PGA CHAMPIONSHIP

August 4, 2020

Adam Scott

Harding Park Golf Club

Press Conference

JOHN DEVER: Good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. Welcome back to the 2020 PGA Championship here at TPC Harding Park. We are blessed to be joined by Adam Scott. Adam, welcome to your 20th PGA Championship. That's a round number.

ADAM SCOTT: There you go.

JOHN DEVER: So that means we've got to look back a little bit. You've had six top 10s in our championship, and believe it or not you have more rounds of 65 or better than anybody in championship history. You've had four of those. What matches up with your game and a PGA Championship layout by Kerry Haigh?

ADAM SCOTT: Yeah, well, look, I guess I have a pretty long relationship with Kerry Haigh, now that I've played 20 of these. He's done a fantastic job, very consistent throughout the years in setting up a challenge for us to play, but certainly he's always kept it very fair. It's a difficult thing to do because I think there's lots of factors.

The game has evolved. Guys are getting better. They're more athletic. Technology has advanced. Treading that line of difficult and fair is a tough one in golf course setup, so he's done a fantastic job over the years.

Yeah, I've shot a few good rounds at the PGA just not in 20 years, so four days in a row, so that'll be the goal this week.

Q. Just to go back, can you walk us through your idea of why you decided to wait until now to make your first start? Was it just the idea of staying at home, or was it more complicated than that?

ADAM SCOTT: It's probably more complicated than that, but once you got down to everything, it was just tough to figure out if I left home, when I can get back.

Traveling internationally at the moment and leaving the family somewhere with uncertainty about rules and regulations changing all the time, for example, with quarantine and self-isolations and all this kind of stuff just made it difficult to really feel confident that I'd leave and be able to go back essentially.

It was pretty clear things were changing, and when the TOUR was going ahead, I just for myself needed to make some kind of clear decision so I wasn't in two minds every week going forward from about June.

Q. Just to be clear, you stayed in Australia; you didn't go to the Bahamas, correct?

ADAM SCOTT: I went home to Australia, and then now my family is in Switzerland, and that's where we'll base for the rest of the year, I guess, at this point.

Q. You are coming here from Australia having -- we've seen you playing down there on social media. Obviously it's a lot cooler here. What do you do to adjust to distances, numbers, yardages? Do you get into launch monitor stuff? Do you take it on the course? Or is it something that you do by feel?

ADAM SCOTT: I think it's a feel thing. I got here on Friday, and I played the course Friday, Saturday, Sunday in very similar conditions I would say to what it is today.

And again, I played nine holes today. I've played several times, I guess, in this area over the years and understand the ball goes a little bit shorter. I really don't get on the TrackMan and bring it to an exact number. I kind of have my numbers, and I have soft numbers and kind of hard numbers, and they're give or take five yards here or there, and hopefully that's precise enough.

Q. What do you see as the biggest challenge on Thursday of jumping right back in at such a big event and such a difficult test?

ADAM SCOTT: Just the same as any other week. I mean, it's really just executing. This golf course this week, the way it's set up, is going to demand a little more of everybody and their game and penalize -- penalties are more harsh. You can hit some pretty good tee balls that might just end up in the rough and you're going to draw a lie that you can't get it on the green and you're scrambling. That's going to be the biggest test, how sharp is my scrambling probably. But I think I've tried to prepare like I would for any other event, and I feel like there's no reason why it shouldn't be good enough.

Q. It's been over a year between majors. It's the longest stretch since the 1940s. What does it mean to you to compete in a major again?

ADAM SCOTT: Well, there's no doubt the majors are kind of what everyone's careers are defined and measured by at the end of the day.

So it's great that we're back here playing for a major, and it's been over a year, which is a long stretch, but now there's seven in the next 12 months, I believe.

Q. 11 months.

ADAM SCOTT: 11 months, so that's exciting for me to think about, especially at this point in my career. I'd love to win a second major championship. It's all I focus on, really. This is a big opportunity for me, and so are the next 11 months.

Q. There will be plenty of sort of speculation and talk on the negatives of not having played until now, but what are the positives that you can bring having been refreshed until now, I guess?

ADAM SCOTT: Yeah, well, I definitely don't think I've kind of -- not that anyone is really burnt out, but given the circumstances and just seeing the rigmarole of the changes in protocols and things to get into the golf tournament, I can see potentially how some guys have kind of got a little bit worn out over the last weeks on TOUR. I certainly don't feel like I missed anything from that sense.

Maybe the week of Memorial there's a similar kind of setup to this in preparation for a tough test, but I don't think anything else was. I don't really think I've missed anything in the sense of preparation from competing.

Q. Has the family time freshened you, as well, I guess?

ADAM SCOTT: Yes and no (laughing). It took a while to get used to being a full-time dad, but it was great.

I think more so just the break at this point in my career. It had been probably 20 years since I'd been home in Australia at that time of year and for that length of time I hadn't been there, and I certainly enjoyed that very much, given whatever restrictions we were still under.

