THE TOUR CHAMPIONSHIP PRESENTED BY SOUTHERN COMPANY AND MERCEDES-BENZ

October 31, 1998

Hal Sutton

HAL SUTTON: Little bit of a different kind of wind today. It was kind of gusty, which made it difficult to get the right club in your hand or to be sure you had the right club in your hand before you played the shot. I think it blew pretty much as hard as it did yesterday, but maybe up-and-down a little bit. The golf course is in good shape again. Greens are still fast (laughter). Need to be below the hole still. I haven't found where it was a good idea to be above it yet. Same golf course really every day.

HAL SUTTON: I don't think so. I think the elements make it change quite a bit sometimes at different tournaments. This week, actually, probably the easiest day we had was the first day. The wind didn't blow as hard the first day as it has the second two days. We basically had the same days three days in a row.

HAL SUTTON: Yeah. I didn't have a plan. Just do the same thing, try to drive it in the fairway, hit as many greens as I could, keep it below the hole as much as I could, and not lose my patience. You know, I was on a pace that I haven't been on in a while. I mean, I hit lots of fairways and lots of greens the first two days. I told myself last night, I said, "Before this week is over, you're going to hit a few balls in the rough. You're going to miss a few greens. Don't let it frustrate you." I'd probably been ahead of the game to that point. The back nine, starting at 10, I missed the green at 10 and 11 and 12. You know, I had an opportunity there to be frustrated if I'd let myself. And I didn't. I hit a great bunker shot on 10, awesome bunker shot on 11 from where it stopped, lipped the putt out, then chipped in on 12. That turned the whole game around.

HAL SUTTON: Well, I think if you just start realizing that no matter what happens, I'm going to try to stay in the same focus, same frame of mind, you can pretty much do that. I mean, I've been doing this 17 years. Hopefully I can hold myself together enough to do that; I mean, if I'm confident with my game. If I'm not very confident with my game, then it gets harder to do. You feel like, "I can't lose it because I'm not playing that well; I might not be able to get back up." I mean, if I lose a shot or two out there, I felt like my game has been solid enough that I can make a birdie or two to get them back.

HAL SUTTON: Well, you don't want to get too far away from the lead if you want to win the tournament. Although, I would say this is not going to be an easy tournament to lead the tournament in either, because if you start making a few mistakes and if you let it rattle you, you can make some bogeys on this thing in a hurry. If the guy is throwing birdies at you at the same time, then it gets a little annoying.

HAL SUTTON: Well, I don't know what the best possible score would be. I hadn't even --

HAL SUTTON: I don't think so (laughter). I don't think so. Are you wondering if someone is going to come way out of the pack with a 63 or something? I don't see that happening on this golf course. There's just not that many birdie holes out there. You know, every day you're making a birdie on a hole or two that you don't expect to make it with a bomb or something. There's not many birdie holes on this golf course.

HAL SUTTON: What's it been blowing out of?

HAL SUTTON: That will change the whole golf course quite a bit. We'd almost get an opposite wind. Is that what you're saying?

HAL SUTTON: We'll play 10 and 11 into the wind, play 18 downwind. That will give you an idea. 15 has been downwind, we'll turn around, be playing it into the wind. 14 and 16 will be downwind, basically, then. I think the golf course might play easier if it turned around and went the other direction, myself.

HAL SUTTON: If the golf course has stayed the same?

HAL SUTTON: Well, first of all, the only person that shot lower than 67 has been Vijay, right? Well, that was a pretty phenomenal round. I think all the rest of the scores have been pretty similar, other than that one round. I said Thursday was the easiest day of the bunch, so that would have been the day I would have expected 63. Just not an easy golf course. I mean, any way you cut it. My ProAm partner at the beginning of the week said, "What do you think is going to win the tournament, 12 under?" I had not played the golf course. Tuesday was the first day I played I. When we finished, I said, "The guy that wins is going to shoot under by about six."

