THE MEMORIAL TOURNAMENT

May 28, 2000

Ben Nelson

LEE PATTERSON: Thank you. We appreciate you coming in. I know you're wet and cold. Maybe just take us through the scenario we had today and then how you reached the decision you did.

BEN NELSON: Let me try and think back. First suspension was 11:15 for the first suspension. We got about -- let me figure. We've got 1.7 something inches since early this morning. And we've gotten a little over 1.1 for the two storms we had during the day. So, I can't really figure out how much was each one was. But the first one came through at 11:15. We stopped, it didn't really hurt us that bad. We could have been playing golf later in the afternoon, if it had not been for this second storm that came on through. We saw that it was on the radar. The weather guy did a great job of notifying us and we probably could have gotten out there about the time this storm was only arising. So, we chose just not to go back until we saw what this one did. And luckily, I guess, or unluckily, that it hit, but it just really wiped us out for the rest of the day. The golf course is really -- the bunkers -- the second storm created so much wash in the bunker. That is, we're going to do a lot of work on those. If you haven't been outside, the creeks are over their banks in many places. The banks are over the hazard lines. And it's just going to take a lot of time for the water to just naturally drain away and go back in and give us a chance to work on the golf course. Our weather guy says that the rain should be tapering off now the next hour or so. And we shouldn't have anymore rain the rest of the night. And hopefully Mike McBride and his crew can get going early in the morning. And 8:00 we've rescheduled the start or the resumption of the round. If he's successful in getting the golf course back into playable condition, we'll resume at 8:00.

BEN NELSON: Forecast for tomorrow is good. It won't be a clear, sunny, perfect day, but it will -- it won't have any thunderstorms in it.

BEN NELSON: No. Our guidelines give us -- tell us, if we can play on Monday and IF the forecast is good for Monday, which they say; then we're going to make every effort to play on Monday. Only when there will be a dire situation where there's no chance of playing, will we just revert back to 54 holes. But we intend to play 72 every week.

BEN NELSON: It was a thought. You know, you guess this weather, you guess wrong, guess right and hindsight is really wonderful, but it would have been nice if we'd played off one tee and two today -- I'd still have been sitting here talking, but it would have given us a little better or earlier finish tomorrow, let's put it that way. But it would have been the same results, as far as we wouldn't have played the round.

BEN NELSON: No. It doesn't work like that.

BEN NELSON: I guess the only question as far as the time starting tomorrow is whether or not Mike McBride is successful in getting the golf course playable.

BEN NELSON: Yes, it's our call.

BEN NELSON: No. Not to the point where -- they don't have a call. They certainly have some involvement in their logistics of being able to get it done. But CBS has always cooperated with us, just like they did on Saturday. The forecast, you know, was -- for Saturday, all the storms were coming late, this is the forecast; so we figured we'd try to go early and we did. But the storms never came. The forecast for today, and you have to understand, you have to make these calls 24 hours in advance, so a lot of things change. You haven't just all of the sudden decide you want to two-tee this, one-tee this, or change your times because there's so many factors involved in getting it done; television, volunteers, golf course, all this. So the forecast we had comes late on Saturday, early on Sunday, gets out and so we decided to go early on Saturday, never came late on Saturday, but it -- it was here all day on Sunday.

BEN NELSON: No. It will be playable by tomorrow just 8:00, it might be 8:15 before we start or should go like that. But it would be right in there. He's programmed that for, just whether it's going to get down to some minutes.

BEN NELSON: Well, we've got players that could have finished today, and we hung in there and would have hung in longer if we hadn't got what we got out there. We would have tried to go as far as we could to play today. If we'd played an hour more, we would have played.

BEN NELSON: No. We feel like any time that we're able to play golf, we need to be playing golf. And not for a player or certain players or anything else, just if it's playable, we play, if not, we don't. And we got to the don't situation and that's when we told them to come back in the morning.

BEN NELSON: No. I don't think for anybody, no.

BEN NELSON: That's during -- it rained about four o'clock this morning. We had some this morning. We had six-tenths this morning. I think the daytime rain is about 1.1.

BEN NELSON: I don't know how it broke out, and it's still raining out there. It may get more than that. The second one was a very torrential downpour.

BEN NELSON: The amount of water that was coming out of the creeks and the second one washed -- the first one didn't wash the bunker faces down. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. After the first rain, we were pretty good. I mean, the fairways were wet. Given a little time, we would have been back out there. But the second one now, is going to take a lot of manual work to restore the bunkers. It's going to take hours of work.

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