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U.S. WOMEN'S OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP


June 29, 2006


Mike Davis


NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND

RHONDA GLENN: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure you have heard the word that play has been suspended for the day and will be resumed tomorrow. We have Mike Davis, the Senior Director of Rules and Competitions of the USGA. Mike, would you explain the conditions that caused the suspension of play, and also what the plan is for the remainder of the weekend?

MIKE DAVIS: Well, sure, I think everybody knows, obviously fog was the culprit today. That's the only thing to say here is obviously golf is an outdoor sport, and it's unusual to get fog where you're delayed or you can't play all day long. But we can't remember a time at one of our national championships where it's actually caused an all day delay the way it did today.

But, you know, if you look at one thing, there is a little silver lining in this; as of yesterday we were supposed to get upwards of an inch of rain on the golf course, and obviously we didn't get that. So in one sense if we don't get hit with rain tonight, which we're hearing varying reports, but we probably will get some, one way to look at this is we're probably going to have a better golf course from here on out than we anticipated having. So that's a little bit of a silver lining.

As far as the schedule for the rest of the way, essentially what we're going to do is move round 1 to tomorrow, so that will be played Friday. Same grouping, same times as today. Round 2 will be played Saturday. And then, again, if Mother Nature cooperates with us the rest of the way, we anticipate playing 36 holes on Sunday. And what we would do is part of this depends on how big our cut is; we do the low 60 and ties and anybody within 10 shots of the leader, but if we have a normal sized cut, which would be somewhere between 63 and 70 players, we would play in groups of three and go off both 1 and 10 tees and then hopefully finish up maybe in the 6:00 to 7:00 range on Sunday.

RHONDA GLENN: Mike, I had a question posed to me. After the third round, will the players be re paired for Sunday afternoon?

MIKE DAVIS: The answer is we do not anticipate having enough time to be able to do that. Obviously we'd like to do that. You always want to have the leaders playing together in the final round, but just the way that works, there's really no way to be able to hold up somebody who is say one of the last finishers from round 3 which would be finishing oh, you know, we would probably run tee times, again, depending on the number of the players in the cut, somewhere between 7:00 and say 9:30 and then get off on both teeing grounds. So there really would not be an opportunity to re pair after round 3.

RHONDA GLENN: So there's a chance that the leaders would not be finishing last?

MIKE DAVIS: That's correct, there's absolutely a chance. We did this a couple of years ago at our Senior Open Championship in St. Louis at Belle Rive. We had the same type of scenario; our second round was washed out and we played 36 holes, and again, unfortunately we didn't have the leaders but it did work out there, and we're hopefully it will work out here.

Q. What would have been the standards for the visual conditions that would have been acceptable to play in?

MIKE DAVIS: Good question. The standards are if the player can see where she is trying to hit the ball, that's what we consider. If a player the player wouldn't necessarily be entitled to see the flight of her ball the whole way nor in some cases where it lands. But where she's going to hit driver off the tee, we want her to see the drive zone. If she's hitting into the green, obviously she has to see the flagstick, but obviously we want her to be able to see the green.

And that's what held us back today. There were times you could start to see some areas in fact right around 2:15 today all of a sudden it cleared to the point where we could have played and we alerted players to that, but literally within five, ten minutes, and as we all know fog is very fickle, it rolled back in and we just determined based on what meteorologists were saying, that even if we got them out at say 3:30 today, the chances of keeping them out there for until 8:00, 8:30 tonight were really slim. We thought based on that, this is a schedule where everybody can understand, it's easy for the players, it's easy for the volunteers. So the decision was made at 3:00 to cancel the rest of today.

RHONDA GLENN: In terms of yardage, best yardage visibility and worst yardage visibility today.

MIKE DAVIS: Well, much of the day on some of the ocean holes out around 12, 13 and so on, there were times when you couldn't see 75 yards. In other words, you're 75 yards from the green and you couldn't even see the flagstick. I would say around 2:15 today was our best scenario, where you probably could see between 300 and 400 yards, and that's really quickly where we got excited thinking we're actually going to get some golf in today. And literally five, ten minutes later it rolled back in and we were done.

