U.S. SENIOR OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP

July 10, 2021

Kevin Kraft

Omaha Country Club

Quick Quotes

Q. Tell us about what happened overnight, please.

KEVIN KRAFT: So sleeping, about must have been about 10 after midnight woke up just bolt upright with the whole hotel shaking. Like it's only four stories tall, so it seemed really strange that the whole thing would be wobbling and we quickly scrambled, got to it and saw what was coming, it was a big red blob. Shortly there after, probably three or four minutes after that the fire alarm started going off. So everybody, I think everybody, hustled down to the basement area and they only kept us down there for like five, seven minutes until they could verify that there wasn't really a tornado threat and then they said if we wanted to we could go back to our rooms. So by that time by the time we got back up to the fourth floor, water had already started coming in through some of the fixtures and stuff. Which is obviously not normal. We went back to our rooms and the alarms finally went off and then they started up again after just a few minutes. And we were just watching the weather to see how long this thing was going to last. So a little time passed and the hotel people came around and said, Okay, so there's a lot of flooding on the fourth floor, there's a long hallway for the fourth floor and then a short one, we were in the short one and we had no issues there. A little bit of dampness around the window but nothing big. So they said we could stay if we wanted to or go but they didn't have any place to put us. So obviously we were just going to stay. And then the alarm starts going off again. And it was just I mean it's just, if you've ever been in a hotel with a fire alarm going off, it is just, oh, it's brutal on the head. So I went down stairs to see what was going to happen, whether they could turn this thing off or not since we were plan to go stay and the whole lobby was starting to flood. I mean water was just pouring in from all over the place. So I just kind of wandered, started wandering back up to the room and I happened to run into the poor woman that was running the front end and I mean she looked visibly shaken. Who wouldn't be. A packed house and everything possible going wrong. She said they were doing a mandatory evacuation. So this was about 1:15 in the morning. I said fine, but it's going to take awhile. I mean we had been in there for four days we had stuff everywhere. And it was going to take multiple trips to get out. So I took the first trip of stuff down and saw that John's car had been struck by a rather sizeable piece of debris.

Q. That's your caddie?

KEVIN KRAFT: Yeah. Coming off the roof of the hotel. So I put my stuff up, came back up, let him go down, kind of check things out and finally I got the rest of the stuff and went out. I took some video at about 2:30 in the morning right before we left, I went around the corner to where the hall way was and it was totally flooded and it was just streaming down out of the fixtures. It was crazy. So obviously the hotel had lost most of the roof of the building or at least a very sizeable chunk of the roof of the building. So they didn't have any -- they were packed house, they tried to find places to put people and they just really didn't have anything. So we hung out for a good while while he tried to get his car sorted out. He had two pieces of metal that had sort of come around and gone through the bumper on his car and they actually had to saw them off because they had gone in and then had actually gone into the metal in the trunk. So finally they were able to get it so that he could actually be able to drive the car. It was totally drivable but it's pretty well messed up. So I hung around there for awhile, just not knowing what exactly I wanted to do, about five o'clock I went and got some caffeine and headed up here, got here and just kind of had to ask what was going on, what they knew what was going on and it was about they were saying three hours. So I said okay, just going to go to the barn, try and catch a few, a couple hours of sleep and that's when I got, I got about two hours of sleep there. And then got up and went and played.

Q. Do you have a room for tonight?

KEVIN KRAFT: Yes. Yes. Hopefully in a place that won't lose its head. Yeah.

Q. 72 today. I mean were you shaken? I mean how does all this leave you when you've got a very important round to play?

KEVIN KRAFT: I'm a working guy, right? This is all total bonus to me. I'm a club fitter, I work for great company, I got a great job, and they're very gracious in allowing me to pursue the tournaments that I want to play in and this is great, this is my first professional major I've been a professional since 1995, I've gone to the U.S. Open locals and sectionals 15 times and never gotten in and turned 50 in February and first shot I get into this one. So -- and then to make the cuts was kind of awesome. I had three goals for this week: Don't make an ass out of myself. I think I'm okay there. Make the cut. Definitely got that one. And I was hoping to lose 10 pounds. But it's cooled off maybe a little too much to lose 10 pounds. So we'll see. Maybe the stress will kick some pounds off. But, no it's been great. I didn't really lose much, other than sleep. I run on caffeine most days anyway, so not anything particularly different. Definitely a little less sleep than I would normally want to get but it is what it is, didn't really rattle me, I fought my swing on the back nine yesterday and I fought it a little more probably on the front nine today. Kind of settled in, was worried about the restart because sitting on that couch in player services and oh it was so comfortable and I started to get a little too relaxed and maybe started maybe thinking about drifting a little bit and then I was like I got to get up, I'm going to have to play golf again.

Q. What was the seen like here at five in the morning?

KEVIN KRAFT: Heavy with debris. Driving in there were two big trees that -- I didn't get one of the Lexus courtesy cars because I drove in from Pennsylvania, I just didn't need, we didn't need three cars between us. So the SUV's wouldn't have had any trouble, but there was a lot of debris and there were two major trees down back in the neighborhood they wind us through, so it was a little stressful once we got, once I got off the highway, but nothing.

Q. Were they working on-site here?

KEVIN KRAFT: Oh, yeah. They definitely have been at it for awhile. This crew is just an amazing. For them to get this golf course in the condition that it's in right now, oh my goodness, I mean fantastic. This facility is so good. The golf course itself is just awesome, it's hard, but it's fair, greens are very challenging, and honestly it drains pretty well. There's wet spots but in the fairways it wasn't really, nothing that I saw in play was -- none of us had to take a drop from casual water, so I guess we didn't get like the most rain up here but I think it all felon my hotel, but, really, the golf course was good, yeah.