THE MEMORIAL TOURNAMENT

May 31, 2001

Chris Smith

CHRIS SMITH: I played really well today. It was -- believe it or not, it was a fairly relaxing 66.

CHRIS SMITH: I did. I thought I would be nervous today. I really didn't know what to expect playing here. I've looked forward to this, oh, for a mere ten years, probably. So, you know, I was geared up, ready to go and I was the first one out this morning. It was cold and I had way too much adrenaline going and hooked one into the left trees and punched a 5-iron about 40 yards short of the green and hit what I thought was a pretty good pitch up there, about 12 or 15 feet short of the hole, I would say and I made that. I think that was when I took my first breath, when I was walking off the first green. After that, I felt pretty good. And it did. It got me rolling. I birdied the second hole, and then I was kind of off to the races.

CHRIS SMITH: I felt really good about the chances of getting in off the Money List. It's one of those deals where you want to play so bad that you don't really feel confident until the deadline has passed. So I was calling the Tour office Thursday a couple times and last Friday I called them again, and finally the deadline closed and they said, "Quit calling us, you're in." At that point, I felt I was pretty safe.

CHRIS SMITH: I did. I have. I've just never gotten one. It just makes it that much more fun, really, to be here this year. One of my goals at the start of the year -- you have all these goals, and I feel like for me, this is almost a major, and one of my goals was to try to figure out a way to get in off the Money List, whatever I needed to do. And so, to be able to do that, it's pretty rewarding, and it's a lot of fun because it was one of the things I really wanted to do this year.

CHRIS SMITH: Yeah, I don't mind that it's a little soft right now. Right about now is how I'd like to play it all the time. You have to carry the ball a long way. You hit a lot of drivers. It's playing long. The greens are extremely fast. You know, you kind of have to position yourself around, but you still have to hit it out there pretty far. So it's kind of playing the way I like it right now.

CHRIS SMITH: Yeah. You would probably know better than I would.

CHRIS SMITH: No, I hit 3-wood on 18. I hit five or six drivers.

CHRIS SMITH: I hit 3-wood on 2, and I think I had 132 yards and hit a gap wedge in there about ten feet. Then I birdied 4. I had 6-iron on No. 4. Hit a good shot there about 20 feet below the hole. Then I birdied 8. I hit a little 7-iron on No. 8 and hit that about, I would guess, 20, 22 feet left of the hole on 8. Then I birdied 10. I hit a driver, gap wedge on 10 and hit that one about a foot and a half. Birdied 11. I hit driver, 5-wood on the back of the green on 11 and 2-putted from 20, 25 feet there and 2-putted. Then hit wedge on 12. That one came back to about two and a half feet. Made birdie there. Then I 3-putted 13 from not very far. I think I had about a 30-footer the first putt and then a 20-footer coming back the second putt. That was the first time I fell asleep a little bit. As soon as you do that -- the ball was still picking up speed when it got to the hole. Made bogey there. Then came back on 15 and I hit driver, 6-iron on 15 about 25 feet below the hole and 2-putted that one. I can't believe I remembered those.

CHRIS SMITH: Gary and I were the same age, yeah.

CHRIS SMITH: You know I saw Mr. Nicklaus this week and I said, "Where's Gary?" I played both days, and then I saw Mr. Nicklaus yesterday after the clinic and I said, "I still haven't seen Gary."

CHRIS SMITH: Yeah, I really felt like I -- yesterday, I could kind of feel that I was starting to get control of the ball again. The last couple of weeks -- I didn't play last week and just worked with my teacher. The two weeks before that, the Byron Nelson, Colonial, I didn't feel like I really knew where the ball was going. I worked pretty hard at it last week and hit a lot of balls, and yesterday I kind of started feeling like I knew where it was going to go again, and I was hitting shots where it was looking. My teacher was out with me yesterday and he said, "You're getting it. I think you're going to be all right. You're swinging good enough that if you get out there and you get rolling, one might jump out of the bag." And I just looked at him, rolled my eyes; he's trying to pump me up. That's really kind of what happened today. After saving par on the first hole, I birdied the second hole, and just about every shot I hit, I looked up and it was going where I wanted it to go. And I just I felt like I knew where the ball was going today and I could control the distance again and was able to hit some shots when I wanted to.

CHRIS SMITH: A lot. We played quite a bit, yeah.

CHRIS SMITH: Believe it or not, I shot 64 one time. That was -- I think I want to say that was maybe my senior year. It was sometime in the spring, too. But we used to -- we got to play out here quite a bit. There's a lot of great things, good going to school here, but that's one of the things, looking back at, that I thought was pretty good.

CHRIS SMITH: We always came to the tournament and you see guys play here and come down here and I thought, "Man, that would be all right to go in there and do whatever they are doing, and here we are."

CHRIS SMITH: No, I haven't. (Laughter.)

CHRIS SMITH: The rain. (Laughter.) You know, when you're in college, it's no big deal. You come out and you slide down the mud and it's no big deal. It just was something -- it was just different. I don't know if it was because I -- you know, I was so into the fact of, Ohio State, and I loved it here, I knew Mr. Nicklaus really well. I don't know, it was a combination of all those things, but it was just that it was different. You come out here and, you know, it was special. That's why I was looking so forward to playing the tournament some day and to be able to do this year; it's really neat. It's something that you get -- it's like teeing off in the U.S. Open. About the only other time that I really have the jitter bugs going at the start. That's how I felt this morning. At 8:00, there's nobody out there; there were a lot for 8:00 actually, but relatively speaking, there's not a lot of crowd around the first tee, and I still felt like I was getting ready to tee it up in the Open. It's a tournament that you wanted to be a part of.

