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JOHN DEERE CLASSIC

July 5, 2005

Chris Hague

SILVIS, ILLINOIS

PHIL STAMBAUGH: Thanks for joining us this afternoon. Maybe a couple thoughts from you on the golf course and talk about the season. I guess from the weather reports when I got into town, I guess you haven't had a whole lot of rain around here lately.

CHRIS HAGUE: No, we're almost ten inches down in this general area, maybe a little less than that. For us the month of June was way below average precips, all of our temperatures were above average. I think in the month of June we had something like 25 or 26 days above 85.

We really haven't had a real appreciable rain since the mid May period, so all those things put together have probably made it the most challenging pre month that I can remember over the years, mostly because we were coupled up with so many 95 to 105 heat indexes that took place, and you talk about a drought, and droughty conditions mean low humidity, but on a piece of property like this that sits close to a river, and we create some of our own humidity because we irrigate. So this whole piece of property really becomes its own monocot type center. Even though you're hearing humidity 35, 40 percent in our places, once you irrigate for a certain number of days in a row, you tend to hold a different kind of heat index within the bounds of the property than everybody else does.

You couple that with I think we had a run of 11 or 12 days where I take a lot of heat, thermograph readings, and I could shoot asphalt at 128 to 135 degree range, and I'd go out on putting greens at times, and it was literally 105 to 110, 112 degrees mid day, and we were seeing the heat of the day happen between 2:00 and 6:00 o'clock even. We just had a lot of hours of it; even though you'd get a heat index reported of 106, but it might have lasted for three or four hours.

So that was very detrimental, especially to the putting surfaces. Fairways didn't suffer at all. We're really rolling into the tournament with root zones on the grasses on the greens a little on the weaker side because of the way the weather and the conditions set us up, and partially for that reason, we brought greens to 11 speed for this week, and unless I see something really positive happening here in the next week or so, a little more of a cool off, we'll probably settle into the 11 or 11 and a half for all five days of the competition, rather than really trying to push the envelope. We're rather interested in having a golf course left after the event is done.

I foresee us to really be trashed on the outside of the gallery ropes. I think even though the place is really green and lush in the middle, I mean, everything on the outside of the ropes is about as droughty as everybody's yards and fields and everywhere around here. So I think it won't take much of a crowd to probably wipe out 10, 15 acres at least just down to the dirt. It won't really take all that long. I think we'll have a little bit more on the renovation on the outside of the ropes. I think the interior of the golf course should come through real well, as per usual.

Q. How will that translate to how do you see the greens part of it? What kind of reaction to you expect to get? Will it be any different reaction from the players in other years regarding the greens?

CHRIS HAGUE: I think the only way it's going to be different, we've had a tendency to really please the players from a ball roll standpoint, and these greens have always been considered darts, dartboards for these guys, and some of that definitely equates to we have never been through a seven day period around here for a tournament without having two or three storm events. If we can stay away from that, we may actually get a complaint that the greens are getting too hard because as long as we can control those conditions, we've got a little better chance. That may generate that's going to generate a few more strokes, and that probably is going to generate a few more comments.

You know, when you've got greens at 12 or 12 and a half like we've had on certain days in the past, but if they're dartboards and you've had nice greens and they're soft, these players just love it.

So I hope to we kind of hope to see that maybe as one of the slight changes this year, that we can just have a little bit harder surface for them.

Q. So firmer greens but slower greens, do they offset?

CHRIS HAGUE: Yeah, slightly they can be really offsetting, especially if the wind kicks up. I think that becomes the key. And on this golf course, we have so many different small cultures of you know, you've got greens tucked into trees where there's no wind. Then you play out the next hole and you're up high and you've got maybe a 25 mile per hour wind, so there's many different diversities here, and that's partly why the players don't feel like they play the same hole over and over here like they do at some places, and I think that will play into it. You all know, you've walked around here enough, you can walk two or three holes and it'll be stagnant, and then you'll come uphill and feel like you're being blown over. That will make a big difference in how the greens play over a period of time.

