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DP WORLD TOUR CHAMPIONSHIP, DUBAI

November 19, 2019

Danny Willett

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

STEVE TODD: Delighted to be joined by defending champion, Danny Willett.

I'm sure coming back here this week brings back some very special memories. Just give us your thoughts on defending your title this week.

DANNY WILLETT: Yeah, it's always nice to come back and defends anywhere in the world. You know, for it to be the final event of the year in Dubai, obviously with the new format, 50 guys here and a really strong field again this year, yeah, it's good fun.

We'll see how the week pans out, how the weather and stuff are looking. Yeah, I'm sure we'll get four great days of golf, four exciting days of golf for everyone that comes up. Yeah, hopefully on Sunday we're in a similar position.

STEVE TODD: You've just been talking in some other interviews about how special it was to win that tournament, given everything you've gone through. Reflect on that and how pleased you are to have then kicked on from that victory.

DANNY WILLETT: Yeah, it was obviously -- yeah, we weren't sure if we were going to win again with all the injuries, and it was nice to come back and do it on such a big stage against such a great field.

Obviously coming down the stretch with Patrick and Jon Rahm posting scores, and yeah, just to prove to myself that when I get in contention, I'm pretty good at closing out golf tournaments, and it was obviously after everything that happened, it was, yeah, a pretty special moment, especially with all the family here and friends.

Any win in your career is a pretty special moment, but yeah, the bigger the event and the bigger the emotion, always makes it feel even better.

Q. You said last year that when you won, in terms of the body, you were trying to get 100 percent. Where are you now with that?
DANNY WILLETT: Yeah, body-wise is good, pretty good, anyway. We're not in the physio bed anymore. We're back in the gym training, working out, doing whatever we want basically. The swing moves are always a continuous thing. We're always getting work on that and we're always trying to get better and change things. In terms of body-wise, apart from a bad night's sleep or whatever it is, or you travel badly, just the normal things that I'm sure everyone kind of goes through on a day-to-day basis, we're pretty solid.

Q. Would you say in terms of your swing, how far have you got to go with that?
DANNY WILLETT: I think we'll be working forever. I don't think there's an end goal, really, with the swing. We'll keep trying to get better. I'll keep changing things, if I feel like it will help me with what I'm doing, and yeah, just a never-ending process, really, where you might have felt something two years ago that was good and then because it kind of got bedded in, you lost that feeling and you've got to change it to get the same thing, but a different way. It's how the game goes. It's a strange old game. We'll keep working for the next 30 years.

Q. When you look back at last year, do you look at it as a turning point or something that you saw coming?
DANNY WILLETT: No, we were going down a nice path. There had been a few nice things in there that I had seen that I liked, and yeah, winning percentage-wise was pretty low. So for me it was more of the progressions I was seeing on a daily basis that I was more excited about.

If we had not won here, if we had finished second, the movements would still have been exactly the same. Just a few things might not have gone our way and that's how the game goes. Before we came here and won I was really happy with where I was going and really happy with the progressions I was making and we were obviously moving to America the January afterwards and getting all that in place to start with the PGA TOUR stuff a bit more seriously.

Yeah, I think it was probably halfway through that year we started to see a lot of good stuff and then you're a bit more confident in what you're doing and the inevitability comes back of if I keep doing this and I keep doing it better and better and better, we'll hopefully have a few more chances.

Q. You've had a few coaches. What is the thing that marks Foles, the one thing about him as a coach?
DANNY WILLETT: You know, I think anyone who has ever met him knows that he's a charismatic guy. The time when we first got together, I was in a pretty low place, and you kind of needed that. Me and Mike are really close. Pete was like a father figure in how he kind of put his arm around you and we'd go over some things, and I'm still really close with them guys.

But Foles just brings a different energy to the table in how he does things with his work and backs it up -- with whatever we do, he backs it up with a lot of science and facts, and we use TrakMan data to get to the bottom of some things.

Yeah, he's an incredibly intelligent guy, and I like the fact that he's always wanting to change and wanting to get better and wanting to do things to increase his knowledge of what he's teaching. I'm the same in what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to increase and gain knowledge in what I do so that I feel like I can choose which ones I want to kind of use.

Q. Do you think you're back now to the standard of golf that you were leading up to the Masters victory or is there still some ways to go?
DANNY WILLETT: I don't know. There was still a lot of things at Augusta that I couldn't do. You know, the body was still a constant battle before Augusta. You know, you look back there, and Augusta was obviously my week, and that doesn't always happen on Sunday on a back nine.

In terms of playing-wise, I think I could potentially be better than what I was then. Very different ball flight. Very different golf game and very different outlook on probably what is a good or a bad day or how things go.

So I think as a whole, the potential is there to be better. Whether that means you're going to win anything else, no. But been what we're doing, the potential is definitely better.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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