PGA CHAMPIONSHIP

May 18, 2022

Sam Burns

Southern Hills Country Club

Flash Quotes

JOHN DEVER: Welcome back to the 2022 PGA Championship here at Southern Hills Country Club. We are very pleased to be joined by Sam Burns. Sam, welcome to your third PGA Championship.

You're ranked in the top 10. You're kind of riding pretty high right now, and it's terrific to see. Does any of that enter into how you prepare to come here, compete and potentially win a major championship?

SAM BURNS: Not really. I think, like you said, the biggest thing for me is just trying to make sure when I tee it up tomorrow I've done everything I could have done to be 100 percent ready to go.

So that's really what the last two or three days has looked like here, just trying to figure out and learn as much as I can about the golf course, and just trying to make sure that everything feels like it should and go from there.

Q. Going back a little bit, but 2014 you won the Boys' Junior PGA Championship. I wanted to ask you to reflect on that victory, what your recollections of it are, and how the junior golf experience aided you. You've come to some prominence here on the Tour in a relatively short amount of time, and how much that might have played into it.

SAM BURNS: Yeah, it's crazy to think that's been eight years ago. Yeah, you look at that field and there's a handful, if not more than that, of guys who are playing this week.

I think you look at junior golf for me around that time, there's a ton of really, really quality players. I think Scottie probably played in that event, Davis Riley. I'm sure there's some others.

So you work your way through junior golf and you just try to figure out how you can improve and start trying to beat really good players, and then into college and amateur golf and then as you turn professional, too, just trying to find ways to improve.

That's all me and my team have tried to do, is just continue to improve and find the areas where we can get better and try to attack those areas.

Q. Those relationships you form as juniors, they carry through, don't they?

SAM BURNS: Yeah.

Q. It must help especially in your early days out here on Tour where you can lean on one another.

SAM BURNS: Absolutely. It's always nice to -- especially for me when I first got out here to see a familiar face, just to have somebody to go play with or talk to or reminisce on tournaments like that.

Yeah, definitely helps you to be comfortable. We always joke around from those experiences and some of those rounds of golf that we've played together.

Q. After three days, what do you know about Southern Hills, and what are the things you're going to have to be careful about or focus on?

SAM BURNS: Yeah, for one, it's a fantastic golf course. I love the way the holes kind of shape. It makes you kind of hit different shots. There's just a lot of different ways to play it. There's so many different options that they can set the golf course up, especially with different wind directions that we're going to get.

Yeah, coming into the greens you've got to be hitting your spots. You've got a couple areas where the run-offs are pretty severe. Like No. 10, if you miss it left of that green it goes all the way down 50 yards into the rough.

It's stuff like that where you may be 130 yards, but the penalty is pretty extreme if you hit a bad shot.

That's how this place can get you really. You've got to drive the ball well. You've got to be very disciplined into the greens here. Then you've got to lag putt it really well.

Q. It's always tough to grade scoring, but from what I hear, being under par or being close to par is not going to be bad here this week?

SAM BURNS: Yeah, I don't know what the number is, but I would think coming down the stretch when you get to the back nine if you're somewhere under par I think you may have a pretty good chance.

It seems like someone goes out Thursday, Friday and always shoots a couple really good rounds and then kind of anything can happen from there.

It's going to be interesting to see. I think the golf course is -- like I said, it's very demanding, and I'm really excited to see how it plays out.

Q. We talked a lot about the demands of the golf course, the dangers, but maybe an attribute or a portion of the golf course that can be taken advantage of, especially as it relays back to your game. Where do you think you can get something on this golf course?

SAM BURNS: Well, I think if your iron play is sharp you're going to have some good opportunities. It's just one of those things where you can hit it to -- you can hit a really good shot to 20 feet, but you may have a 20-footer that breaks six feet.

So it's stuff like that where if you have 20 feet and it's breaking six feet, you have to be a little bit more defensive than you normally would. But if you can leave it in the right spots, then you can make some birdies.

Q. I think there's a tradition maybe with the PGA Championship of being physically demanding and mentally like any other major. Do you think that's the case, and why?

SAM BURNS: Well, I think for starters we're in Oklahoma in May. It's going to be pretty warm this week. I think that'll be pretty physically demanding.

It's a major championship. It's going to be a grind out there. It's going to be -- you're going to have some stretches where the golf is going to be tough, and you've just got to kind of grind it out and continue to kind of push forward and press on and not let that distract you or mess you up for the next few holes.

So I think that's really the challenge this week is just try to be steady out there, kind of one foot in front of the other, and just try to play the best golf you can.

Q. Did your college golf at LSU bring you to Oklahoma to play any or have you been steering clear of this state?

SAM BURNS: We never played here. We played some at Karsten Creek in Stillwater. That's also another challenging golf course. Maybe that's the thing in Oklahoma, to have really tough golf courses, I don't know.

JOHN DEVER: Thanks for finding us. Have a terrific week and represent us well as the 2014 Boys' Junior PGA champion.