WORKDAY CHARITY OPEN

July 9, 2020

Collin Morikawa

Q. To begin with, an assessment of your round?

COLLIN MORIKAWA: Yeah, it was a really solid day. Got off to a good start with a lot of -- four pars but I was hitting them pretty close, hitting my iron shots good, tee shots felt great, and I knew if I just kept that going I was going to make some birdies. I didn't know how many but just kind of build momentum off of that. The iron shots is where I really felt comfortable today, and just took advantage of those approach shots.

Q. Do you have a bad taste in your mouth? They say that you have a bad taste in your mouth if you bogey the last hole.

COLLIN MORIKAWA: I mean, it happens. I think it was just slight fatigue. 16, 17, 18, I didn't hit my iron shots solid, and you're going to get away with some like I did on 16 and not like I did on 18. It was a pretty routine bunker shot, just didn't hit a good shot, didn't hit a good putt, but if I look at the entire day, it was very consistent, very solid. I can take a lot of positives heading into tomorrow.

Q. What did you do with your first weekend off from the PGA TOUR?

COLLIN MORIKAWA: I flew straight home, got some dinner, hung out with my girlfriend. We're fostering dogs, and just relaxed. It's always nice to be home, especially when you get a week off after everything started up, three weeks on the road. But same thing, take a few days off, get ready, get ready to play and get back out here. I was excited to come back. To have two tournaments at the same course, it's going to be a lot of fun this week.

Q. Your thoughts on this course and the challenge of getting ready for it?

COLLIN MORIKAWA: No, it's a beautiful track. It's a very tough course obviously, but you just have to map your way around it. You've got to be really smart. If you're not in the fairway, you've got to make sure you play smart. So I was playing smart but I felt good with my irons, so I was able to attack some pins when they were accessible, so we'll see what everything plays out tomorrow with the wind, weather, what everything is like.

Q. Your dogs' names?

COLLIN MORIKAWA: The one we're fostering right now is Crystal. She's a seven-and-a-half-year-old lab/pit bull mix, so she's really cute.

Q. Do you have a little emptiness or -- that's not the right word, but the fact that you came so close to catching Tiger, the name of Tiger, will that linger, or do you say hey, I came close?

COLLIN MORIKAWA: Yeah, I think anytime any record is compared to Tiger it's always going to be good. Obviously I came short, but he obviously ended his at 25, so he started his 142, sometime after that. But yeah, would I miss the cut now or 10 tournaments later? Whatever. It's always going to be -- I'm always going to look at the positives. I don't want to miss cuts. But the game, I learned a lot from those two days. I learned a lot last week. I learned a lot kind of the prep Monday through Wednesday with my coach. So you kind of reset, get ready for this week, and every week is a new week, so you've just got to get ready, and the game felt good. So we've got three more days of the same thing.

Q. Could you summarize what you did learn?

COLLIN MORIKAWA: You know, I just had to kind of look back at my stats, see what I wasn't doing well, what I did differently, what I was playing well, whether it was at Colonial or before the quarantine, and I just wasn't hitting my irons as well. I wasn't giving myself chances to make birdie, and if I did, I wasn't converting. I just had to work on some iron shots, work on the swing a little bit and just go back to the basics.

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