It was nice to be there with the family, and I think the break in some ways is going to prolong my career. You don't get that break; the seasons kind of bleed into each other now, and I've got events in Australia to play. There's no great breaks, and this from a career and a playing sense was a great break for me.

Q. Just going back to what you were saying about preparation, two things: Where did you play in North Carolina? And then secondly, in what ways has this been or felt different in terms of preparation for a major in the way that you did prep for it?

ADAM SCOTT: We were in South Carolina at Congaree Golf Club. The club there was very generous and let us use the facility even though they're closed at this time of year. It also served a great purpose for isolating because we didn't see anybody for a couple of weeks and did our isolation like we were meant to.

But really that felt like how I prepared a lot for major championships in the past. I've used Albany in the Bahamas in the past, and although that community has grown a lot in the past, you go back seven or eight years ago, it was just me practicing there, too, in the summer. Very little distraction. It felt very similar to what I've done.

I arrived here early, which I often do for majors and play normally before the crowds, but still just to get those extra days here and come to grips with the course, I don't feel like it's been very different at all, actually.

Q. Just to clarify, you went straight to Australia roughly after THE PLAYERS?

ADAM SCOTT: Yes.

Q. And then obviously the rules have now changed, but you came over early with the idea of having to do that 14 days --

ADAM SCOTT: That's right. It changed while I was doing the 14 days, yeah.

Q. You went straight from there to the place in South Carolina to do it the whole time there?

ADAM SCOTT: We stayed in South Carolina for the -- well, it was 12 days in the end, but in the middle of it they took away the 14-day isolation, yeah.

Q. Are you here now through the Masters? Do you know how you will handle that?

ADAM SCOTT: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think I'm here at the moment through the U.S. Open for sure. It seems like I'll be granted permission to come back to the United States through the PGA TOUR if I were to leave. So that's the plan, but at the moment I think I'll be away through the U.S. Open.

Q. You spend a lot of your home at home volunteering I heard at Caloundra. Can you tell us some of the jobs you did? I understand you also made some visits. You went to go see a club member who I guess had had a stroke at one point?

ADAM SCOTT: Right, yeah. Look, Tom is an old friend of mine, and he lives in my area. When we could, we managed to get together in golf clubs were the place that stayed open really during the pandemic down in Australia, so I managed to get to spend a bit of time with my old buddies back at home. Tom at Caloundra, and some of those things are things that I don't get to experience that much being part of a golf club atmosphere like when I was a kid and the club members, and although the bar was closed and other things were closed at the club, it was still fun to be in a golf club environment and now the back of the pro shop with Tom and catching up, and I don't get to do this stuff so much, so I took advantage of a couple of those opportunities with my mates back home and played some of the local courses, which was fun.

Hopefully stimulated some interest in golf at that time when there was no other sports and golf was the only thing going, so that's what myself and a couple of my buddies were up to.

Q. In coming to the decision to play this week, did you think that you may not play? Did you ever give that thought that you may not go to San Francisco?

ADAM SCOTT: Not fully. You know, it was very difficult watching news and trying to get information not being in the United States. There's a lot of beat up in some of the news. It was dragging on so long, the kind of layoff, that it was almost like should we just call it a season.

Once the majors were planned to go ahead, I really selfishly could have missed them. Back at the start of this interview I mentioned how the majors are so important to a player's career, and that's what I'm looking to do now, so I never really seriously considered skipping this week.

Q. Can you sympathize then with the likes of a fellow family man like Padraig Harrington and Lee Westwood who decided not to come, and are you shocked by the events going on back in Victoria?

ADAM SCOTT: Yeah, look, I feel for everybody in this situation. It's a very difficult decision. Certainly international travel is very complicated at the moment, and I fully understand Lee and Padraig weighing up the decision of not coming here, and it's a respectable decision. I don't think anyone is in any position to judge their decision on that.

And as far as Victoria, yeah, it's far from ideal. We'd tried to suppress the virus this entire time, and to have this outbreak is obviously going against what they're trying to achieve down there. I don't know what the answer is. I don't know those answers. Everywhere is struggling with it in one way or another.

Q. You're one of three players to have played here in '05, '09 and '15. Does that surprise you, and does it give you a pretty good grasp of this place?

ADAM SCOTT: I think it is a little surprising, but I seem to be getting on these kind of older lists much more often these days (laughter.)

But I haven't played particularly well here in any of these occasions. However, I think the setup is a lot different this time around.

I certainly think the greens have never been such a good surface. I mean, they've managed to keep a lot of poa out of these greens, and that was very pleasing for me and probably everyone coming here this week. They're pure. They've toughened the course up. Hopefully with a bit better focus and execution this week, I can perform a little better than I have here in the past. But it's a golf course that I feel very comfortable that I should be able to play well if I get my head down and perform.

JOHN DEVER: Adam, thanks so much for stopping by and best of luck all week long.