Q. What is the forecast for tomorrow and the for the next three days?

MIKE DAVIS: Forecast, and let me just say we haven't been right on to this point, so we are supposed to get some rain this evening. And they're thinking between midnight and 6:00 a.m., and their best guess is maybe a quarter inch up to a half an inch. They're hopeful by 8:00 a.m. tomorrow that that would be out of here, and really from that point on until about noon, 1:00 we'd have clouds and then breaking into sunshine tomorrow, high temperature of about 80 degrees, a little bit of wind.

Saturday is supposed to be quite nice, high of 80. Sunday, again pretty nice, and then at some point we're going to see a cold front come through, they're predicting anywhere from 4:00 o'clock to 7:00, but it is starting to stall a little bit, so it may be late, maybe midnight on Sunday. It's pretty good from here on out.

If we don't get a lot of rain tonight, the course is it's not that we're going to have a dry, firm course, but it is going to keep getting better.

Q. Under the worst case scenario, if there are further delays, are you 100 percent committed to playing 72 holes, no matter how long it takes?

MIKE DAVIS: Yes, we will play 72 holes. We feel that it's a national championship and we absolutely we've seen it before, we had a Women's Open in 1987 at Plainfield Country Club that went into Tuesday because of weather. I think I'm right on this one. And then we had a playoff on top of that. So that went to Wednesday. But we will be playing 72 holes.

RHONDA GLENN: It was 1987 Plainfield Country Club, JoAnne Carner, Ayako Okamoto, and Laura Davies won it. The playoff was on Tuesday.

Q. How much limit do you have in terms of if you have a delay in terms of still being able to look at the whole round?

MIKE DAVIS: On a normal day, we probably have an hour or so wiggle room, something like that. We anticipate being able to play to roughly 8:30. And the way we think the pace of play is going to be, we should finish around 7:30, quarter to 8:00, something like that. And we would in theory have some wiggle room if we got into a situation where we needed to, we could move tee times earlier than 7:00 a.m. We are so far east on the eastern time zone here that it's light in the morning by the grounds crew can start doing things at literally 5:00 in the morning. So we'd always have that option, as well.

Q. On Sunday, going off of both nines, do you have the opportunity from morning to the afternoon to change hole locations? And also blocks, will they play the same setup morning and afternoon?

MIKE DAVIS: We do plan on changing hole locations between rounds 3 and 4. We'll have two teams of hole cutters, literally following the last groups finishing their round 3 before the first groups in round 4. It doesn't take long to do that. We will change hole locations.

Q. And how about tee markers?

MIKE DAVIS: Yes, tee markers will be changed, as well.

Q. You mentioned the silver lining today, no rain. During the delay, were you able to do anything to the course, tend it, get any more water off? Was there any more maintenance done to the course while there was no playing today?

MIKE DAVIS: Well, we didn't while we weren't playing. But absolutely, right now the grounds staff is out there. We will be mowing roughs, mowing fairways. The greens will be double cut again. And that's things if we had been getting heavy rains we simply would not have been able to do.

I'm not sure we really saw any drying today because the way the fog was, we certainly were not seeing moisture leave the ground. But at the same time in theory it maybe was draining a little bit. So it should hopefully be a little better tomorrow.

Q. Just to clarify, Mike, when you redo the hole locations for the afternoon on Sunday, you cut the greens, also, or no?

MIKE DAVIS: Yeah, the question about greens being mown, no, we will not do that. We really don't do that for any kind of double rounds at any event other than we sometimes do it at our Walker Cup match and Curtis Cup match where we have the planned double round, because we, in theory, have different players playing.

I remember in 2001 down at Ocean Forest we did that, just because we were in Bermudagrass and they were growing so much we lost so much speed. We won't have to mow greens between rounds 3 and 4.

