U.S. OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP

June 12, 2002

Craig Currier

Tim Moraghan

RAND JERRIS: It's our pleasure to be joined by Craig Currier, who is the golf course superintendent and Tim Moraghan, USGA Director of Championships Agronomy. They will answer any questions about the golf course, the course setup.

I will turn the mic over to Tim and we will take some questions, please.

TIM MORAGHAN: Just before we get started, I want to thank the State of New York, Governor Pataki and Bernadette Castro and everybody involved, from Rees Jones on up. It's been a wonderful experience for the USGA, and we are very, very pleased to be here. Can't say enough good things about the gentleman to my right and his No. 1 guy, Garrett Boddington, who is the superintendent on the Black Course. He is also here today, and if you have any questions, I'm sure he can help you out, as well.

But more than anything, I think this year, the media, both electronic and print, has given the golf course superintendent, Craig, more publicity and more credit than in the past. From my standpoint, those are the individuals that do the work that don't seem to get as much credit as they deserve, and I want to thank everybody for doing that, and bringing to everybody's attention the hard work and dedication of these individuals.

So from there on, any questions, please fire away.

Q. I was just wondering, I know these greens are perhaps the flattest in Open history, but also they might be the quickest as a way of counter-punching, rolling 13, maybe using speed as an extra barrier; whereas in the past, with so much slope, you could not make them quite this fast as other places?

TIM MORAGHAN: Well, I think our championship staff and Fred, who is our championship committee chairman, we pick the speed based on grass-type contour and the championship being played.

This idea that these greens are flat, I'm having a hard time with that. These are some flatter surfaces than we've played in the past, but if you look at your kitchen table, it's flat, but if you pick up one side, it's no longer flat.

Perhaps, in the past, when green speeds were a little lower, maybe 10, 20 years ago, you could strike the ball pretty hard and it would stay on line. Talking to the players this week, there are a lot of subtle breaks out there. They are going to have a hard time picking that up. I think they will pick it up eventually because they are great players, but you could look at green No. 1, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and even 17, it's two-tiered; it has a mound or ridge running through the middle.

I think this idea that they are flat, I think it's not really correct. I know the fairways are flat for the most part, but not the putting greens.

From a speed perspective, though, a flatter surface, for the sake of argument, is probably, gives us a little more flexibility to give us a little higher speed. When you have contours, serious contours, you force a player to make a great putt, and as it gets closer to the hole, due to contour or something at an excessive speed that that ball will trail on, and I don't know that that's quite an equitable situation.

Here we are in the range from 12 to 13 feet. Probably think we are a little closer to 13 at this moment, and our goal, and Craig can elaborate a little bit, was to try the best we can to have Monday morning and the three practice rounds as close to or equal to Thursday through Sunday.

CRAIG CURRIER: Yeah, just what Tim said about the greens, they have pretty much been consistent all week. We've been Stimping at night, and we lost about six inches of speed when we do Stimp at night. We are pretty close to 13 and we will try to keep them there for the next four days. Even if we do get rain, I don't think speed will be a problem, just the firmness of the greens.

Q. Craig, I was wondering if you could talk about the rough, the type of grass that the rough consists of, how the process is of getting it to the thickness that it is, because a lot of players are talking about how thick and gnarly it is, what you guys did to get it to the way it is?

CRAIG CURRIER: The rough is pretty dense. Biggest reason being a lot of the rough, just outside of the fairways, used to be fairway. We've brought the fairways in. A lot of them were over 45 yards wide and we have brought them down to -- I think our widest one now is 29 or 30.

Two years ago, we scalped all of the roughs down and overseeded them with ryegrass. There's a real high population of ryegrass in the roughs. There's so many plants per square inch, it's really dense and it's really uniform all over the golf course. We are making the rough at 3 and 1/2 inches right now, which is fairly short, but the ball just kind of sucks down to the bottom of it pretty good. So it's definitely going to be a real test for them.

TIM MORAGHAN: This is something that's been a concern over the years. If you look back at some of the history of the U.S. Open, going back to 1995, where you have, as Craig said, a wide area of play for the daily player or the member, whoever, and all of a sudden you go -- Shinnecock, we did that and at Olympic, Pinehurst, Southern Hills, Pebble Beach, and now here when you have kind of a uniform or one mono-stand of turfgrass, and we do narrow fairways quite a bit and that becomes an issue as far as density. We've dealt with it as best we can over last four or five years.

I think when the player understands that these are old fairways or were, in their prior life, fairways, are now primary rough -- we have to find a height in the 3 1/2 inches, where if you go a little lower, the ball has a tendency to sit up on top of the grass.

As Craig said, due to the high seed count and plant density, you have to let it get taller so it loses its stiffness and the ball sits a little bit. It's supposed to be a penalty; we ask the player to hit the middle of the fairway. If you get lucky, you get lucky. If not, that's the way it goes.

