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NISSAN IRISH OPENMay 21, 2006Andy McFeeDavid ProbynMAYNOOTH, IRELAND SCOTT CROCKETT: Andy, I'd like to ask you to give us some indication of the State of the course at the moment and perhaps the problems that we've had leading up to this decision. ANDY McFEE: Obviously we played, started at 7:30 this morning and the last group got through to I think they are on the 8th green. And the reason we stopped was we had a period of about an hour and a half with rain that was getting pretty intense. And while we had absolutely no problems on the greens, the greens were perfect, the main problem was the fairways. And we got word that the 6th fairway and the 8th fairway were getting very difficult to find a place to take casual water relief. So we then started looking and then noticed the 11th fairway and 14th fairway. Even with preferred lies and a club length option where you place it, there comes a point where you just can't play and we reached that point so we called play. DAVID PROBYN: Status is we expect the rain to go through on and off for the rest of the evening and then tapering off after sunset tonight. From then on we're expecting isolated showers through the night, and certainly from midnight onwards the expectation is that could be pretty light, maybe a maximum of two millimeters of rain over that six hour period. Thereafter, really, the chances of rain we understand to be very small. And therefore, our hope is that three hours or so after that, we could be playable on the golf course; and therefore, we elected for 9:15 restart tomorrow, which would give us three hours of play roughly with the last match on the eighth for a 12:15 finish tomorrow lunchtime. Q. Did you give thought to calling it off altogether and going for the play-off option? ANDY McFEE: I think we take a view on these final round situations that it's really a question of majority of golf over minority of golf played. I mean, we scheduled a 7 hour period of play today from 7:30 to 2:30. We played virtually five hours of that before we came off the golf course, and very much the precedent is set that we would want then to conclude. DAVID PROBYN: That would be the fourth option if we had not got far enough to the point that we've only played a couple of holes of golf and the forecast is not very good, we'd have taken the view, okay, we'll come back to 54. With the amount of golf we had played and the forecast for tomorrow, that's not an option. ANDY McFEE: It's still a possibility because if, for example, tomorrow morning having tried to complete 72 holes had gone into Monday to achieve it and then you can't play on Monday, then you might think of 54 holes. But not before that. We have a high degree of confidence that's not going to happen. Q. And obviously Nissan are the main sponsors of the tournament, they have a part to play. David spoke to DAVID PROBYN: Yeah, we sat ask consulted all of our partners, television, the golf club, the event staging team and the sponsor, as you say. And in that situation, it was very clear that they felt the integrity of where we got to needed it was all about finishing it off. There was no way we should be coming back to 54. That was their viewpoint. ANDY McFEE: I think I can't generalize that. Everyone has different perspectives. That's the reality of where people sit in golf tournaments. There's a strong feeling from most of the guys I've spoken to that they want to have a fresh start tomorrow morning and finish this thing off in style at lunch time tomorrow. Q. Was the fact the leader is Irish a consideration? DAVID PROBYN: It's very rare that was foremost in some people's minds as to their perspective on it. From our perspective it's very much the fact that the amount of golf we had played, had to be held onto and that's the bottom line. DAVID PROBYN: I haven't discussed that with Edward Kitson, our event staging manager. My feeling is they stopped tickets from lunchtime today already. Anyone coming in was on a free of charge basis. I would certainly imagine that would be our viewpoint is they could come back in again tomorrow. There would not be a charge tomorrow but I have not discussed that at this time. Q. Have you any idea about numbers of players not turning up tomorrow? DAVID PROBYN: I have had a couple of people speak to they me about it, yes. DAVID PROBYN: They are waiting for some feedback from me on that one right now and I haven't had time to do that. Q. Will they be given the standard fine if they pull out? DAVID PROBYN: My mind right now is a little scrambled. We've just got out of there and I've told them that I need to sit quietly for a little while and think about that before I get back to them.