CHRIS SMITH: It's an Indiana company. It actually is dry beans. It is a dry bean product. They make -- you-name-it kind of bean. They make 15-bean soup, things like that. The guy is a golf nut in Indiana and is really into golf. Actually, he drove over yesterday to watch me play my practice round yesterday, and they have been great. I get a lot of questions about it, and I was telling him that yesterday, and he said, "Good, that's what we want." I had one guy at the start of the year, thought it was my own designer line of clothes. He said, "Ham beans, what a great name for clothes." I said, "No. These are beans." (Laughter.) They have been great. It's nice. I enjoy being able to represent somebody that's local, too, that I actually see face-to-face once in awhile, and that was Indiana, they are worldwide, actually, and they have 60 employees is all they have, and they are all in Indianapolis. It's really something. They ship every one of their beans out of Indianapolis. So it is kind of neat for me to be part of something that actually is local.

CHRIS SMITH: Actually, it wasn't downhill. It was really downwind, and I didn't hit any cart paths. That's the first question: "How many times did you hit the cart path?" I actually hit it right down the middle of the fairway. It was on a Sunday at the Honda two years ago, I was in last place, and it didn't matter if I shot 62 the last day. I still think I was going to finish in last. They did split tees; so I was the last group off. It was about a 35-mile-an-hour wind and we got to the last driving distance hole, and I was playing with one of my good friends, Bo Van Pelt and we were both playing bad, decided to see how far we could hit on the measuring hole. And I hit one, got up in the jetstream a little bit, the fairways were fast, and the thing landed probably 325, and it rolled another 100 yards. I get that question all the time. I hit driver, wedge on a 602-yard par 5 and made par.

CHRIS SMITH: That's right. Couldn't hit the green with a wedge and couldn't get it up-and-down. (Laughs).

CHRIS SMITH: As long as people know me, I don't care. I know what Dave is thinking because -- I always get questions about the clown, and there's a story about a clown that I -- and I don't like being known about the Skins Game. I played against this clown, so I'm not going to go into that. The drive is good, but don't ask me about the clown. (Laughter.)

CHRIS SMITH: You know what, if we're here Sunday, I'll tell the story.

CHRIS SMITH: I'm going down to bw3's on campus and get some hot ones --

CHRIS SMITH: You've got to go to the one that smells funny down at campus. Get the whole experience. We've been -- you know, we have kind of the week planned out. Obviously, I didn't plan on practicing a lot. I practiced a lot last week and I was looking forward to being here and playing in the tournament and seeing some people that we haven't seen. So we are going to stick to our schedule. We're going to take our kids down to campus today, and our big excitement yesterday was we drove my son past the apartment that we lived in when we were here. So we're just doing pretty mindless stuff. We're going to go down to campus and eat lunch today, and get the kids some tee shirts and sleep in tomorrow, and come out and do the same thing tomorrow, I hope.

CHRIS SMITH: I think I'll be better tomorrow. As I was playing well today, I felt pretty good, and I just needed to get that -- it's a lot like the Open. I just needed to get that first shot under my belt. I think I'll be all right. No matter what happens, I had a heck of a day today and I feel like I'm playing good. It's a golf course I'm comfortable on. As long as I can keep my wits about me, I think I should be all right. I think I'll feel good tomorrow. I think I'll be excited to play. I just hope the weather is decent.

CHRIS SMITH: I think this year, I truly feel comfortable out here. I think that I finally have convinced myself that I can compete out here, and I think that's the biggest thing. I worked pretty hard on my short game the last year or so, and I think that's helped the scoring a lot. I think I'm chipping the ball better, and I think I'm putting better. I think another thing that's been running for me is I'm having fun. The years I played well on the Nike Tour, BUY.COM TOUR, I had a lot of fun and I was playing well, and the years that I've been out here, I think that I didn't have nearly enough fun, and took it way too seriously and thought that it was life or death, what was going on out here. I had a caddy, a friend of mine that played golf here at Ohio State, Matt Minister, is caddying for me this year. We've been able to have fun and relax and just let whatever is going to happen, happen. And I've been able to play better.

CHRIS SMITH: Minister.

CHRIS SMITH: He's from Worthington.

CHRIS SMITH: No. He was on the -- his first year was the year after I graduated, and we were still living here. So I got to know -- I was still hanging out with the guys and playing with him and stuff. I got to know him then and we became friends. He played the Golden Bear Tour and missed Tour School last fall, and I've been asking him for a year, at least, to caddy for me. And the phone rang the day after he missed the first stage Tour School, and I knew what he was calling for and he said is that job still available and I said, "Yeah, I've love to have you." So, we have a good time. I think he's helped me relax on the course, too.

CHRIS SMITH: Not very often. You know, I tried -- the way that I play the best is if I just kind of let it go. If I'm really struggling with the way I'm hitting it, then I'll try to back it off a little bit and try to hit it in the middle of the green. But I felt a day like today, you know, I felt pretty good looking at any of them. You know, like No. 18, if I didn't feel good, I wasn't going to shoot at that pin on 18. But I felt like I could hit it pretty close there and I hit a good shot. If I start laying back a little bit and playing conservative, it affects my game because it's really not -- it's not the way I play the best. It's real easy for me to get to where I'm getting too cautious and I don't hit any good shots if I back it off too much.

CHRIS SMITH: Oh, for sure. Yeah. This would probably be -- this is as important, really, to me as any other tournament. I don't think there's anything that would be more important to me.

CHRIS SMITH: You know, last fall I got inducted into the Hall of Fame, and I went to a football game when I got inducted into that. What was that was really the first time that we had been on campus in about three or four years. So, we just -- you know, you get -- you're traveling so much and we're on the road so much, and the last thing you want to do when you have a week off is travel again. So we really haven't been over here very much.

CHRIS SMITH: I hope I see you all tomorrow.