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THE MEMORIAL TOURNAMENT

June 4, 2005

Jeff Sluman

DUBLIN, OHIO

JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: Jeff Sluman, David Toms, Bart Bryant and Fred Couples will share the 54 hole leader position this week and they are the winners of this week's Crestor Charity Challenge and in their name a donation of $50,000 will be given to the health care charity of your choice. And the Columbus Children's Hospital will receive $50,000 from The Memorial tournament and Crestor.

JEFF SLUMAN: Thank you very much. I'm going to give ours to the University of Chicago. I think it's a wonderful facility, and my wife who just joined me works there presently, so I can't think of a better health care outfit to give it to.

Q. On with the tournament, great round today, kept that position, had to come out and play pretty well today

JEFF SLUMAN: I sure did.

JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: to maintain that spot. Why don't you talk about your day today and then we'll go into questions.

JEFF SLUMAN: I've been feeling more and more comfortable over the ball, and I went out today and played really well tee to green. I got off to a wonderful start, made about you can probably tell me, but probably close to 40 footer on the 1st hole for birdie. Then after that I just hit really a bunch of good shots. Nowhere really in any kind of trouble that I was going to possibly make bogey until 13, and that was probably the only errant shot I hit all day.

Looking back, it was a very, very solid round and I had a lot of birdie opportunities, and that's what it's going to take tomorrow, and whatever happens happens. David is playing great, Freddie obviously has played well here in the past and Bart Bryant and all that. There's a ton of players right around the lead and probably anybody what did Tiger finish?

JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: 8.

JEFF SLUMAN: Well, anybody within 8 under has probably got a pretty good chance (laughter).

Q. Fred said that he had to, I guess, adjust his game plan when he saw how low everybody was going the first couple of days and that the conventional wisdom is that this course gets tougher as it plays faster because maybe the ball runs into the rough more. Why is this birdie barrage continuing to happen out there as the course plays faster?

JEFF SLUMAN: Well, I would think that we had perfect weather and the absence of wind, and then the greens aren't as firm as I think they'd probably like them to be. So the golf course is playing a little shorter and guys are driving it in the fairway, I guess. That would really be the explanation.

I only missed one fairway, and you're supposed to probably shoot a pretty good round out here if you do that. I can't speak for everybody else, but that would be my guess on why the scores were so low.

Wind and firm greens really make a tremendous difference, and we really haven't had that this week.

Q. As hard as the fairways are rolling, the greens are holding, aren't they?

JEFF SLUMAN: The greens are holding great, and they probably all will have sub air next year and they'll be like concrete. And they're so true and all that. They've done such a great job.

You hit a putt there and you can tell 10, 12 feet away sometimes that it's going in. But it's just so true.

The 5s are still accessible. I don't really try and take a rip at 11, but I saw where Tiger hit it, and I played with Lucas Glover and he had probably a little over 200 into the green there. All of a sudden you're looking at 5, 15 and 11, if you're playing well, all of a sudden par is basically 69. So it's just kind of that day where the direction of the wind, you can really take advantage of it.

Q. 5 you hit too much?

JEFF SLUMAN: Yeah, I thought I hit a really good second shot and it hit right on the back edge of the green and I didn't get it up and down from the rough.

Q. The greens seemed to be a big issue today, Jeff, and your putting in general seems to be at a premium. How comfortable with this grip of yours and is it surprising that only three weeks in you've been able to master it so far?

JEFF SLUMAN: You start making putts and it looks great and feels great and you should have a lot of confidence in it, and that's basically what happened. I would expect that to continue really.

The putt I hit on 18, I didn't think there was any chance in the world, and I almost made that. I hit a tremendous amount of good putts out there. Really that's all you can do. Sometimes they go in and sometimes they don't, but certainly I'm making my fair share.

Q. Isn't distance control the hardest thing to manage when you make a putting change?

JEFF SLUMAN: You know, that was the thing that I would have guessed when I made this change that I would have had a problem with, and there's been no problem at all. It's actually been a lot better than the way I was putting the last couple of years. My distance control is bad because my stroke was so bad. This stroke is solid, and all of a sudden you can just because I'm hitting it the same way every time, it's a lot easier to kind of dial it in.

Q. Like you had two real 15?

JEFF SLUMAN: 15 was a heck of a good two putt there. I could have putted it off the green and had 30 yards left, literally, if you hit it just a little too hard.

Q. And then 18?

JEFF SLUMAN: Yeah, I was waiting for the clown's nose to putt it through, but I hit it there. I had to put it up into the fringe and die it there, and all of a sudden halfway down the hill, I said, "how do I make this silly thing?"

Q. Did you say something to your caddie after that almost went in?

JEFF SLUMAN: He said, "if you can two putt 15, this should be a breeze." I said, "well, why don't you come up here and putt it then."

Q. Did anyone teach you this thing or did you just start

JEFF SLUMAN: I just asked Chris a little bit, DiMarco, and he just gave me he grips it a little different than I do, but I saw Billy Andrade, Craig Stadler, to name a few guys, kind of grip it the way I'm gripping it. Billy threw it right in, and he said it was just amazing right away how easy it was so putt. The change that I made was just going to a round grip versus a putting grip I guess you could say.

