WGC NEC INVITATIONAL

August 28, 1999

Jesper Parnevik

JESPER PARNEVIK: Not really. I got off to a bad start, too. I bogeyed No. 2 from the middle of the fairway. Hit a clean bunker shot from the front bunker 40 yards over the green, and that was not a place to be. Being 1-over par after seven holes, and being 5-over for the tournament, 1-under after 16, I was quite pleased. And I just overcharged the birdie putt on 17 and 3-putted.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I played very solidly on Thursday. Nothing really happened. And then I came out Friday morning, and I don't know what was wrong. I felt -- I did not feel very good, and I came out and made one double and three bogeys straightaway and went from even to 5-over; and pretty much put me out of the tournament.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I had a pretty short birdie putt on 16 that just lipped out and I looked at the score board, and I saw everybody is still at 5-under. If I hold that and go to 2 (-under), I'm right in it again. That was nothing I really expected after that first round, and after not doing anything yesterday. It can change quickly because it is a tough course. If you start losing it, it seems -- yeah, you just keep on making bogeys.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I just tried to birdie every hole. After I birdied 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, good chance on 16, you just get into the mindset where you just try to birdie every hole. And it's a good feeling, I tell you, after struggling with bogeys the first few days. It was just nice to make a run at it again. Yeah, I was close, around six, ten feet most of the time.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Well, like I said, I had quite a long birdie putt, probably 30 feet and I ran it by five feet and missed the return putt. I wanted to make the first one and just charged a little bit too much.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yeah, it was quite funny, actually. Well, I'll skip that. (Laughs.)

JESPER PARNEVIK: No. Me and Lance, we're very good friends. You know, we give each other some crap a lot of the time. And one thing he always says: "Well, I've never given you wrong yardage." That's kind of been his last resort. And finally on 18, he gave me one, and I hit a perfect shot straight over the pin, and it just ended up in the back bunker. I made a great up-and-down; so he's going to have to eat that for a while.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Tenbroeck. He played on TOUR for 15, 20 years.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Better ask him. He's in the media guide.

JESPER PARNEVIK: We just laughed. I said: "You finally did it, didn't you?" And he was just laughing. And I think he was quite pleased that I made up-and-down.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I asked him last week, and I asked all the other guys, at least, Westwood and Darren Clarke, and they actually told me to bring him on. Because I've seen -- you never know what he's going to feel like and so on. But he said he would feel very comfortable on the European side, and he would, of course, do whatever he could -- he can to make me win my matches. And, you know, you never know. Sometimes you can feel a little bit strange being on the opposing team. I know at Valderrama, Lee Janzen's caddie pulled out because he felt it was -- he wouldn't have the right feelings there. But Lance has made it clear for me that he's very eager to go. And Darren Clarke's caddie and Lee Westwood's caddie wanted him to go. That was fine with me. Same thing I think with Sergio. I think he's going to bring his American caddie.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I don't think I did, but someone did. One of the journalists did calculate, and I think I would have made the U.S. team, yes.

JESPER PARNEVIK: This time, I don't think so, no.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yes. It's completely different. It's something -- I don't know how to explain it. Pressure is something that you put on yourself. So in that sense, it's just like any other tournament. But, anyone who as anyone who does anything for a living and it gets hyped up for a year in advance. And everybody really looking forward to it and the crowds are really charged up when they are there, it just feels different standing on that first tee. I don't know what it is. The atmosphere is unbelievable. Like I said before. It's like playing golf in the middle of the Super Bowl or something like that. You see the players high-fiving each other on the 2nd hole, and screaming and jumping around, and you would never see that out here, for example. Maybe on the 18th green tomorrow. But there, every hole -- every hole is like holing a winning putt. But it is a lot of pressure. It's also because you're picked to qualify for the team a month in advance, and usually when you're under tremendous pressure -- you're there because you're playing well; so, at least you have that going for you. But Ryder Cup, you can go into that weekend being way off, and then it's a lot of pressure because it's very tough playing on that amount of pressure, not really knowing where the ball is going, or if you're feeling a little uncomfortable with your putting or whatever. But I felt good about my game coming into last year; so, that helped a lot. But on the first tee, I would have to say I was probably the most nervous I've been on the golf course, the first half.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Different things can happen when you get nervous. You can either panic completely, and you just have kind of an out-of-body experience and you really don't know you're there. You feel like you could whiff the ball. Or you could let the adrenaline pump you up, and get you focused, move your game up to a new level, and that usually happens if you're playing well. That's why at the Ryder Cup you see so many guys hole out from the middle of the fairway. You always have three or four guys hole 5-irons or wedges, and guys holing bunker shots right and left. It seems like everybody plays on a different level all of the sudden because the atmosphere is so charged. On the other hand, you see guys miss shots they would never miss under normal circumstances. So it all depends how it goes if you start panicking, or it really gets you pumped up.

JESPER PARNEVIK: It feels different.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I don't think so. Many people have different ways to take care of whatever they need to do to either release their tension or just try to calm yourself down inside. And, you know, self-talk is very important. You've just got to keep on pumping yourself up, try to stay in it and make birdies and so on. I remember in our first match last time, me and Per-Ulrik got 2-down quickly to Tom Lehman and Jim Furyk. We just had a feeling we was going to pull it off somehow, and we birdied 17 and 18 to win 1-up.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I haven't noticed any difference. Golf is more and more becoming a world-wide game. You know, the crowds are more used to seeing the foreigners coming over here and playing and so on. And I say 99 percent of the time, they are really good to all the players. But I'm very sure it's going to be different when we, you know, step up in the Ryder Cup three weeks from now.

JESPER PARNEVIK: No, I think it's the same. Maybe it's -- how should I put it -- the Americans, they are in an easier situation one way because it's one country. We are going to have a lot of different countries playing on the same team, and you're going to have the people that come to root from us are also going to be from all the different countries; so, it's a little bit different that way. They are more going to root for their guys maybe, follow their guys. If they are going to be Swedish, they are going to follow me around, or French guys are going to follow Van de Velde around.

JESPER PARNEVIK: They get a little bit faster because they are drying out, but they are still fairly soft. You can stop the ball pretty much right at the pin, and won't get a huge bounce or anything. The course is playing probably as easy as I've seen it, because I remember, I think even last year, the greens were much firmer; and, you know, it's a very tough golf course when the greens get firm here.

JESPER PARNEVIK: They try to hide them, but it doesn't really matter. When the greens are soft, you can put them three feet over a bunker. The ball is just going to plug there anyway and it's much harder to hide a pin. If you take Pinehurst for example, when they tried to hide the pins there, it was a different situation, because then you can make double and triple bogeys all of the sudden.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I don't know. I think I put it on purpose, but sometimes I would have a white one as well.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Special Ryder Cup hats flipped up.

JESPER PARNEVIK: It says European Team -- I don't know.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I think that's the best thing that could ever happen to the world of golf. Tiger has been around now for a few years, and everybody was just waiting and dreaming for him to come along; and now you have a guy from Europe. What could be better, and he's 19. It's just like, you can't write it better than that. I think he's (Sergio Garcia) a lot of fun. Both of them is going to have a lot of fun trying to compete with each either. Sergio is a very mature guy being 19. You have to remember he made his first cut on the European TOUR when he was 14, which is quite amazing.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I don't -- I don't have any special point of view on that. It's more of a -- you kind of match your own players in the sense that you can put them on -- out in the order that you want. If you're -- you know, if you might put out all your best guys in the beginning to make the final blow on the other team. If it's really tight, you might want to put the experienced players at the end and so on. You do have an option. I don't know if you really need to match back and forth.