U.S. AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIP

August 11, 2020

Elis Svard

Bandon Trails

Quick Quotes

Q. You have to be excited with that round, and certainly you're going to advance to match play with that score.

ELIS SVARD: I sure hope so. If you tell me so, I will take your word for it and go home and pray.

Q. What is it like playing in your first USGA championship?

ELIS SVARD: It's wonderful. The course is excellent. Everything around it's perfectly set up. Even with the whole COVID situation going on, there's shuttles. There's nothing to complain about whatsoever.

Q. Obviously you've been in northern California for a while, but is there anything that compares to this in Sweden?

ELIS SVARD: It gets close but not really like this. I would say it's true links, even though I heard it was links and I was like, is it going to be links or American links? Yeah, I would say it's links. Even for people that live in the UK, they'll call this links.

Q. Tell me about the eagle you had on 3 because that really got you going.

ELIS SVARD: Yeah, that was a nice one. I started good, then I hit a good 3-wood just short of that center bunker, just made sure to cover the green bunker that's like 20 yards short of the green, flew it over there, got some good kicks up to about nine paces and just smashed it in the pin.

Q. So about 27 feet?

ELIS SVARD: Yeah, something like that.

Q. You made three more birdies --

ELIS SVARD: Yeah.

Q. And then a little bit of trouble on the way home but not enough to throw you out of kilter.

ELIS SVARD: I mean, I hope so. I had some serious issues on 16, so I hit my driver left, and then I tried to punch it back out, but I kind of crossed the fairway on the other side. I got pretty lucky, I just missed a bush. So I actually hit my third short kind of short right of the green. There are some bunkers, just kind of a little fairway-rough area. And then we go up there and search for my ball for one, two minutes, and we couldn't find it. I was getting pretty concerned. Then we find it three feet up in the air like in the bush. My partner Eddie just found it, so I had to take an unplayable from there. So I had to drop it twice on the fairway, but it was severely sloped, and so I tried to place it after my first two drops, and it stayed. The ref said that it was in play, so I went up to the green, kind of looked around, came back and it rolled away like another 20 yards. I mean, it still was in play because I didn't cause it, but that's my new location pretty much, and then I lipped out for par from there. So I was happy with my bogey.

But yeah, and then on the last hole I hit it in the fairway bunker, had to hit it really high to get up. The wind just took it way left in the bunker and I've never been that plugged in my life. I hit it two feet. I was just happy to get it out of the sand.

And then actually kind of made like an important four-footer for double bogey, so hopefully that will be just enough.