Q. Do you have to talk yourself into it to make a putting change?

JEFF SLUMAN: It took me a long time to consider it. I was just putting so poorly for so long, what do you have to lose at that point?

Q. I'll apologize in advance for not checking your results this year. I don't know what you've been doing leading into this event, but did he see this coming, setting the pace for 54 holes?

JEFF SLUMAN: Well, I told my wife, I said, "you know, I'm playing really good golf, I just have to be patient." I know I've only missed one cut this year, so I mean, obviously if you've made everything but one cut, you must be playing pretty good. With this putting change, it adds a little more confidence. I just said, "I'm just going to stay patient," and I know I'm going to break out of this and good things are going to happen. I can't tell you exactly when because if I could, I probably would be living in Las Vegas. But overall, I just felt like I had a pretty good chance to play some good golf very soon in the future.

Q. Why the reluctance to make a switch? Is it because it was an unconventional method or is there some other reason in the mind that says I'm reluctant to make a switch?

JEFF SLUMAN: Good question. I can't really give you an answer for that. I was struggling with the belly putter. I used it for about a year, and I just finally said, "you know, I've got a little better but I haven't gotten a lot better," and I didn't think my stroke was really that much better. So I said, "well, what's everybody else having success with?" I kind of looked around and saw all those other guys having success with that modified kind of grip, and I said, "I'm going to do it." That was really about it.

Q. When did you make the switch to the belly putter, and secondly, how long did it take to talk yourself into doing that?

JEFF SLUMAN: The belly putter I actually switched at this tournament last year and putted pretty poorly for about a two year stretch before that. It just kind of happened overnight. You know, you kind of lose your confidence, and it wasn't a whole lot of fun being out there. So I went to the belly putter.

It took a while to convince myself to do that. My brother told me like the week before, he said, "look, you've been so good with your eye hand coordination from table tennis to bowling to golf and everything, you just give yourself a week and just commit to it, you'll start putting better." So I did. I told myself at that time I wasn't going to be one of those guys with the belly that was going to if I had one bad putting round go back, and I said, "I'm going to take it through the end of the year and make an evaluation." I had some good days with it and some not so good days. Overall I kept looking at it and finally said maybe there's a better way than this.

Q. How many weeks this year have you hit the ball as well as you are right now?

JEFF SLUMAN: Hopefully every week. I mean, I've hit the ball

Q. Putting is really the only difference?

JEFF SLUMAN: Putting is the only thing. If I looked at my stats the last three or four years I've probably driven it longer and straighter and hit more greens than I did leading up 20 years before that in my career, so putting has really been basically the one thing holding me back.

Q. Just to get your reaction to this, on TV they asked Mr. Nicklaus why he picked you as a Presidents Cup captain. He said three reasons, one, because you knew the younger guys better than he did, two, because you had won a major and you saw yourself as a captain sometimes in the future, and three, because you're a nice guy.

JEFF SLUMAN: Well, that's an awful nice thing for him to say. That's a heck of a compliment coming from Mr. Nicklaus.

Q. Can we go through your birdies and bogeys? You made a 40 footer on No. 1?

JEFF SLUMAN: No. 1, I birdied 6, hit a nice drive down there, I think I had about 127 to the hole and hit a wedge 12 feet.

7, nice drive and I had to lay it up. I had about 80 yards there. That was probably about 14 feet.

12 was just a 9 iron. I think that was maybe another 12 footer.

I bogeyed 13, hit it left, kind of hit a high slice out of the trees, and I thought this could have been the all time break. It hit just it bounced into the lip of the bunker and plugged. It was going to be a I was just trying to hit it in the bunker, and I saw where it ended up and I wasn't very pleased with that because I thought if it got down in the flat part of the bunker it was a pretty basic up and down. So bogey there.

Then I hit two good shots on 15 and a nice two putt from God, that had to be 50 feet, I think.

Q. A lot of guys talk about every time they tee it up they're thinking about winning if they're going to compete. Was there a point during this stretch of the last say three years where you felt like you couldn't actually compete with the way your putting was?

JEFF SLUMAN: It was pretty tough. I just didn't think I could hit the ball close enough to really overcome missing a few greens. So it was difficult on me to go out there and feel like I could go 72 holes and not you'd like to think you can do it all the time, but the way I was putting, it was not impossible but it was highly unlikely that I was going to have maybe a bad 18 or 36 hole putting stretch or 27 holes, and you can't do that out here really and compete. You've got to be able to putt the ball and get it in the hole. I went from basically being about 30th on the typically 30th or 40th in the putting stats to like 160th. You're not going to I think what I've done putting is about 160th has been pretty good, so I must have been hitting the ball pretty good really.

But I've got a lot of confidence now, and this stroke enables me to do everything that I needed to do with putting regularly that I seemingly couldn't do.

I can't explain it. I'm happy that it's happening to me, and I don't see myself using any other grip for a while.

JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: Thank you, Jeff, for joining us.

End of FastScripts.

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