Q. Can you tell us what was technically done to the greens from three to five years ago and the condition they were in to getting them in the best condition these guys have ever played?

CRAIG CURRIER: When I got here, the one good thing, they rolled the greens. I don't think they got a lot of water for the most part. They had a lot of bentgrass on them. They had not been aerified a lot so I think the first summer we were closed, we aerified them six to eight times. We have done a lot of aerification and removed a lot of soil and the top 3 inches now has a lot of sand in it, which has been able to help us firm them up.

Just from constant grouping and topdressing all the time, we topdress real frequently, just the right fertility program, they have come around. Obviously, limiting play this spring has been great, 125 rounds a day and then having the two weeks off the last two weeks, pretty much all the ball marks held in, so they were just about perfect on Monday.

Q. Last year, at Southern Hills, obviously you were in here, much different environment, people were questioning 9 and 18 repeatedly; how much of a relief is it for you to come here this year? And this is good public history, a lot of talk about coming to a public course. For you, has that been more gratifying than what you went through last year?

TIM MORAGHAN: I'm just happy to get out of bed in the morning. I thought last year's Open was fabulous. We had some issues on 18. I don't perceive 9 to have been a huge issue. But that was last year.

I think every Open for me is gratifying. What's been nice about this year is we had an awful lot of preparation time. Craig and I have been working closely for about five years, and we've had an opportunity to look at all of the past championships that I've been through, and that's 46 U.S. Opens as far as mens, womens and seniors, and we learn from that.

I think the gratification that I get out of this year is we uncovered a great golf course, and Craig and Rees turned it into an even better golf course and from what I heard from the players, they are having a blast right now. I'm just happy to be here.

Q. There's a lot of people that walk around the galleries out here that have a special bond to this course. Some of them are saying that five years ago, this course was nothing; they described it as being brown and not anywhere near what it is now. How would you describe the transformation where it was and what it is now?

CRAIG CURRIER: Well, it's not really kind of fair to compare. When I got here, we had a total of five or six employees working on the golf course, and then, obviously, with the USGA spending $2.7 million or almost $3 million on the renovations, everything got upgraded. Our budgets have obviously increased a lot since five years ago. So having the right resources and the staff has made it -- it's not really apples to apples. Besides the Black Course, the other four golf courses have improved dramatically.

We've been working five years. It's just great to finally see some guys come out and play it and hear some comments and we're real glad to hear everyone likes the course.

Q. When did you get here, precisely?

CRAIG CURRIER: My first day on the job was, actually, I drove down to Congressional in the '97 Open. So I started five years ago, basically, this week.

Like I said, when we got here, we had a crew of four or five and now we have -- nobody on the crew had any background in turf, per se, no degrees. Now we have 20 full-time people with either two- or four-year college degrees. We have, this summer, I think 15 to 18 turf interns. So as far as the talent we have floating around here, it's pretty incredible.

Just over the years of picking up new guys and women here and there, the crew is great. I think right now, with all five golf courses, including our carpenters and plumbers, I think we are up to almost 75 or 80, which we've probably increased 10 to 15 people in the last year over five.

Q. Could you address the issue of the green-side bunkers? It looks like you changed all the sand out and you almost get a guaranteed plug lie in those green-side bunkers. It's pretty stiff, and I'm guessing that was by design, to make those considerably more punitive than maybe they had been at other courses on the TOUR?

TIM MORAGHAN: I think Craig can agree. When we started the project with Rees and Chip McDonald back in '97 the bunkers had deteriorated to the point where they were circles or piles of sands. With the photos and documentation that we had, and David Fay's thrust of trying to make them more of a Winged Foot situation, more penal and closer to the green, I think we did that.

The sand, in the reconstruction of the bunker, everything from new drainage to reshaping to the sodding and what have you around there, of course we put new sand in. Over the years, due to weather and what-have-you, we have replaced some sand since then. I think the original total was 8,000 to 9,000 tons of sands, and we probably put another 500 or 600 tons.

CRAIG CURRIER: 800.

TIM MORAGHAN: Just to make it all a little better situation. You have to remember, Long Island, what is underneath us is a sand bar, so we do have some subsurface issues that we are trying to keep clean.

I don't know so much as a plug lie. I think the rules of golf will tell you the bunker is a hazard. Probably not the best place to be. It might be a little better than the rough, but that's up to the player and their decision making. Plug lies, I haven't really seen any. We have been monitoring some of the hole where is the high shots come in. If they come in short, I don't think we want to provide a player with an unplayable situation. I think we want to provide them with a challenging situation. I think we are in pretty good shape.

RAND JERRIS: Tim and Craig, thanks very much.

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