AT&T PEBBLE BEACH PRO-AM

February 4, 2023

Gary Young

Pebble Beach Golf Links

Quick Quotes

Q. Do you want to just recap the update for everyone?

GARY YOUNG: Yeah, so I've actually just gone up to the player hospitality area, made some announcements to the entire field. Basically play has been suspended for the remainder of the day, which we're all aware of. The forecast is for continued high winds and even increasing as the afternoon goes on.

Round 3's going to resume at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning. It's just, with the logistical challenges of getting everyone in position across three golf courses, all of the shuttles, 8 a.m. is about the time that we feel we need to accomplish that.

Amateurs are required, they're not required to return for round 3, but they are certainly welcome to complete round 3. And we will be crowning a pro-am champion following 54 holes.

Round 4 is going to be professionals only. And we will be revert to go our normal 65 and ties cut. With the amateurs not being part of the final round field, we thought that the right thing to do is revert to our normal 65 and ties cut, not the 60 and ties cut that we have with the amateurs.

To give everyone an idea of what we're looking at, we feel we have about three and a half hours left of play on the golf course to complete round 3. That should get us to about 11:30.

And again, with all the logistical challenges, we will begin round 4 at approximately 12:30. And that tee time range would be two hours. So 12:30 to 2:30 off two tees in threesomes.

We feel we have enough daylight to more than likely complete approximately nine holes, which should leave us nine holes to complete on Monday morning. With that time yet to be determined. But we will try to go early. Approximately in the 8 a.m. hour. That would be my guess.

So if anyone has any questions I'm happy to answer any questions you have.

Q. What precipitated the stop of play?

GARY YOUNG: We had two holes over on Monterey Peninsula that were giving us problems. Hole 9 and hole 15. 9 was becoming a persistent problem, just given that the wind was much higher than originally forecasted earlier in the week.

This is the difficulty of setting up for three rounds with everyone playing the same basic hole location for three rounds. We get the best information we can get. We did try to slow down the greens significantly. The last time these greens were mowed was yesterday morning.

We did try some mitigation matters. We did try to apply some water to the green just to create a little bit of friction. Just a light spritz of water on the green. Which is sometimes normal that we will do in hot conditions. But this was due to wind.

So we were looking for anything we could do to try to keep a golf ball at rest. But we were getting some really hairy situations on that hole. We just did not want to continue play.

We suspended play on Monterey Peninsula at 12:12. Then we suspended on the other two golf courses at 12:20. We didn't want play to go on any longer at the other two golf courses. I wanted to give them enough time to see if they could get the situation under control at Monterey Peninsula, but they could not.

So we suspended play at 12:20. We didn't want to have players playing in a more difficult condition. We want them all playing similar conditions.

Q. I'm assuming you couldn't have reduced the field down to get it done for tomorrow.

GARY YOUNG: For tomorrow? There's just not enough daylight. Knowing that we have three and a half hours left. It gets dark by 5:15. It's just not enough daylight for it. With 65 and ties, even if we went to 60 and ties it wasn't going to make a difference.

Q. Give us an example of hairy.

GARY YOUNG: Hairy? Hairy would be a situation where a player hits a putt and the ball temporarily stops and then blows to a completely different position or almost starts to return to them. I think that we did have that situation with an amateur where the ball started to return back to the area.

Q. Do you remember which amateur?

GARY YOUNG: I don't know which amateur. Unfortunately, I was not there, but Stephen Cox was the chief referee at Monterey Peninsula and was in communication with me about the situation. So ultimately I've got two other chief referees. John Mutch at Spyglass Hill. I'm here at Pebble Beach. But I am basically the chief referee for the entire event. So they were kind of reporting back to me what they were experiencing.

Here at Pebble Beach we were fine. Spyglass Hill was also fine. But that didn't mean that, you know, as the winds increased, that we wouldn't start also being in the same situation.

Q. Those examples you excited, were they on 9 or 15 or both?

GARY YOUNG: They were on 9 and they did have another situation at 15 where, you know, someone hit a putt and it went significantly off line due to the wind. So it started to get hairy.

Q. Was it blowing at either Spy or were any balls moving at Spy or Pebble?

GARY YOUNG: No, I mean Spy has some nice tree-lined areas that are protected. The reports I was getting from Spy was that they were fine. They could have continued to play.

I think -- we did experience some during round 1 here at Pebble where we almost had to start applying some water at 18 green. But we never did.

But we, the wind was just howling at 18 and howling at 9 and we were quite exposed on those holes.

And also No. 6, I think the last group that was playing during round 1 experienced some, you know, just treacherous putts in really stiffer wind.

Q. Where was that?

GARY YOUNG: That was at Pebble Beach. No. 6. Just that whole area out there where we're really exposed to the wind coming over the ocean.

Q. Given the forecast tomorrow, how confident are you that this schedule you've laid out is realistic?

GARY YOUNG: We're going to -- he's predicting anywhere from a quarter to a half an in of rain overnight. In the morning there's three separate waves of rain that are going to move through in sort of squall lines. With some 25 mile per hour gusts in those.

So we're just going to have to see. I'm feeling that the additional moisture overnight, another 12 hours plus of greens growing, getting more growth. We've done everything we could to maximize the grass that's on these greens. We worked with the superintendents and just trying to think of anything that we could do to try to get a little more friction in the greens.

We do have, in an event like this, we always have the option of cutting a new hole. Quite often in these multiple course, multi-day events when a hole gets worn or compromised size-wise, we will generally move it a pace. And that keeps the playing conditions consistent.

But for us to have a significant change at hole No. 9 we would have had to move the hole quite a distance. And that was just not part of our, we were not willing to do that in order to keep play going. It's got to be pretty much the same exact conditions for everyone.

Q. What's the plan for prepping the greens for tomorrow?

GARY YOUNG: Absolutely nothing. We're just going to let them grow. What we did this morning, we didn't do anything at all last evening. Came in this morning and we ran the hand mowers over the greens with no reel engaged. So there's no grass being cut, just simply the drums on the mowers. Which is not a real heavy weight, but it was enough just to tap down all the spike marks that were there and also remove some of the puffiness to the poa.

That's pretty what we'll do in the morning, we'll probably run those things over one more time, just to try to smooth out what's there.