Q. This afternoon you were going to be shortening a couple of holes, if you had gone out. Will you carry that forward to tomorrow, keep the holes shorter as you would today?

MIKE DAVIS: You're right, we did take a look at each hole, and because the golf course is wet right now, because the forecast was for fairly strong winds and then some heavy rains this afternoon, we planned accordingly. So we did move up on oh, it may have been seven or eight holes that have to go through them. But we'll look at that each day.

And the prevailing wind, the way the golf course was set up was for a southwest wind, and they are calling for southwest winds tomorrow and for Saturday, so some of those teeing grounds, we're going to look at how high the winds are.

It's tricky, when you're on a seaside course like this, you try to anticipate what the weather is going to do, but as we saw today, we just didn't anticipate this. We thought it was going to be raining today and we get this.

Q. On a similar note, I know that there's a bunker on 6, I believe, that's been designated ground under repair. Can you take us through quickly, what is permissible and not permissible in that situation?

MIKE DAVIS: Sure. There's a bunker green side bunker that's short left of 6 green. And we have been having trouble with that the last well, really since the Saturday rains began. It sits so low, and it's actually, I guess, below the water table, and we keep pumping. I don't know how many times that bunker has been pumped and the water keeps coming back in it. We were at a point today where most of it was full.

And if we had gotten the anticipated rains we thought we were going to get, we knew we couldn't keep up with it. We knew we couldn't be pumping during play. So we decided early this morning that we white circled it and we deemed it to be ground under repair through the green, which meant that if a player got her ball in it that she'd be entitled to free relief outside the bunker. We only did it for one bunker. And secondly, we only did it for one round, that is if it would be played tomorrow.

We'll look at that bunker tomorrow to determine if we need it. But the thought being that if we didn't do that and a player got her ball in that bunker, her only option would be to come out of the bunker with a one stroke penalty, and we didn't feel that was an equitable situation.

Q. They have to take a drop, right?

MIKE DAVIS: If we had not declared a ground under repair through the green, because it's a hazard, they can try to play it, but if you look at that bunker, you're several inches under water, then what you do is you keep you keep the point where the ball lay in the bunker, in the water, between yourself and come out of the bunker keeping that point between yourself and the hole with a one stroke penalty. We'll look at it again tomorrow. If we feel like it needs to be done, we'll do it again. Unusual, but that was just a bunker we couldn't keep dry.

Q. Why the decision to play 36 on Sunday, not go to Monday?

MIKE DAVIS: Well, I think the feeling is that everybody wants to see this championship end Sunday, including spectators, including television, including media, USGA. So that was the feeling. We've done it before. In fact we've even done it we did it, as I say, for the Senior Open, when seniors were walking 36 holes. We felt like that was the prudent thing to do. If Mother Nature doesn't cooperate, we may be into Monday. And obviously if there's an 18 hole playoff we're there already.

Q. I know you guys don't play lift, clean and place, and that's not going to happen. But do you ever test, perhaps, somehow to see how much mud a ball is picking up, and would that ever influence you to perhaps cancel playing during the day, because the ball was picking up so much mud it almost becomes too much to ask of a player?

MIKE DAVIS: Good question, there. First of all, the USGA stance is that we have never, at least to my knowledge, in the last over 100 years, we've never used the lift, clean and place during one of our national championships. But let me make it perfectly clear that it doesn't mean that lift, clean and place is wrong. If it was wrong you wouldn't see it in the appendix of our rules book.

But we feel in conducting our national championships that it does change the nature of the game so much that we're not comfortable for a national championship playing with lift, clean and place. We don't allow lift, clean and place for our qualifiers, either.

With respect to your question about suspending play because there's so much mud on the ball, I don't think we've ever done that, but candidly, we do look at when we suspend play, the playability of the golf course is ultimately the issue at hand. If we don't feel like if it was so bad that there was so much mud on the balls, we could suspend play for that reason. I don't think we've ever done it, but in theory I think we could.

