BAY HILL INVITATIONAL PRESENTED BY COOPER TIRES

March 16, 2000

Mike Nicolette

MIKE NICOLETTE: How about that, bogey-free. I haven't had any of those. Let's see, 4th hole, I made a birdie at No. 4 par 5. Hit a pretty basic drive, 2-iron, left front bunker blasted out three feet, birdie. Birdied No. 6, another par 5. Got pretty lucky on that hole. I kind of pulled my tee shot a little bit but it carried far enough and I had about 230 yards to the pin, which I pulled that shot, too, but got lucky and it carried the water and was on the green and 2-putted for birdie. So pretty easy there. No. 8, hit a pretty good tee shot, 158. Wind was fairly strong in the face. Hit 6-iron about two feet below the hole and made that. So it was pretty -- it was a pretty basic round. I feel pretty fortunate to shoot that low because we got a break on the weather. Obviously, the afternoon round wasn't anything like the morning round. But that's the way golf works sometimes.

MIKE NICOLETTE: I don't think so. This morning around 9:00 or 10:00, I was out having breakfast and the wind looked horrific. When we got out here it, was still gusty, but I don't think it was nearly as hard as it was this morning. Of course, I wasn't out here, so I don't know.

MIKE NICOLETTE: Well, the last four years, the same place I've been the last 11 years. I work for Ping and I design golf equipment for them. I left the TOUR back in '88, took a job with Ping in '89. And I play a couple of tournaments -- my position, obviously on the -- well, there is no position on the money list, but my category has dropped so far down that I only get to play one tournament a year and this is it. So this is my full schedule.

MIKE NICOLETTE: This is a vacation for me. I mean, I bring my family down. If I play good, great. If I don't, I'm going to Universal. Sorry, Disney. But I haven't played much golf this year. This makes my eighth round of golf this year. So it's really hard to be competitive with this caliber of player, and I hate to say it, but my true game will probably show up here very shortly.

MIKE NICOLETTE: Lack of talent and funds. Does that sum it up pretty good? I'm a good golfer, I'm not a great golfer, and on occasion, I have a good round. But the guys that play out here week-in and week-out, these guys are tremendous. So I'm not in their league. Today, I was in their league. Tomorrow, you know, it's a municipal course round, I might shoot 89. You never know.

MIKE NICOLETTE: No. I'm really happy with what I'm doing. I love my job. I'm with my family every night, which is very important to me, to be with my family a lot. I'm doing what I want to do. To get to come out and play, like I said, it's a vacation, it's a privilege for me to be here, and I'm having a great time. You know, for me to play as well as I did -- like last year I made a few events. I made the cut here last year, which was a big thrill. But I have a good friend that he lives here in town. His name is John Redmond. John is a teacher and he used to teach me when I was playing full-time. So when I come down, you know, I get my yearly lesson with him and he kind of tunes me up and off I go. So we worked pretty hard on Sunday. We went about three or four hours together and I was playing terrible. I was just hitting it -- but he just got me tuned up to where I can feel the club again, I can start my ball on the line I want to start it on and move it the way I want to move it. And that's all golf is, you need to start a ball on line and move it one way or the other, and I'm doing that pretty well right now. Hit a lot of fairways and hit a lot of greens, and if I could have made a few putts on the back nine, I could have shot all right.

MIKE NICOLETTE: You know, I played our state Open last year, and I was lucky enough to win that. And I played the Argentina Open last year, by accident. I was going to Argentina to do a product introduction. I work for Ping and we you just introduced our new i3 product, the irons. And so we were down there with our distributor, and about a week before they asked me if I was interested in playing. And I said, "Well, not really, because I haven't played like any golf in two months." And they kind of talked me into it and they said: "Gosh, come one, you're using the new product and just play." I finished okay. I finished 8th. But, you know the neat thing about not playing very much is you don't try very many spectacular things out there. I know pretty much what my game is, what I can do and that's good enough.