HAL SUTTON: Well, I don't want to cut myself out. If I get to 16, 5- or 6-under-par, I don't want to say, "I said yesterday 67 was the best you could do." I don't know what the best we can do is. That's the beauty of this game, isn't it, that we don't know? That's what we're all coming out here trying to figure out, what is the best we can do. I'm glad we're talking about the best we can do instead of the worst we can do.

HAL SUTTON: Well, when you hit rockbottom like I hit rockbottom, thinking about the THE TOUR Championship, things like that, there's a lot of steps that have to be made before you can make that step. I'm not really sure that I was thinking about THE TOUR Championship or anything. Certainly I hoped that one day I'd be able to play in it again. When I was at rockbottom, though, that seemed like an awful long ways away.

HAL SUTTON: Well, no, I didn't say that. I didn't know. You know, I was 35 years old at that time. I'm 40 now. You know, I'm getting on up there. You don't know what you can do. You don't know what your body will allow you to do. I missed a lot of shots, a lot of putts during that time period. Those were the most vivid in my memory banks, not the ones I had made a long time ago, but the ones that I had missed. You know, you've got to somehow reach down inside you and get rid of all those thoughts, and try to focus on something good happening.

HAL SUTTON: Well, yeah, that was a turning point for me. I had another year after that where I didn't play nearly as well as I should. I felt like, I said at the Texas Westin Open when I won, "I got really lucky to win the BC." I didn't have any pressure on me on the last day. I shot 61 the last round to come from way out of the pack to win. Then when I won the Westin Texas Open, I was in the lead, I had to feel the pressure the whole way. That meant a lot to me, to realize that I could feel the pressure and then win the tournament.

HAL SUTTON: I can put my finger on why that happened for me, but I don't know if that happens the same way for everybody. I mean, I went through a stretch where everybody thought I was really missing the boat, not living up to everybody else's expectations, you know. I'd read stuff like, "He doesn't hit it high enough to ever win at Augusta," which bothered me, at the very least. I was letting people that probably didn't know influence my thinking. So I started trying to make changes that, I guess, make those people feel better that thought I couldn't do certain things, you know. I ended up seeking out a lot of people to help me do it that I should have left alone. I should have kept doing what Hal Sutton knew how to do. I should have been myself instead of trying to become someone else.

HAL SUTTON: Well, I surrounded myself with a bunch of people that believed in Hal Sutton. I surrounded myself with people that I felt like knew a lot about the golf game. I worked really hard.

HAL SUTTON: I had a lot of flaws. I mean, you just don't hit it as badly and play as badly as I did without having a lot of flaws. You know, when I first started doing -- trying to change this - and this is even after the won the BC - I still had a lot of flaws after BC. When I missed every shot I hit, went left, I knew that under the gun, I had to block the left side of the golf course out. So when Floyd and I got back together, the guy I work with now on my swing, I know why you go left all the time when the heat hits you, let's work on this. We started working on it. It's paid off. But there were a lot of flaws there, yeah. There usually is when you're shooting the kind of scores I was shooting.

HAL SUTTON: Horgen, H-o-r-g-e-n.

HAL SUTTON: Well, that's like saying, "What comes first, the chicken or the egg?" I felt like I had to start seeing some good shots. That would start to make me believe in myself again. I guess that's what came first.

HAL SUTTON: Haven't gone through very many since all this happened. I went through a lot for a lot of years there prior to that. I mean, anybody that had a comment, I listened to, probably. Probably half y'all in here made a comment that I paid attention to and tried to implement into the game, you know. I tell you what, if I had any advice for any kid out there today, I'd say, "You know what, get with somebody that knows your game, and stay with them." Each and every one of us has a fingerprint. We won't vary too far from that fingerprint. When you start trying to change your whole fingerprint, that's when things go wrong.

HAL SUTTON: He lives in Montana.

HAL SUTTON: Two years.

HAL SUTTON: Uh-huh.

