THE NABISCO CHAMPIONSHIP

March 21, 2000

Naree Wongluekiet

Aree Wongluekiet

Jonathan Yarwood

TERRY WILCOX: Naree, are you happy to be here?

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: I'm happy to be here. I'm excited about seeing the great players up close and it's a great honor to get an invitation to this tournament.

TERRY WILCOX: Let me also say these great players are excited about seeing them up close, too, at the age of 13. I think we can open it up just to some general questions from the media, if you would like to ask any questions of the girls.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: To compete against them?

AREE WONGLUEKIET: I think it's a great honor to be able to be here and just to see them and see how they play and how they compete out there. Yeah, I think it's going to be a good experience.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: Also, I would like to compare myself, to know what I'm missing and what I have to do to get to the next level.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: Well, my favorite player on the LPGA TOUR is Karrie Webb. She is very consistent and I'm looking forward to meeting her and seeing how she plays.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: My greatest player also is Karrie Webb. She's my favorite player. I think she's a very good putter and I'm looking forward to meeting her.

TERRY WILCOX: Very good. They picked a good one.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: I was seven and a half years old when I started playing, and I started back in Thailand.

TERRY WILCOX: What was the other half of that question? How did you get started playing?

AREE WONGLUEKIET: My dad and my brother, they were playing before me, so I just tagged along to the golf course and started picking up golf clubs and hitting shots on the green.

TERRY WILCOX: Naree, same thing for you, you were tagging right next to her? That's good.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: My driver is a Honma. It's a Japanese driver, 43 inches. I have also, Honma irons and a Ping putter.

TERRY WILCOX: And Naree?

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: I have Callaway driver, 80 degree, regular shaft, and my putter is a Ping (inaudible) 2 and my irons are Honma ladies shafts and I have a 3-wood and a 7-wood, they are both steel head, Callaways.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: 240.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: When we are not playing at a tournament we practice together and we try and push each other forward and when we compete against each other we try to pull for one another. We're competing against each other, but we're also trying to pull for each other, want each other to do well in tournaments.

TERRY WILCOX: Friendly competitors. How much time do you spend practicing, say, hours a day?

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Around 3 1/2 hours after school.

TERRY WILCOX: Do you know Aree's weaknesses, strengths?

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: I don't know if she has any weaknesses, but her driver is her -- definitely her strength. She hits it very long, very straight. Her putting can be hot sometimes, most of the time. Her irons are very consistent. She has a great short game, has good feel. So she's very consistent.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: I think my sister has a very good short game. I think she is quite -- also consistent. She hits her irons on the green, hits fairway in green and I think she's very good at chipping.

TERRY WILCOX: Very good.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: I don't think there's a time or an age. If I feel my game's ready, I'll go pro when I feel that I'm ready.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: I think there is still quite a bit of time or a while to go, but I'm still learning and learning new experiences and certainly this will be one of the very good learning experiences.

TERRY WILCOX: Is there one thing that you think is keeping you from being a professional at this point, that keeps your game from being -- making you capable of being a professional at this time? Maybe your weakness, if you feel as though you have a weakness that you need to work on?

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Probably all-around, really a bit of everything. Maybe a bit of short game, maybe a bit of irons, and really just not ready yet.

TERRY WILCOX: Naree? Same? How do you feel about your game, any particular part of your game needs more work than the other part?

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: I think the ladies out here are very good putters. They are very consistent in their putting and I think I have some problems sometimes getting putts in the hole consistently, like day-in, day-out.

TERRY WILCOX: I would also like to introduce their coach, Jonathan Yarwood with the David Leadbetter schools. Jonathan's on the front row and I think he's open for questions, also.