RHONDA GLENN: Thanks so much for your explanations.

RHONDA GLENN: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure you have heard the word that play has been suspended for the day and will be resumed tomorrow. We have Mike Davis, the Senior Director of Rules and Competitions of the USGA. Mike, would you explain the conditions that caused the suspension of play, and also what the plan is for the remainder of the weekend?

MIKE DAVIS: Well, sure, I think everybody knows, obviously fog was the culprit today. That's the only thing to say here is obviously golf is an outdoor sport, and it's unusual to get fog where you're delayed or you can't play all day long. But we can't remember a time at one of our national championships where it's actually caused an all day delay the way it did today.

But, you know, if you look at one thing, there is a little silver lining in this; as of yesterday we were supposed to get upwards of an inch of rain on the golf course, and obviously we didn't get that. So in one sense if we don't get hit with rain tonight, which we're hearing varying reports, but we probably will get some, one way to look at this is we're probably going to have a better golf course from here on out than we anticipated having. So that's a little bit of a silver lining.

As far as the schedule for the rest of the way, essentially what we're going to do is move round 1 to tomorrow, so that will be played Friday. Same grouping, same times as today. Round 2 will be played Saturday. And then, again, if Mother Nature cooperates with us the rest of the way, we anticipate playing 36 holes on Sunday. And what we would do is part of this depends on how big our cut is; we do the low 60 and ties and anybody within 10 shots of the leader, but if we have a normal sized cut, which would be somewhere between 63 and 70 players, we would play in groups of three and go off both 1 and 10 tees and then hopefully finish up maybe in the 6:00 to 7:00 range on Sunday.

RHONDA GLENN: Mike, I had a question posed to me. After the third round, will the players be re paired for Sunday afternoon?

MIKE DAVIS: The answer is we do not anticipate having enough time to be able to do that. Obviously we'd like to do that. You always want to have the leaders playing together in the final round, but just the way that works, there's really no way to be able to hold up somebody who is say one of the last finishers from round 3 which would be finishing oh, you know, we would probably run tee times, again, depending on the number of the players in the cut, somewhere between 7:00 and say 9:30 and then get off on both teeing grounds. So there really would not be an opportunity to re pair after round 3.

RHONDA GLENN: So there's a chance that the leaders would not be finishing last?

MIKE DAVIS: That's correct, there's absolutely a chance. We did this a couple of years ago at our Senior Open Championship in St. Louis at Belle Rive. We had the same type of scenario; our second round was washed out and we played 36 holes, and again, unfortunately we didn't have the leaders but it did work out there, and we're hopefully it will work out here.

Q. What would have been the standards for the visual conditions that would have been acceptable to play in?

MIKE DAVIS: Good question. The standards are if the player can see where she is trying to hit the ball, that's what we consider. If a player the player wouldn't necessarily be entitled to see the flight of her ball the whole way nor in some cases where it lands. But where she's going to hit driver off the tee, we want her to see the drive zone. If she's hitting into the green, obviously she has to see the flagstick, but obviously we want her to be able to see the green.

And that's what held us back today. There were times you could start to see some areas in fact right around 2:15 today all of a sudden it cleared to the point where we could have played and we alerted players to that, but literally within five, ten minutes, and as we all know fog is very fickle, it rolled back in and we just determined based on what meteorologists were saying, that even if we got them out at say 3:30 today, the chances of keeping them out there for until 8:00, 8:30 tonight were really slim. We thought based on that, this is a schedule where everybody can understand, it's easy for the players, it's easy for the volunteers. So the decision was made at 3:00 to cancel the rest of today.

RHONDA GLENN: In terms of yardage, best yardage visibility and worst yardage visibility today.

MIKE DAVIS: Well, much of the day on some of the ocean holes out around 12, 13 and so on, there were times when you couldn't see 75 yards. In other words, you're 75 yards from the green and you couldn't even see the flagstick. I would say around 2:15 today was our best scenario, where you probably could see between 300 and 400 yards, and that's really quickly where we got excited thinking we're actually going to get some golf in today. And literally five, ten minutes later it rolled back in and we were done.

