VOLVO MASTERS ANDALUCIA

October 29, 2003

Sergio Garcia

MARIA ACACIA: How did it go today, Sergio?

SERGIO GARCIA: Good. Eight holes, a little bit of rain, so, you know, hopefully the weather improves a little bit. It looks like it's going to be quite windy, so it should be tough, as it is here every year at Valderrama.

Q. Jose Maria was talking, he said he wanted to have some of the cork trees cut back here, and he says that nothing has happened, would you have liked to have seen them cut back around the greens?

SERGIO GARCIA: Well, they did do something around 18. I mean, they have cut quite a lot of branches on the right of 18. So now if you hit it on the right-hand side of the fairway, you still have a shot to the green.

I don't know if they cut some more. Like 1 and some of the other holes, they haven't. But 18, that was probably the worst thing they did cut.

I don't really look too much at that. I just try to hit it where I want to. If I hit the trees, then everybody's going to hit it.

Q. Just give us a brief English assessment of your game then.

SERGIO GARCIA: I think it's been getting better and better as the year has been going through. I'm feeling a lot more comfortable. I feel like I'm back driving the ball very nicely, hitting it quite far, too. My irons have improved quite a bit. That's a great thing for me. My putting looks like it's coming around, too. So I've been working quite hard on it, so it looks like slowly but surely it's starting to pay off.

Q. Would you give yourself a rating on your swing changes out of, say, a 10, and how much longer you think you have to work on those things that you tried to change?

SERGIO GARCIA: Well, I'm still working on them. I'm still getting better. It's definitely feeling a lot more comfortable now, so it feels a lot more natural. It feels like I don't have to think about it, and that's always a great thing. If you can stand over the ball and not think about doing the swing the way you have to, you're thinking about where you want to hit the shot and that makes it easier.

Q. When you are making these changes, would you say -- you had a month off in January when you were working really hard and came back in February?

SERGIO GARCIA: I like the way it's feeling at the moment. Of course, I have to keep working gradually, get it better and better but, you know, the biggest changes we made, I just have to get it better as time goes by.

Q. Did you use anything, any method or tip, to make that big change in your backswing?

SERGIO GARCIA: No. Pretty much my Dad and I, we tried to figure out which way to do it. We realized that the main problem was the start of the backswing. You know, the club was going to be too much off-line on the outside and that is when it was making me lay the club a lot. And so now we are trying to go more in-line and straight up. It's making the swing, the top of the backswing, it looks much better than what it did. It's aiming more towards the area, it's not perfect, because it's always going to be a bit of it in there, it's my way of swinging but it's definitely much better.

End of FastScripts.