HAL SUTTON: Man, the world and the media is starving for Tiger Woods. You know what I'm saying? I mean, it puts a lot of pressure on that guy. I just use Tiger's name because he's in that role right now. There's been guys prior to Tiger Woods in that role. According to everybody else, we haven't lived up to their expectations. You know, I think sometimes in the present day game on the PGA TOUR, it's pretty hard for anybody in the world to live up to those expectations. If you get caught up reading the paper and reading the magazines and everything else about what you ought to be doing here or there, whatever else, it can make you make some wrong moves.

HAL SUTTON: There were some lofty expectations put on me. I'm the kind of guy myself that I put some pressure on myself to try to be the best I can be. You know, I think that's just stepping way too far out in front. It's kind of like somebody asked me a while ago, was I thinking about THE TOUR Championship when I was way down and that's what kept me up? There's a lot of steps made prior to ever get there. You can't miss any of these steps. There's no shortcut to success, really.

HAL SUTTON: No. Scared the heck out of me. That was my boyhood idol. I'm not sure I even wanted to be better than him. I mean, I had him up (indicating). I had him so far up in respect, you know. It scared me, it really did. That's one thing we were talking about earlier. Kids come out here today. I don't think they've got any less respect for the veteran players' games, it's just that they've got so much more respect for their own game. I mean, it's like, "Let's tee it up, I'll show you how I can play." I never had that feeling when I was really young, you know. I didn't know how good I was. I didn't know how I stacked up against the best players in the world.

HAL SUTTON: I got a lot of rotation in my swing instead of before - I don't know how I can explain this. The club had a tendency to go back shut and I had to reroute it back this way because I moved this way as opposed to just letting the club flow back, rotate back (indicating). I always seemed like I was hitting the ball from in front of it like this, so it wouldn't go left (indicating). That's why I was shorter than I'd ever been in my life. That's why I either held on and the ball kind of went short and to the right, or if I released it from there, it went hard left. When I started rotating and turning, in other words, on my backswing, then stayed behind the ball at impact, I was able to get the ball more solidly and from the inside, just hit better shots.

HAL SUTTON: Any horizontal stuff?

HAL SUTTON: Sports psychology? Yeah, I've talked to sports psychologists. I have not talked to a sports psychologist that didn't say something beneficial to me. Each and every one of them had a really good comment to make. But I'm going to tell you what it boils down to more than sports psychology. It boils down to just how much a person has inside them to be at the next level, whatever that level is. You know, I don't think any sports psychologist in the world could have gotten me out of where I was at, because I was talking to every one of them basically. Like I said, I surrounded myself with people that cared about me, like my wife sitting back there. She cared a lot about me, pointed out all the time, "You'll be back, it will be okay," all those times I came back and wanted to beat the room to death, you know, or whatever else. This is a frustrating game. I tell you what, it can get you at any point in time. Nobody's got the answer. I don't have the answer. You know, when y'all ask me these questions up here, I'm halfway stuttering. I mean, you're wanting an exact answer, and I don't have it. If we had an exact answer to why someone is here, we'd all be there. I mean, Jackie Burke is a close friend of mine who has -- should get a lot of the -- I should give him a lot of credit for me getting back here, because he's helped me a lot. You know what he said? He said until a video camera can talk, it's not going to make a teacher out of the rest of these people. There's a lot of truth to that, you know. I mean, we can try to place the club in a certain spot. That's an exact thing. We see a guy playing really well at that time, he has it right there, we'll try to place it there. Go out there tomorrow and try to place that club there, see how well that works. I mean, you got to go out there and be fluid, be smooth with what you're doing. I mean, it's not an exact science. If it was, there would be someone better than Jack Nicklaus, but nobody's got that answer.

HAL SUTTON: Well, I'd like to think that I can improve day by day. I don't know where that will end up for Hal Sutton, but I'd like to be able to just keep improving. I do know this: I wish that I had my youthfulness back physically to go with the experience that I've got now. But that's not the way God lets it happen, is it? We usually get pretty smart after we get too old to do most things (laughter).

HAL SUTTON: All right.