MR. YARWOOD: Brief history on the girls. They came over from Thailand about two and a half years ago to the David Leadbetter Academy in Florida. They work with myself, Jonathan Yarwood and another coach called Andrew Rice. They have worked, obviously, extremely hard on their game when they first came over. They were very talented girls, obviously, but with not very good techniques, not very good all-around game. So we've -- they enrolled in our golf school down that that encompasses the whole game, as it were. They go to private school in the morning and then they attend the golf program in the afternoon, which is a program with currently 91 full-time students in and they work on obviously every aspect of the game -- this is a great PR ad, by the way -- every aspect of the game, from the swing to the short game. There is a very stringent mental proficiency program, there's a physical fitness program, there's a nutrition program. And, you know, at the end of the day I think it produces almost a mini-tour player, like a little junior in a tour player, sort of the way they go about things. If you watch the girls play this week, you're not going to see, apart from their stature much difference between how they play the game and how any of the girls on the LPGA play the game. They have got a strong routine. All of the department of the game are really strong. And to answer the guy's question about what do they really need to improve, I think they are going to keep improving and evolving as they get older and stronger. But I think the biggest thing that's going to improve them is experience, and the more experience they get at tournaments like this, the more experience of playing against these great players and seeing what they have got to do, then the better. But they work day-in, day-out very, very hard. They have got the Asian work ethic of, you know, putting in as much time as possible. But we also try and teach the girls and all the students at our academy the importance of a balanced life as well as golf. We try to get away of just golf, golf, golf. It's important to channel yourself into all different areas. So that's part of the program, as well. And another facet that you might be interested in is the sacrifice the parents have made to get over here for the girls. They have made a huge emotional and financial sacrifice. They first of all brought their Chan who is caddying this week for Naree. We call him the black sheep of the family. He is the No. 2 ranked player in America, and he's the black sheep. So he gets a bit of a hard time. But he initially came over and he enrolled in the academy and the girls obviously followed suit and they are now ranked 2 and 3 in America. And the sacrifice the parents have made are quite incredible, really. They have sold everything they owned in Thailand. They were very successful business people in Thailand. They sold everything to come over here to America where they are not eligible to work. They are only eligible to look after the kids and sort of provide a parental support for the kids. So there's a lot of sacrifices, a lot of gambles involved in this, but it's gamble I would be willing to take, I can tell you that.

JONATHAN YARWOOD: Well, it's a sticky question, really. There's nothing really that I can answer at the moment. I think it's going to be one of those things that sort of evolves and we sort of get to the point where we say, okay, now you're good enough and whether that's 17, 18, 19, 20 or whatever it is, I can't say, but obviously they are heading in the direction of being professional golfers. But I think on another issue, I think there's a lot of things we can avoid as well. It's not all set in stone. Obviously, they are good players at this age, but there's a lot of things to avoid like burnout, overexposure, which something like this is probably the ultimate overexposure, and injury as well. There's four or five things we have got to really keep our eye on and protect them, as it were, as much as possible; and hopefully, if they keep going on the course that they are going, they are going to be pretty good.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Yes, we are interested in attending college. We feel that our game is not ready to go professional, then we will go onto college.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Yeah, trying to do some Monday qualifiers, trying to get into some tournaments.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: What are we doing, Chick-Fil-A, maybe the Phillips.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Just those two right now.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Never thought about that one. Probably together, yeah.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Yes. When we go to tournaments, junior tournaments, most of the time, if Naree doesn't win, I would win and if I wouldn't win then Naree would win or if one would play better than the other person. But we progress about the same time.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: I feel happy for Naree if she beats me.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: Sure (Laughter.)

TERRY WILCOX: She hopes it is.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: I'm not starting. When Naree is on the golf course, I would treat her as a competitor, especially if we're playing together in the last day of the tournament, I would certainly want to beat her. But at the end of the day, she is my sister and we live together, so yeah.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: I'm just going to try my best and see what happens, but I'm going to have a good experience and maybe try to make the cut and go from there.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: My dad used to have a hotel business back in Thailand.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: Yeah.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Yeah, really excited and nervous, but maybe I'll be more nervous when I get on the first tee. But I'm just having fun right now, enjoying it.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: Yeah, basically having fun.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: My brother came over here first for a year and he told us he really liked it over here, and the golf program and the school was great; so we were just looking forward to coming over here.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: A little bit, yeah, I miss Thailand, but my family is over here; so it's not as bad.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: I think I miss the food in Thailand, but this is great weather in America here and there's a lot of support for golf. It's very good in opportunities here, a lot of opportunities, especially for golf here.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: No. We go to movies and hang out with our friends and go to the mall and stuff like that on the weekends.

TERRY WILCOX: Maybe where someone got you mixed up with Naree at some time and someone approached you and thought you were Naree and congratulated you for a tournament when it was really she that won?