Q. How many guys do you actually have out working the course for you guys right now?

CHRIS HAGUE: We peaked ourselves out around 28 to 29 people for event week, and all that group is regular staff people, and we all are used to working together, and we basically split everybody off of No. 1 and No. 10, worked forward on the golf course. On top of that, we've got some great, 12, 15, maybe 18 volunteers that tend to come in in the evenings and help us with seed soil divoting, raking bunkers, picking up divots, little things like that. In total we can reach 50 or so. And a normal crew for us is 22 to 23 when we're just here for our daily fee and our corporate golf. We tweak it up quite a bit for about a month and a half period.

Q. How much work have you put in to this point to get the course where it is in its ready state? How many weeks in advance did you start?

CHRIS HAGUE: Our weeks in advance really begin in mid May, and from that period on, with you begin to do things a little differently to the golf course. Our timing of whether it's seeding tees, whether it's aerifying, our whole aim is to provide strong enough plants early enough that by the time we get to tournament week, we can do whatever we want to. We can dry them down, we can take some 90 , 95 degree weather, and we're just always trying to set up these turf areas to take it. And it's not a problem with the rough areas, but the bentgrass, the massive amount of acres we have there, that grass doesn't tend to take the stress near as much.

Yeah, we're working a program all the time, several months in advance, to help us to get to that point.

Q. At this point how much rain can this course take if we were to get it?

CHRIS HAGUE: Yesterday's was perfect. The way everything floats in here, we can get a two and a half inch rain in an hour, and it all floods off. Once you repair bunkers and pick up some twigs and get rid of some debris, the place is ready and usually not too much casual water sitting there. So it really depends on the type of rainfall that comes in on us.

A quick flood is going to move on, and really the conditions are going to come right back to us fairly quickly. If we'd have had something like we had yesterday and it had been twice as maybe the precipitation rate, maybe if it was twice as much and it lasted 10 or 12 hours, it would have softened up everything. That was really a made to order one. That's the kind we like to have, what we had yesterday.

Q. In talking to the guys yesterday, it seems like every one of them really take pride in that they're doing out there, especially when they get to watch the course on TV.

CHRIS HAGUE: No doubt about it. Out of that core there's about 15 of us that work together from February through November and kind of know each other's moves and moods and so forth. Yeah, everybody really does, and it's we put a 50 inch TV back in the break room for the week, and that helps the enjoyment level. We've got some rollaway beds back there for all the guys that are on call during the day. It's kind of the one time a year that we can have a real presentation that gets noticed because I think speaking for daily fee type courses and resort courses, you always have the same faces in and out, you don't always hear too much back and forth.

So everybody gets a kick out of knowing that some of the better players are appreciative of what's going on, and the area here, too. I mean, every day there's just hundreds of people stopping me. I can't go from point A to point B for more than 50 feet or so without getting stopped.

Q. Is this golf course soft in the fairways particularly? Is it going to play longer this week or is it going to play firmer?

CHRIS HAGUE: I don't think it's going to play longer this week at all compared to some of the previous years. I think you're going to see it begin I think you're going to see things really begin to roll out here over the next couple of days. As I said, it's all the plants are healthy to take some drought stress, they're going to turn a little blue up on the crowns in the high places, and they're going to look the nice shocking green like they are.

What gets taken away from us in a tournament is we can't do anything anywhere from about 7:00 o'clock in the morning until 5:00 or so in the evening. So it's kind of let it go, and we may pick up on a little hand water late in the evening when we get the golf course back, but our aim is to just keep the place on the edge for the next five days or so so that the kind of things you're talking about continue to happen. So we might see some of those long 320 drives, especially the way that the crowns are out here. If you can get those hard rock, they're just booming by.

Q. How would you describe this golf course to golfers? How would you just describe this golf course like to someone who hasn't played it and is just interested, certain holes being extremely tough?

CHRIS HAGUE: I think the design of this golf course is really friendly to the wide variety because most times you've been out there, you've got so many landing zones that are 40 to 50 yards in places and it's very generous. There's 38 hours of bentgrass fairways out there, and a lot of tournament sites you're down to only 22 or 23, and that makes a tremendous amount of difference for the 25 handicappers like me that want to just keep it in the middle. So on a day to day basis, that's good for the place.