ANDY McFEE: I think it would be fair to David that he would tell the players before he would tell anybody else. Q. Are you considering a fine? DAVID PROBYN: I think at this stage that there is a fine in the book, whether that would be a fine or not, I can't really say at this time. Q. General response in the locker room? DAVID PROBYN: I don't know. Between walking up from the weather center into the players lounge to let them know the decision and on my way back down here I've spoken to two people. What was the response? ANDY McFEE: Good decision I heard twice. It's a question of where people sit and their stances will be different. I think the overriding thing I heard, good decision, guys didn't particularly want to go back out tonight again if things were going to be on the borderline and our feeling very much is that we are not going to get a period of time this evening where we can get the course the proper amount of time to get ready and our best chance of doing that is tomorrow. Q. Do the greenstaff face a huge job overnight and tomorrow? ANDY McFEE: It's really going to depend on how much more rain we take. As you can hear it's still coming down. I think they as we speak throughout this week, the golf course takes an enormous amount of water and the greens especially. We don't have any problems on the greens and they don't expect those problems at all. I think we have an increasing amount of work on bunkers. With the design of these bunkers as we know the Friday before the tournament we had an inch of rain in the space of an hour and a half and it washed away a large majority of the bunkers. Now, you know the more we take of this, the more that they are going have to do on that front much the rest of it the fairways yes we can assist that artificially but it needs a period of time for the water to run off and drain away. Q. Is it a clear rule or an arbitrary decision? DAVID PROBYN: As I said I think it's a question of majority over minority. That's the situation. We need in our mind to have played a significant amount of golf. With the question it being a finishing off three hours of play if we had ten hours to play, that's a very different perspective and as I said, we discussed all the implications of running into Monday. You know, subject to where we are in the world, subject to the impact on television, on the players, flights, it's, all of those things come into the equation. And the needs of the sponsor. But on a purely golfing basis, as I said, the principles are there. And the only different viewpoint on that is that when we feel we're in a situation where we're just finishing off the golf, which is where we are now, you know, we feel that's the situation we must see it through. ANDY MCFEE: It's a position that's been built up over a number of years on the Tour. It goes to the very credibility of your sport and you know, that's key. That's absolutely key. And sometimes it would just be plain wrong to go back to the 54 hole mark because so much of the final round has been completed and today would be one of them. Q. Was there not a rule about a number of players going through the turn? ANDY McFEE: There were a number of rules around that period. We're sending out a rule whereby no player could play more than 30 holes in a day if another player was going to play just one round. And those went out of the window in 1985 when Sandy Lyle won THE PLAYERS Championship at Sawgrass. Sandy played 35 holes in one day. We've only quickly realized I actually attended that tournament, and we quickly realized that you can't have hard and fast rules which are going to fit all circumstances. You have to have the freedom to do what you think is right, and your guiding thoughts has got to be what's the credibility of your sport. That he is bottom line. So, yes, there were rules like that, but they kind of went out quite a while ago. ANDY McFEE: We've got the facility now where we can text players with their starting times and we'll be up early tomorrow to have a good look at the golf course and if we are not confident of the 9:15 start can be achieved, we can get that message out fairly quickly. But, you know, we're taking the best advice that we can in terms of what we think might happen. You know, it's all based on forecasts and sometimes it's difficult moving forward based on a forecast, the reality of what actually will happen will determine what we do. But we feel fairly comfortable that the 9:15 is a sensible time to start or re start the final round because that's going to give time to clean up the golf course and opportunity for the greens staff. Once that draining time has been well underway because the only pushing of water around now is just a waste of energy. Q. Would you have one hole for a play-off? ANDY McFEE: That's the circumstance that we had at the Wales open at Celtic Manor a few years ago where we had a 36 hole tournament and we actually had a golf course which was totally just underwater because of the deluge that we had there. And I think you remember Paul McGinley was in that playoff and we found one hole, it happened to be the 12th which is about as far away as you can get so it was highly inconvenient to people, but that was the choice. We did not have a fairway on that golf course that we could play so, while we would have preferred to conduct the playoff near the clubhouse that people could have got to easily we had to go down to the bottom of the hill to the 12th. Same thing would happen here. If it rained all day tomorrow, and we couldn't play a round of golf or finish a round of golf, I'm sure we'd find one hole that we could conduct a playoff. Q. Would you wait all day for that? ANDY McFEE: Going back to the credibility of your sport, I think it's a sensible position to take that 72 holes is the benchmark of professional golf and if you cover a tournament back to 54 holes that is in the record book forever and a day and whoever wins that tournament, there is always the question of, well, he only won it over 54 holes. If that is the absolute final, if that's the best we can do, then that's what we will achieve. But if we've got a chance it get 72 holes in and if that means running onto a Monday, then we'll do it. Having done that, you know, there might come a point where we say, look, what we're trying to do is great, but we just can't achieve it, so what's the next best thing and that would be 54. DAVID PROBYN: We are waiting to hear, going at 9:15, our forecast is we are considering our options and we are very hopeful that we will get the proper amount of golf tomorrow. Q. What time do you consider a play-off? DAVID PROBYN: We've got three hours of play left and we've got a very good forecast for the late afternoon, it's an improving forecast. We will have some showers around in the morning but I really don't see that that's going to become necessary at all. Q. Can you remember a tournament that has been plagued by such bad weather ANDY MCFEE: We've had a few, Celtic Manor, we've gone back, some of the old Monte Carlo tournament that is we played, we actually had a spare day there. We used to start on the Wednesday yeah, we did we started on the Wednesday and played through to Saturday and we actually wrote into the conditions of the tournament that Sunday was a possibility because we had so many fog delays. There were one or two tournaments in South Africa we had a few difficult he's with. It happens. It's an outdoor sport and it's one of the things that we have to contend with. You know, you make the best of it, you do what you can. Ryder Cup at Valderrama, the weather was pretty exceptional there, but in Ryder Cup we've only got a small number of players on the golf course, a hell of a lot of spectators, but small number of players. |
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