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SENIOR PGA CHAMPIONSHIP

May 26, 2006

Gary Player

EDMOND, OKLAHOMA

Q. Overall impressions on the course after two rounds?

GARY PLAYER: You must say, I thought the golf course was a beautiful golf course. And everybody did a fantastic job of work here.

All the volunteers, you know, it's a great team event.

The course was in great condition. I just done like the tree on number 10 in the middle of the fairway. And the rocks in the middle of the fairway at about No. 16. I thought that other than that I thought the golf course was perfect.

Really a very fine test of golf and a successful PGA.

Q. Who do you see as maybe the guy to beat? Who does this course kind of set up for, as far as the way it's playing right now?

GARY PLAYER: Very different to say, but Gil Morgan is going to be very confident and living here and hitting the ball a long way is a big advantage.

Brad Bryant, you got Peter Jacobsen, you got a host of fellows in there. Anybody could come out and win. I'm not very good at picking the winners.

Q. How do you feel about the way you played though through two rounds?

GARY PLAYER: I played very poorly yesterday and I played very nicely today. So all in all but I enjoyed myself very much indeed.

Q. Is it too much of a stretch to say that you're kind of the founding father of golf fitness? You were kind of doing it before it was popular, yes?

GARY PLAYER: Well, I was being, I've been exercising since I was nine years of age, which is 61 years. And Frank Stranahan and I were the only two that were using weights back in the '50s. And I spoke to Yogi Berra the other day and he said, you know when you were doing all those weights I thought you were mad. We wouldn't even let our baseball team have a swim. And he says, I just couldn't believe it. He says, and today they are putting these bionic men in sports today. And unless you want to, you know, are the particular young guy, not this TOUR, but young guys, both men and women, unless you're on a weight training course, you're going to be left behind.

Not only that, I think it's the eating. You take just in America alone, 55 percent of the population are obese and 24 percent of the youth are obese already. So the eating probably, I would say even more important and crucial to the body, even more so than exercise.

Q. There are a lot of amateurs out here watching you guys this week, saying how do they hit it so straight and far. A lot of it probably has to do with the weight lifting, also stretching. What difference, if an amateur were to get in that, we were yesterday over in the trailer with Paul, he was showing us some of the techniques. What difference is it going to make for them?

GARY PLAYER: Well, you must remember to start grown ups doing exercise is easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get average everyday guys to exercise. Nobody wants to exercise. The human being basically is pretty lazy. They don't want to go to the gym. And it's a very difficult thing. But don't eliminate the eating. Because it's very sad when you see all these young people so obese. And the mother's are to blame. The mother's and the schools. The mother's, the schools and the hospitals. You go to hospital, they give you white bread, they give you bacon, they gave you sausage and all of the high animal fats. You just got to lay off those high animal fats. I mean, you should never be giving your children milk, in my opinion, that's just my opinion. I mean, you're weaned from milk as a baby. No animals drink milk after they're weaned. And if you read a book called The China Study, every American and every student at school should be made to read this book called The China Study. And that will change their entire lives. It will change the whole perception of 300 million people.

Q. What's kind of you're routine now day, how do you stay so limber, so loose.

GARY PLAYER: Well, first of all I try not eating animal fats. I'm not a martyr, I do it 75 percent. I don't eat any animal fat and I eat a lot of vegetables and fruit and avocados and a lot of roughage and do a lot of stretching. And I keep fit. I've always said that when I got to 50 I would try and lose one pound every year. I used to weigh 166, I'm at 140 now. So I haven't quite adhered to it, but I'm reasonably close.

Q. Do you think if some of the people followed the things you do as golfers they will be better players?

GARY PLAYER: I think golf is, golfers are very good. I think they're very fit. If you look at them they're out practicing in the morning, they go and play, some of them go to the gym. They all are working pretty hard. I think that golf is a much more of an is a severe exercise than people think. Yesterday I practiced and then played 18 holes and it was 96 degrees and I'm 70 years of age, and I went and hit balls when I was finished.

Q. A lot of amateurs won't do that.

GARY PLAYER: Well, that's they're choice. That's they're choice.

Q. You would recommend it. Something is better than nothing?

GARY PLAYER: You've got to more people are dying of obesity than all the wars of the world put together. There are probably 10,000 people a day, plus or minus, that die in the United States every day of obesity. Diabetes, heart attacks, cancer, something. And so the wars, very few people are killed in wars as compared to obesity.

Q. Like Tiger and Ernie and Luke Donald, all the great names that are in the game now, Mickelson, they all have these exercise routines, but they're almost like military secrets in that you don't know what they do. Do you wish that some of those guys would share their routines and that might spur other people to kind of take it on?

GARY PLAYER: No, not at all. Because there's really no secrets, I mean the knowledge is out there, it's been out there for a hundred years it's out there. I mean there's nothing new in the golf swing, there's new technology, but there's nothing new in the theory of the golf swing or exercising, I mean exercises that I was doing when I was nine we knew about all those things and that was about, you know, there are no secrets. It's a matter of getting off your butt and doing it. That's the tough thing. And really at schools it amazes me, everything is academics. Man, I tell you, without your health, those academics mean nothing. School should be teaching health and exercise and how to eat properly. But there's not a school in the United States, the greatest country in the world that's doing it. It's sad.

End of FastScripts.

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