AREE WONGLUEKIET: There's a lot of instances like that. Like they would congratulate Naree or me for winning a tournament, but it would be the wrong person and they would just say congratulations anyway.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: No. We pretty much dress alike most of the time.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Everything. We're two different people. But we just dress alike. If you look at Naree, she really doesn't look like me (Laughter.)

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: Maybe Aree likes to talk a lot.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Well, I don't really like fishing but she seems to like catching fish can. I like to fish, but Naree doesn't like to fish -- I don't know why she didn't like it right now.

TERRY WILCOX: She just goes with you.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Not very often. We get along pretty well.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: I think I'm half a size bigger, 10 and a half.

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: I don't think they can really tell. Only a good friend can tell.

TERRY WILCOX: That's how Jonathan tells.

JONATHAN YARWOOD: One of those things where you get used to looking at two different people. I'm of the same opinion as Aree where they are absolutely totally different people visually. Distinguishing features are very difficult when you first look at them, and obviously, it's because I've been around them a lot that I can tell them apart. But you guys think they are probably pretty much identical, which they are to the naked eye, but I can't think of one distinguishing feature that stands out. Really the best way is one of them has a bracelet on and one of them doesn't. But personality-wise, I think you see in the traits that seem to -- Aree is a little more dominant than Naree. And Naree likes to take a little bit more of a back seat, and it reflects a little bit in the golf as well. They are both great strategists on the golf course. They know exactly when to attack and when to defend, like all good golfers do. But I think that their personality comes out a little bit on the golf course as well. If you watch Aree play, she's occasionally can be a little bit more aggressive and sort of goes about it with gay abandon, where Naree on occasion can be a little bit more conservative. That's not saying that's how they always play. They know how to play and when to attack and when to defend, but sometimes their personalities do come across when they play golf as well. When Naree first came over, Aree had technically a lot better golf swing than Naree, and as a result Aree was in my opinion quite a lot better player. She had won a lot more tournaments, and really, Naree was the sort of underdog, let's say, although, they were both pretty good. And now, Naree has really improved her technique and improved her game and really worked hard on it, and really, she's caught up to Aree as well, and I think that's healthy for them both because it obviously provides good competition and they pull each other along. And if you look at their records now, Naree is ranked higher than Aree at the moment, 2 and 3. And it's great because they are going to go sort of -- one will win, one will lose. Whereas before it was sort of always piled on Aree. So I think that's quite a healthy thing to have happened. So Naree has really improved, but they have both improved a lot.

JONATHAN YARWOOD: Yeah, think I think that it's quite a big tournament level. (Inaudible) was also a very big tournament win for her. I think obviously we don't really try and treat each tournament that much differently, really. They are all on a golf course with some flags and holes and you are playing against other people and if you try and treat them too differently, the pressure changes and a change in the person and it makes it harder to play. If you look at the records, I think you'll find that obviously those two wins are very good and good for a career and good for their confidence.

TERRY WILCOX: Which one is the first-born?

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Naree by 9 minutes.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Scratch.

JONATHAN YARWOOD: On the U.K. system they would be plus two or plus three, but other here it's the USGA system and it's little bit different. But they are plus two or plus three over in the U.K. .

JONATHAN YARWOOD: Well, if they followed the USGA system which we don't, then they'd have a similar handicap here, but I don't want to give an exact figure because they are not officially doing it.

TERRY WILCOX: Scratch or better, probably.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: I played here on Saturday 18 holes and I played here this morning, six o'clock. It's very long. I've never played a golf course this long before, and the rough is very thick. It's quite tight, greens are hard, greens are fast, windy.

AREE WONGLUEKIET: Well it's lot different. This course is much harder than the ones in Thailand.

TERRY WILCOX: How did Chan decide who to caddie for?

NAREE WONGLUEKIET: Well, my brother caddied for Aree in Korea at the pro tournament there and I don't think they got along very well.

TERRY WILCOX: So he's going to try something different. That's good. I think again I would like to say it's a great pleasure for us to have the girls here this week and I think you can tell not only is their game very mature for 13-year-olds, but I think they are also mature in themselves for 13-year-olds and we look forward to seeing how they do during the week and certainly wish them all the luck in the world. Jonathan, thank you for being with us and Mr. Sung, thank you.

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