Q. What is the forecast for tomorrow and the for the next three days?

MIKE DAVIS: Forecast, and let me just say we haven't been right on to this point, so we are supposed to get some rain this evening. And they're thinking between midnight and 6:00 a.m., and their best guess is maybe a quarter inch up to a half an inch. They're hopeful by 8:00 a.m. tomorrow that that would be out of here, and really from that point on until about noon, 1:00 we'd have clouds and then breaking into sunshine tomorrow, high temperature of about 80 degrees, a little bit of wind.

Saturday is supposed to be quite nice, high of 80. Sunday, again pretty nice, and then at some point we're going to see a cold front come through, they're predicting anywhere from 4:00 o'clock to 7:00, but it is starting to stall a little bit, so it may be late, maybe midnight on Sunday. It's pretty good from here on out.

If we don't get a lot of rain tonight, the course is it's not that we're going to have a dry, firm course, but it is going to keep getting better.

Q. Under the worst case scenario, if there are further delays, are you 100 percent committed to playing 72 holes, no matter how long it takes?

MIKE DAVIS: Yes, we will play 72 holes. We feel that it's a national championship and we absolutely we've seen it before, we had a Women's Open in 1987 at Plainfield Country Club that went into Tuesday because of weather. I think I'm right on this one. And then we had a playoff on top of that. So that went to Wednesday. But we will be playing 72 holes.

RHONDA GLENN: It was 1987 Plainfield Country Club, JoAnne Carner, Ayako Okamoto, and Laura Davies won it. The playoff was on Tuesday.

Q. How much limit do you have in terms of if you have a delay in terms of still being able to look at the whole round?

MIKE DAVIS: On a normal day, we probably have an hour or so wiggle room, something like that. We anticipate being able to play to roughly 8:30. And the way we think the pace of play is going to be, we should finish around 7:30, quarter to 8:00, something like that. And we would in theory have some wiggle room if we got into a situation where we needed to, we could move tee times earlier than 7:00 a.m. We are so far east on the eastern time zone here that it's light in the morning by the grounds crew can start doing things at literally 5:00 in the morning. So we'd always have that option, as well.

Q. On Sunday, going off of both nines, do you have the opportunity from morning to the afternoon to change hole locations? And also blocks, will they play the same setup morning and afternoon?

MIKE DAVIS: We do plan on changing hole locations between rounds 3 and 4. We'll have two teams of hole cutters, literally following the last groups finishing their round 3 before the first groups in round 4. It doesn't take long to do that. We will change hole locations.

Q. And how about tee markers?

MIKE DAVIS: Yes, tee markers will be changed, as well.

Q. You mentioned the silver lining today, no rain. During the delay, were you able to do anything to the course, tend it, get any more water off? Was there any more maintenance done to the course while there was no playing today?

MIKE DAVIS: Well, we didn't while we weren't playing. But absolutely, right now the grounds staff is out there. We will be mowing roughs, mowing fairways. The greens will be double cut again. And that's things if we had been getting heavy rains we simply would not have been able to do.

I'm not sure we really saw any drying today because the way the fog was, we certainly were not seeing moisture leave the ground. But at the same time in theory it maybe was draining a little bit. So it should hopefully be a little better tomorrow.

Q. Just to clarify, Mike, when you redo the hole locations for the afternoon on Sunday, you cut the greens, also, or no?

MIKE DAVIS: Yeah, the question about greens being mown, no, we will not do that. We really don't do that for any kind of double rounds at any event other than we sometimes do it at our Walker Cup match and Curtis Cup match where we have the planned double round, because we, in theory, have different players playing.

I remember in 2001 down at Ocean Forest we did that, just because we were in Bermudagrass and they were growing so much we lost so much speed. We won't have to mow greens between rounds 3 and 4.

