THE 149TH OPEN

July 16, 2021

Paul Casey

Mixed Zone

Q. Paul, thank you for joining us today. Can you take a moment to reflect on your round?

PAUL CASEY: Really good day today. I mean, very, very happy with the score. My ball striking again off the tee was a little wayward, and so I feel like I got away with a couple.

I struggled the first sort of half of the round, sort of the first sort of third of the round, and then got on a really nice run 7, 8, 9 with the birdies there.

And playing with Paul today was good fun. We had great energy from the crowd and he was making some birdies, and that sort of snowballed in the whole group.

Managed to move up the leaderboard and then just tried to keep piling it on, which I maybe wasn't able to do, but very, very happy where I stand right now.

Q. Compared to yesterday, do you see any change in the conditions? The angle of the wind seems to be changed and the greens and the fairways seem to be firming up. There seems to be a few screwy bounces.

PAUL CASEY: Yeah, we get the sort of -- firstly on the greens we get the text messages and the emails from to the R&A telling us the speeds and the firmness of the greens, and I know nothing about that, the firmness aspect, because it tells us how many -- actually, I don't even know how they phrase it.

I don't know.

Q. Stimp?

PAUL CASEY: Stimp is a speed. Anyway, the firmness looks like, according to their message, is about the same. The speed is picked up. We're now into 10.3 on the stimp from being sort of mid 9s at the beginning of the week.

Yeah, the fairways are drying out a little bit which is nice. Wind has been the big one. You can see that on holes like 1 which yesterday was a driver and a flick and now that's down off my left shoulder.

So I use a clock kind of system. Yesterday it was a 7:00 wind and today it was like a 10:00 or 10:30 even. And that's where this golf course is now.

Certain holes start to show their teeth. It's amazing how it's not even -- I guess it's a quarter turn. That's all it's going to be all week.

Almost like your tee time has a massive impact on where you are on the golf course when it does turn is going to be key.

Q. Great round today. Today I noticed that you're putting candid. First of all, how long have you done that for and what about that method do you prefer to the conventional grip?

PAUL CASEY: So I -- I've practiced that way for a long, long time. I putted poorly at the Masters and I changed a candid on Sunday at Augusta.

I made some -- I was talking to my caddie, I'm just kind of pretty peeved with my putting. Peter Kostis, my coach always said if we were ver going to do anything different again, start again, he would actually get me to putt with the left-hand below the right.

And so I felt confident doing it in that I wasn't going to get into trouble with my coach and my caddie. But I was so nervous on Sunday. I rolled -- I mean, genuinely nervous over a straight eight-footer. Rolled over the back and rolled another one in.

What does it do different for me? I get a much better strike. I tend to hood the blade on the way back. I tend to be a little -- the putter low on the way back and then high on the way through. I mishit it slightly low on the face if anything, and going left and below right cures both of those things for me.

So much better strike. Ball rolls better. Speed control isn't quite where it needs to be yet overall on the longer stuff, but I'm much, much better on short putts.