MIKE NICOLETTE: I've got zero expectations and zero pressure. The company I work for -- this is a paid vacation. Go have a good time, you're representing us, play well, but I'm here to just have a nice time. So there's no pressure for me.

MIKE NICOLETTE: When this is your only source of income and your game's not very good, there's a lot of pressure. Sometimes you just don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. And I was getting to that point about 1986 and '87, and I was very fortunate to get a job with Ping, and they kind of pulled me out of the doldrums, so to speak. Gave me new life.

MIKE NICOLETTE: You know, that was a whole other time for me, obviously. But I still remember my mental approach when I was like back then because 1982 was the first year they went to the all-exempt tour. '83 was the first year they went to it and '82 you had to qualify for it. Had a nice tournament at Doral and that kind of got me way up on the money list, and I hung in there the rest of the year, finished in the Top-125. And the thing was when you used to have to shoot the Monday qualifyings, you'd shoot 65, but it doesn't mean anything. Just gets you into the tournament. I knew that those rounds in me occasionally. I'd say, one of those days I'm going to shoot that 65 on Thursday and just kind of hang in there. And I did that here. You know, I was very fortunate to win one time.

MIKE NICOLETTE: I ended up winning, but Greg 3-putted. Beating is when you make a birdie. He lost.

MIKE NICOLETTE: You know, I have that all the time but try to suppress those things.

MIKE NICOLETTE: You know, it was a lot of fun to win, and the shot that -- the only shot I remember really vividly was my last shot on 18, because, you know, Greg hits it so far, and I don't hit it anywhere near him. And I kind of fizzled a drive into the right rough and Greg had just, you know 320 bong down the middle. And I hit 215 yards to carrie -- there was a ball cad out there at the time, it wasn't rocks. My caddie was trying to get me to lay up with a 7-iron over to the left of it. He says, hit it over there, and you can chip across and maybe a 4 and maybe a win; maybe Greg will do -- who knows. I went, you know what, I said, "You know what, I'm going right at that pin. I'm going to hit a 5-iron and I'm going to try to hit a big knuckleball." If it flies it's going to be perfect, but if it didn't, it's going to drop 40 yards short. And as soon as it came off the club, I remember saying "get down" and it flew all the way to the back fringe. That was my most memorable shot at that time, and it turned out to be a good one.

MIKE NICOLETTE: Yeah. And the playoff hole, the 15th hole, you know, Greg kind of charged a putt from about 20 feet, knocked it about five feet by and missed it coming back, and I had about a 3-footer for par and made it. I'll tell you something, somebody took a picture of me right when the ball was leaving the putter; my eyes were closed. I don't know if I blinked or what, but it went in.

MIKE NICOLETTE: I design golf equipment for them. There's a design team in our engineering department made up of probably eight guys, and I kind of critique all of the things that our engineers are doing. And I think we have a real winner with the i3 iron, too. Our sales are basically record sales right now. The product is a great product. Virtually all of our TOUR players have them in the bag now, which speaks volumes. I'm not an engineer by trade. But I'm a good critiquer.

MIKE NICOLETTE: Let's see in '96, I had back surgery. I had back problems my whole life. In fact, when I was playing the TOUR, I had back problems. It's just one of those things that you deal with where it finally blew out totally to the point where I virtually couldn't move. So I had to have surgery and went very well obviously, I'm here. But I was out of golf about three years there.

MIKE NICOLETTE: Not at that time. These medical extensions these guys have now, they have no idea how lucky they are, because I remember in my day, my back blew out on me, and there's no such thing as, oh, you had to sit out for 10 tournaments, gee. That didn't happen back then when I was playing. You know, these guys they have their fingers hurting so they are not going to play golf for six weeks, and if the guy misses his card by a couple thousand dollars, he gets five tournaments or something to make it up the next year. It's like, wow, that's pretty good stuff. That didn't happen when I was playing.

MIKE NICOLETTE: Most people think I'm Corey Pavin. You know, you get the profile (Laughter.) If you're not up on your golf trivia, you have no idea who I am.

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