Q. This afternoon you were going to be shortening a couple of holes, if you had gone out. Will you carry that forward to tomorrow, keep the holes shorter as you would today?

MIKE DAVIS: You're right, we did take a look at each hole, and because the golf course is wet right now, because the forecast was for fairly strong winds and then some heavy rains this afternoon, we planned accordingly. So we did move up on oh, it may have been seven or eight holes that have to go through them. But we'll look at that each day.

And the prevailing wind, the way the golf course was set up was for a southwest wind, and they are calling for southwest winds tomorrow and for Saturday, so some of those teeing grounds, we're going to look at how high the winds are.

It's tricky, when you're on a seaside course like this, you try to anticipate what the weather is going to do, but as we saw today, we just didn't anticipate this. We thought it was going to be raining today and we get this.

Q. On a similar note, I know that there's a bunker on 6, I believe, that's been designated ground under repair. Can you take us through quickly, what is permissible and not permissible in that situation?

MIKE DAVIS: Sure. There's a bunker green side bunker that's short left of 6 green. And we have been having trouble with that the last well, really since the Saturday rains began. It sits so low, and it's actually, I guess, below the water table, and we keep pumping. I don't know how many times that bunker has been pumped and the water keeps coming back in it. We were at a point today where most of it was full.

And if we had gotten the anticipated rains we thought we were going to get, we knew we couldn't keep up with it. We knew we couldn't be pumping during play. So we decided early this morning that we white circled it and we deemed it to be ground under repair through the green, which meant that if a player got her ball in it that she'd be entitled to free relief outside the bunker. We only did it for one bunker. And secondly, we only did it for one round, that is if it would be played tomorrow.

We'll look at that bunker tomorrow to determine if we need it. But the thought being that if we didn't do that and a player got her ball in that bunker, her only option would be to come out of the bunker with a one stroke penalty, and we didn't feel that was an equitable situation.

Q. They have to take a drop, right?

MIKE DAVIS: If we had not declared a ground under repair through the green, because it's a hazard, they can try to play it, but if you look at that bunker, you're several inches under water, then what you do is you keep you keep the point where the ball lay in the bunker, in the water, between yourself and come out of the bunker keeping that point between yourself and the hole with a one stroke penalty. We'll look at it again tomorrow. If we feel like it needs to be done, we'll do it again. Unusual, but that was just a bunker we couldn't keep dry.

Q. Why the decision to play 36 on Sunday, not go to Monday?

MIKE DAVIS: Well, I think the feeling is that everybody wants to see this championship end Sunday, including spectators, including television, including media, USGA. So that was the feeling. We've done it before. In fact we've even done it we did it, as I say, for the Senior Open, when seniors were walking 36 holes. We felt like that was the prudent thing to do. If Mother Nature doesn't cooperate, we may be into Monday. And obviously if there's an 18 hole playoff we're there already.

Q. I know you guys don't play lift, clean and place, and that's not going to happen. But do you ever test, perhaps, somehow to see how much mud a ball is picking up, and would that ever influence you to perhaps cancel playing during the day, because the ball was picking up so much mud it almost becomes too much to ask of a player?

MIKE DAVIS: Good question, there. First of all, the USGA stance is that we have never, at least to my knowledge, in the last over 100 years, we've never used the lift, clean and place during one of our national championships. But let me make it perfectly clear that it doesn't mean that lift, clean and place is wrong. If it was wrong you wouldn't see it in the appendix of our rules book.

But we feel in conducting our national championships that it does change the nature of the game so much that we're not comfortable for a national championship playing with lift, clean and place. We don't allow lift, clean and place for our qualifiers, either.

With respect to your question about suspending play because there's so much mud on the ball, I don't think we've ever done that, but candidly, we do look at when we suspend play, the playability of the golf course is ultimately the issue at hand. If we don't feel like if it was so bad that there was so much mud on the balls, we could suspend play for that reason. I don't think we've ever done it, but in theory I think we could.

RHONDA GLENN: Thanks so much for your explanations.

End of FastScripts.
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