I think it's a little bit of a detriment for us now as we get the best players in. We'd like for everything to come in, but how do you in your design stage and setting up the piece of property, the decision was made that we kind of veered this way. I think if the golf course becomes even a more serious tournament site in the future, we're looking into the narrowing of fairways. Any time you start to do those things and really tighten up the golf course, the bunkers have to move in with it, so it's not just a simple let's take this grass out and change it out and that type of thing; that's easy over 15 acres or so, if you want to take 38 and maybe it 22. But we've got to bring all the penalty in with it, and that's kind of addressing a lot of different problems that way.

But in that way, it would become a lot more difficult for the day to day player that comes out to play that are hackers like me.

Q. More serious tournament site, you mean what?

CHRIS HAGUE: In case there's you never know, there could be things that come off in the future. A new golf facility like this that's only five years old, now, I've been through three years, so this will be the fifth John Deere Classic on this site, it takes a while to get recognized for anything in any business, and I would say that down the road, if the green conditions we know are fine, a lot of nice contours, greens are very challenging once you get them up at 11 to 12. But on the flipside, the professional Tour player doesn't have a problem with fairways and a lot of the hazards out here.

So as that comes in, that could also open up, well, maybe there's something else that could be interesting to bring in here in the future. A golf course gets a reputation, and five years is a very short reputation. It takes a long time. And after enough years of having successful John Deere Classics or whatever, you never know.

Q. The rough, what kind of rough have you been able to grow?

CHRIS HAGUE: Well, I know that the rough this year is more penal than last year. It's become that way each and every year. We're not doing things all that much different this year. I mean, we've topped off rough and we grew it the entire month of June as high as our mowers would go, which was around four to four and a half inches. We've deliberately tried to set the place up early to be more penal, and we pushed the nutrition programs and the fertilization here in the early part of the year much more so, but we've been doing that every year.

I think what's out there now is not that it's that much higher but it's much more even. There are less weak areas out there than there was a year ago or two years ago, and we've been because of the drought, we've made a lot of accommodations temporarily even in our irrigation system. We have a fine underground computer driven system that we watch every single gallon that goes out here. But one of the downsides is we don't really have specific irrigation for the rough.

What we have is built around the fairway areas, the roughs suffer because of it, and we went into a lot of different holes like 17, 18, 15, left side of No. 2, right side of No. 5, and we've installed, in the same casings that these are, we've installed part circle type heads that push out and go into the rough, and we know exactly where 250 yards to 320 yards is, we laser, and we've been trying to work those short areas to provide a more penal rough.

But it involves a lot of labor, flip flopping internal assemblies out of these casings in the ground, and we've kind of drawn our own temporary rough system ahead of the tournament. So I know that that's made the rough more penal in more places than in the past, but it's not really being maintained any higher, and that call is made by Jamie Conklin, who comes in as the advance rules official. The Tour really sets that point where, hey, this is difficult enough, so far as height of cut.

Q. Where are places where the drought has stressed

CHRIS HAGUE: Yeah, there's places out there where they won't have any trouble getting out of it at all, definitely.

Q. Do you think that they'll see much just simply condition wise, much difference between Cog Hill and here? I know the courses are a lot different; just the rough at the Western last week was basically described as a little on the thin side.

CHRIS HAGUE: Moderate. Yeah, they've had some of the same kind of drought, too.

Q. It's only two hours away. It would seem like you would have pretty much a similar situation, condition wise.

CHRIS HAGUE: Probably. I think we sit in a our heat index and so forth is a little more here, the angle of the sun, I think, is just a little bit different in this particular area around here. But no, we're suffering some of the same kind of there really hasn't been any natural rainfall appreciable for quite a while I know in this whole region.

Q. But you made an effort to grow rough?

CHRIS HAGUE: We made a concerted extra effort over the last three, four weeks to really roll in some of these areas, and we especially worked 15 through 18 a little bit harder, the finishing holes, and put the investment of time and effort into those probably more than the others with those being the finishing holes.

What we're doing is labor intensive to constantly be popping heads out and putting another one in, so we just prioritized landing zones from the 250 to 320 on what we considered our most important holes because we really couldn't just blanket policy do it on all 18.

Q. So if you hit the ball 321 you're in pretty good shape?

CHRIS HAGUE: Might be. Yeah, we honed in on that area but it overlaps shorter and longer, definitely.

PHIL STAMBAUGH: Thank you much for stopping by. Appreciate it.

End of FastScripts.

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