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THE MEMORIAL TOURNAMENT PRESENTED BY NATIONWIDEMay 29, 2019Bryson DeChambeauDublin, Ohio MODERATOR: Welcome defending champion Bryson DeChambeau to the Media Center. BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: A lot of people here. MODERATOR: I know you were here a few weeks ago for Media Day. How does it feel to be back in competition mode? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: Competition mode, I played for the last -- being back here, moving my game in the right direction, working hard in my golf game, golf swing. And just super positive about what's moving forward. This is a pretty big low for me, I would say, the past year and a half. And it's good. I think it's good to have this because from these lows I usually become better in the end. And so coming here this week gives me a lot of great memories, coming back to Jack's place. Did really well last year, and hopefully I can do it again. MODERATOR: This is the first opportunity this year to defend your title. How does that change your mindset going into this week? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: Defending, to me, it's not necessarily -- I don't give much thought to that. I don't know why people make it a big deal. For me it's more about it's a tournament week, I know the golf course very well. I'm super comfortable with it. I love the grass. I love the greens, and just the atmosphere is great. That's what I'm more comfortable with, and I enjoy it. That's what makes me play well. Q. Most people wouldn't think that because of the way you swing, that you would have lows and that you would have to make adjustments or changes to your game. Can you just talk about how obviously that's not true and what the struggles have been about? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: So obviously everybody in the game of golf has closure rate. So like the toe opens, the toe closes, right? And so from my perspective, I thought I had a pretty darned good understanding of the golf swing about this time last year. I didn't hit it very well last year. But there were points in time last year I felt like I had the golf swing under control and I knew what was happening. And I truly didn't. There were things biomechanically that I didn't understand, that I'm still learning today. It's just an ever-growing process for me and my knowledge and pursuit of the biomechanics of the golf swing. And I think when you don't have a complete view, you're going to be susceptible to lows. Everybody is susceptible to lows. Mine hopefully aren't as low as some others. And this to me is my lowest of lows. I really don't feel like I can play much worse. I missed the cut by one, twice now, pretty much, and out of the three times, and it's literally the worst I could have done. The one I missed by a couple more was because I got really bad lies at the PGA. I couldn't hack it out. When you look at it that way, from my perspective, I really don't believe that it can go much lower. You never know, knock on wood, it could happen. Personally for me I feel like this is as low as it's going to go. I just have to keep running, I have to keep just scratching at the door, keep going with trying to understand why does this dispersion happen, why do I have this range of possibility of shots? What is allowing that to happen, biomechanically, not rhythmically, biomechanically. And it's unfortunate because nobody understands it all and you can't just go ask someone, Hey, what's the reason for this? They can give you a generalized answer, but they don't truly know. They don't know every facet of motion that's occurring in every independent motion of the body. That's the trouble, you're just trying to search for things a little bit to see what is affecting that shot, why is it doing that. And so it's just -- you have to go back through your checklist, things that you do understand and kind of branch off of that. When you go down a rabbit hole and it doesn't work, you pull yourself out and find ways that work better. I don't know if that answered it. Q. On the other side of that, the mental side, are you a believer in horses for courses, and being back here, does it fit your game, or do you kind of stay away from that stuff? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: Definitely, you could say it fits my game. If you have all the shots and you can execute all the shots from your own technique, then you can play really any golf course. It's just about assessing the conditions at hand, you know? And it's a little bit of luck. There's obviously a little bit of luck in the game. So, yeah, I mean the golf course is something that I do enjoy playing. I enjoy the test that is required out here. Great ball-striking, and then good putting, speed control. You need great speed control out here. And that's something that I'm usually pretty good at, is speed control, and usually good ball-striking. But, look, again, this is a process that's going to be a lifetime. I know it and I understand it and I'm okay with it. I'm okay that I'm not playing well. But guess what? I would say everyone should be concerned because when I'm not playing well, that's usually when I figure stuff out. So, you know, for me that's a good thing. Q. I saw you have some new Cobra MB irons in the bag. Can you talk about what's different it between those irons and the previous irons? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: Look, I love the Forged One Lengths. I play them right now. The only difference that we found is a little bit more consistency in the spin rate. And that's just because it's a smaller blade. Personally, for me, I think there's not as big of a change in the gear effect, I think. That's what I hypothesize right now. And the smash factor isn't necessarily the same as my Forged One Lengths. The Forged One Lengths are maybe a little more consistent around the board, but the spin rate changes. In windy conditions I can't consistently know what's going to come out because of the spin change. That's what we're kind of delving into. It's not finalized, but for this week we're going to try and see how it works. This has been working great. Into-the-wind shots are the easiest it's been for me in a long time. I'm very happy about that. And we'll see where it takes us. Q. Is it the same length? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: Yeah, no change there. Personally I've done it since 2011. I'm super comfortable with it. I love it. Makes it easier for me not having to switch all the time with my body postures, those different clubs. Q. Was there a couple of things specifically each week, the PGA, whatever, that you learned, you picked up from that week? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: It's golf swing. It's understanding what motions work and what motions don't. I try and look at every single isolated aspect of the body. So I could go and work on internal and external rotation, see where that needs to be best fit. And you start compounding isolated motions together to see how that dynamically affects the motion. I don't know if that made sense to you at all. But what I mean by that is take one position, put it here, take another position, put it here. The body, upper humerus, humeral motion. When you have right shoulder protraction, retraction, elevation, de-elevation, adduction, abduction, you know. So you have all these different motions and you try to add pieces to the puzzle in the golf swing to be able to understand where that face is moving in space. The next thing in golf is going to be repeatability. We have all this information on ground reaction force stuff, but it's going to be repeatability. That's the next, I guess you could say, Holy Grail. Q. Are you trying to drag the club through the impact zone square, are you trying to throw the club and get it square right at impact? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: I'm trying to have -- for all my internal allowable errors, because I get different acceleration profiles to different swings, I want to be able to have a certain tolerable amount of error that allows me to have allowable ball flights, okay? So what that means is that if I place it let's say an inch back, it's going to have a different shot shape, but it's going to be acceptable and it's going to come right back to the target. If I place it a little more up, it's going to go dead straight, dead straight. Place it a little too far up, it's going to go left and cut back. It may not be the shot I hit, but it's the shot that at the end of the day is going to end up right where I need it to be. And then if you put wind into that, it's a whole different set of scenarios. You want to be able to put yourself on one side of the spin axis. But for me -- I don't know where I was going with that. It's just about repeatability at the end of the day. Q. Were you and Tiger together when you shot that Bridgestone ad when you're at the chalkboard? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: Yeah. Q. What's he like with a director, what are you like, and what do you think of his acting ability? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: I mean, look, first off, it was a lot of fun hanging out with him. And he's always been nice to me, as I've always said. And he taught me a few things, I guess you could say, from an acting perspective. Personally I thought that I did a better job. But he didn't think so. We go back and forth, essentially, is what I'm trying to say, and we jab each other a little bit. Really we have a good time in those situations. It's worked for us. We enjoy it. We appreciate it, too. And we wouldn't be here without them, our sponsors. Look, he's a human being, too, man. That's the cool part about it, is when you really look at him and appreciate him for being a human being, I think he likes that. And from my perspective I respect him because of that. He just wants to be himself. Q. Did he teach you things about acting? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: Oh, I can't really remember, but it was very short and sweet. He was like, It's easy. It's not hard. Just don't think about this, Bryson. I'm like, I can't. I can't. I'm overanalyzing the lines and what makes sense and what doesn't. And he's just like, Say it. It's okay. It's not a big deal. Just do it. One of those things he was messing with me, like he always does. Q. He really kills that moment when he shows the boredom in your lecture. BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: Oh, yeah. It was a great commercial. Bridgestone did a great job. Hopefully there's more to come. That would be awesome. Q. Just to get back to the other thing we were talking about, have you been working with Mike on this period of -- your low period, first? Second of all, when you were younger and you didn't have all this equipment that could tell you all this information, how did you figure it out back then? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: Back then I figured it out truly by going back to the golf machine and relying a little bit on timing. I had to kind of be great with rhythm because I had a massive closure rate right before impact, a huge handle rotation through impact. And a lot of it was timing driven. I talked to Mike quite a bit. But it's gotten to the point for me where I'm doing a lot of this internally, trying to understand it internally. And then every once in a while I'll get some help from some other people at certain times just to try and understand from a biomechanics perspective what's happening. Look, nobody knows the full picture about the biomechanics, so we're all trying to figure it out right now in science. And that's the cool part about it, is I get to go talk to different people. I talked to somebody in Sydney, Australia, about some stuff on the putting green, two days ago, actually. I'm trying to get as many pieces of the puzzle and put them into the puzzle to make it work, you know? And so Mike's been a father figure to me for a long time. And I always respect him and appreciate him for that. Yeah, we talk about things all the time still. It's not like I don't talk to him. For now he needs to be home taking care of other people. It's that time in his life, and he knew it and I knew it and we were both okay with that. Do I call him quite a bit? Yeah. All the time. Q. I know you're testing a bunch of different putters. Is there something in the feel or the data that you're looking for specifically? Have you made a decision yet what you're going with? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: No, not yet. Not yet. And I can't speak on that, unfortunately, not yet. Not yet. Q. Since last year's win, have you watched a replay of the final round? If you did -- BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: No. Q. Never watched it at all? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: It's history for me. I am as good as I am now. I'm only as good as my last week, and if I look at it from that standpoint, I'm always going to be trying to get better. If I go off of what I did last year and I'm content with it, I can go into it being content with it, but my technical aspect is not there, so I'm going to play really bad because of it. Q. Thinking you watch it and maybe you see something that you pick up and say, oh, I was doing that last year, I'm not doing that, but you might pick out something to help you improve? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: Yeah, and I think it's very difficult back then to see exactly -- you've got to think, too, I wasn't hitting it good, so I wouldn't even want to look at it. Shoot, yeah, I can look back and say, oh, I was doing this and that's the reason why, and it relates to now, it makes sense now, yeah, but I feel like my time is better used on the range in just doing what I'm doing right now. And going into, okay, that's acceptable, that's not acceptable tolerance of a mis-hit or -- all I care about is literally my worst, worst shot, where is that going? Where is that going to go? And if I can get that to where I miss it and hit it really bad and it goes dead straight, that's all I care about. If I can just swing it as bad as I possibly can and it goes dead straight, that's pretty darn good. That's what I'm trying to achieve. Q. You're very analytical, but you can be very emotional. On 18 when you won it, you celebrated pretty well. The whole celebration thing is a big deal in sports and baseball after a home run. Where are you on that scale of just a little wave and getting totally excited and doing a Tiger fist pump? Maybe not just after a win, but after a great shot or something like that, and where do you stand on celebration? BRYSON DECHAMBEAU: I can be one of the most emotional people out there. As a kid I was very emotional growing up. I got frustrated a lot growing up, mad, and I was happy at times when I won. That's who I am. That's who I've always been. I'm very passionate. I love this sport because of it. Being a professional nowadays, you have to be -- you have to act the right way. Now, looking at it from when you're winning, I think it's cool when you get to show that emotion. I think it's amazing. It's a part of sport in general that I don't think gets enough talk, you know, about the emotion, the emotional toll that -- that emotional expression is a build-up of a considerable amount of hard work in a long period of time, and it's a build-up all to that one moment that you've prepared for your whole life and it happens. And it's possibly one of the most incredible feelings you could ever have in your body, just the endorphins, the dopamine, the release, all of that, it's the greatest high you'll possibly ever have. MODERATOR: Thank you. Good luck this week. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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