formed a lot of good relationships with players, with tournament directors, with sponsors in my career on the PGA TOUR that maybe they remember some of that and have given me a few sponsor's exemptions, so I'm very thankful for that.

But outside of this week, I'm not in Iowa. Maybe I'll get in Iowa next week. The only other events that I know I'm in for sure are this event this week, the Senior U.S. Open and the Senior Open Championship at Royal Lytham. Outside of that, it's either going to be Monday qualifying or relying on sponsor's exemptions to get in a few events, and then hopefully some good play will take over and I can get a victory, and of course that takes care of everything.

JOHN DEVER: If you're looking for a major champion next week, we can maybe make a call to the French Open tennis and get you in there. That will be four in four weeks.

Is it nice to go out there on that golf course and be seen and interact with some of the Rochester fans, the golf fans here and reconnect? You don't live near this neck of the woods, you don't get up here every year. Is it just nice to get back in that cradle of comfort with those people who you gave them a thrill 16 years ago this week?

SHAUN MICHEEL: Yeah, you know, that's one thing I've noticed. The fans last week were great. They were really supportive. I didn't hear anything negative that I've heard over the last few years from other places. I think the fans are -- I wouldn't say a little bit more different or less knowledgeable or more knowledgeable or less enthusiastic, but I've been to several stores this week, Wegmans up there, I was in there and somebody recognized me. Of course I was dressed like this. They're like, Hey, must be great to be back.

And so I've seen a lot of that. I've talked to a lot of the people. As a matter of fact, there's a young man I'm going to meet today that I had my picture taken with in '03, and I think he was five or six, and so now he's 21, 22 years of age. So I'm going to meet him here in just a few minutes. But it's been great. The fans, they remember people.

I was standing right here before I walked in here today, a gentleman said, I don't know if you remember this, but on the 2nd hole your wife stood on the top of my cart, I was working with such-and-such, and -- and so there's been a lot of great things. There are a ton of great memories for me, but it's nice to kind of be reminded of some of those by the Rochester natives.

JOHN DEVER: As you're walking down 18, do you stop at the spot you hit the 7-iron? Do you always make your way over to that side of the fairway?

SHAUN MICHEEL: I do.

JOHN DEVER: Why wouldn't you?

SHAUN MICHEEL: Like I said, I haven't been up here that many times. This is only the fourth time I've been back since 2003. But yeah, I like to go back. The superintendent was telling me that when I was back here in April that every year when they have these outing there's more divots taken around that plaque. You see people challenge themselves to hit a 7-iron to there. It's fun. It's a great club. It's a great membership. I've enjoyed really getting to know a lot of the members and board of directors and Jim McKenna, the president of the club and I have played a few times now. So I feel like I'm really starting to form a friendship, and they've embraced me as their champion, and it makes me feel really good.

JOHN DEVER: Well, you are one of the champions of the town and this club, and you've earned your stay here, and please enjoy the week and thanks for stopping by.

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