THE MEMORIAL TOURNAMENT PRESENTED BY NATIONWIDE

June 3, 2021

Steve Rintoul

Muirfield Village

Quick Quotes

Q. We're in our second delay of the day here in the first round of the Memorial Tournament presented by Nationwide. Give us an update on what the day's been like so far and how long you might think this delay might last.

STEVE RINTOUL: Yeah, well thanks, it's an unfortunate set of circumstances, right? We come here to Muirfield Village to unveil the new golf course for Mr. Nicklaus, and it's absolutely incredible, the work's been done, and we're blessed with a day like today. So it's unfortunate.

But we played a lot of golf this morning before the first delay, we got back out and played a little bit more. There's a front down to our southwest that's pushing through, it's moving, and it's just a matter of us getting, letting that get out of here and let all these, the cells with the lightning in them move off to the north and hopefully get the players warmed up again and play some more golf this evening.

Here in Ohio in June we have long days, so we got a lot of golf to play today and then tomorrow hopefully make a cut and get back on track for the weekend. The weekend looks like it's going to be fabulous, so look forward to that.

Q. So you and your team PGA TOUR rules officials and administrators are experts in this, you deal with it regularly and quite a lot lately.

STEVE RINTOUL: Unfortunately, yes.

Q. Yeah. Just, is there any prognosis that you can provide us for the weekend ahead or is it just like a wait and see kind of a situation?

STEVE RINTOUL: No, I hadn't really put a pen to a paper as far as the amount of daylight and how much golf we have got to play yet, that's going to depend upon how much more we play today, to be quite frank. We'll certainly make a cut at some point in time, whether it's tomorrow night or Saturday morning. Probably revolve to us perhaps being in threesomes on Saturday. I don't want to get that far ahead. But certainly be back on track and have a great finish on Sunday.

Q. Your on-site meteorologist, what sort of information is he giving you and what have you relayed to the players at this point?

STEVE RINTOUL: Yeah, Joe Halvorson is our on-site meteorologist, Joe does a tremendous job for us. He's looking at every cell that's coming our way and seeing how much lightning's in it and how dangerous it is and how much it's going to put out. I told the players right now we would get back to them at five o'clock Eastern tonight with a latest update.

At that point in time we got to assess things and see if it's safe to play, safe to get them back on the golf course, them and the fans. Give them a little bit of warmup time and then get them back in position on the course.

So we'll look at it at that point in time and hopefully get going sooner or later tonight.

Q. There seems a lot of talk amongst people that aren't really aware, it doesn't seem like there's that much rain, but it's the electricity that's the biggest problem. What's the situation when you get electricity nearby?

STEVE RINTOUL: We had a rough day yesterday in the pro-am with rain and then some more today. So it's unfortunate, but it hasn't been a lot of rain. It's been these pop-up cells that produce electricity that we can't, we're not going to put anybody's life at stake when we got pop-up cells with lightning in them around.

So hasn't been a lot of rain accumulation over the last couple of days, but just been a little bit of an electrical storm here and there that's kind of knocked us out.