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THE TOUR CHAMPIONSHIPNovember 2, 2005Chris DiMarcoATLANTA, GEORGIA CHRIS REIMER: Welcome, Chris DiMarco, to the media center. Just go ahead and start off by talking about the course here. Obviously you've played it a few times, but how does it look this week. CHRIS DiMARCO: It's great. It's a great golf course. The rough is very brutal, so driving the ball is going to be huge. The greens are in perfect shape. The fairways are always good. Zoysia fairways to me are the best because they always seem like you have a good lie. It's the end of the year. I think that there's a lot of people here that sun can't come quick enough to tell you the truth. Obviously there is some work at hand this week. There's still a trophy at the end, still a lot of money here, but I think this has been a long year. I see it on a lot of faces here. I see a lot of guys going, man, I wish we were one week past where we are now. Obviously we're very excited to be here. TOUR Championship is always a huge deal and we feel very honored to be here, but it's been a huge year. CHRIS REIMER: Do you want to talk about your year as a whole, up and down. CHRIS DiMARCO: It's been a weird year. For me normally, the last four or five years, I've been really consistent, not missing too many cuts. I think I've missed seven cuts this year, but yet I've had a lot of Top 3s. I think I've had three or four or maybe five Top 3s. Three 2nds. I've played well enough to win, just haven't won. So like I said, four more days of golf, maybe we'll get to Kapalua. That's what the goal is. Q. Why do you think the looks on people's faces this year as compared to last year might be a little bit more CHRIS DiMARCO: I don't think it even matters from last year. I just think people know that the end is near, and I think that it was the same last year. I don't think it's any different this year. I just think people know that the real end of our Tour season is this Sunday, and a lot of people are wanting to get home to their families and spend some time with their kids. You know, if you won, the season starts pretty soon. It starts the first week in January, so you don't have much time off. Q. Do you think you'll feel better in 2007 if the season ends the middle of September but you've got to play five of the last six and then have a team event? Do you think you'll feel less tired then? CHRIS DiMARCO: No, I just have another month to recuperate before I go back out. They explained it to us last night. I don't know whether it's my Florida education or not, I still don't quite understand everything that's going on. They tried to give us the Cliff Notes version of what's going on. As far as like an opinion from me on it, I don't have one because I'm still speculating on it. As long as it's going to be for the betterment of our Tour, then I'm in agreement with it. We don't know what that is yet. Potentially it could be much better for our Tour, potentially I don't think for example, this year, if we were running up and Vijay played the way he did the last two weeks, he might not make the TOUR Championship, and that's the only unfair part of it I've seen is potentially you could lose one or two of your top guys. I know NASCAR has done a great job with the Nextel Cup, but I know there's a lot of people who would be a lot more interested in Earnhardt, Junior and Gordon were still in it, two of their biggest superstars. That would be the only negative to it I would think is that you potentially could win all four majors and not win the TOUR Championship. Q. Could you see the point of some players who think that this might be catering to the superstars and that they might be left out, that they might feel that way? CHRIS DiMARCO: I don't think so because I think from what I understand we're going to have just as many tournaments, if not more, next year. There is going to be a fall schedule after the TOUR Championship. You know, you're going to get your fields, you're going to have your people, and we have tournaments now where there might not be one guy in the Top 20 in the world playing, and those tournaments go on and they do fine. What you're going to find, I think, is you're going to find a lot of tournaments you're going to see a lot of the same schedules by a lot of the bigger names, so you're going to see a lot of people are taking the same weeks off. You're going to see that throughout the year. You're going to see that the week after the TOUR Championship or THE PLAYERS Championship, then a week after Augusta because guys are going to need weeks off. I was talking with Jim Furyk and we were talking about how many tournaments we play each year. We both play 26, 27, but that's usually in a ten month week, and now it's going to be an eight months and a week span. So that's a lot of golf in that time, and that's going to be the hardest part. It's going to take what's all in our bodies, not physically so much but mentally. Q. So it's just going to create different weeks? CHRIS DiMARCO: I think so, yeah. There's going to be more tournaments than just the World Golf Championships and the majors where you find the top players. You're going to see that more. But there's also going to be a few more players where you don't see anybody in the Top 20 in the world, so that's the only negatives that you see. Q. Just a philosophical question, basically this championship series is kind of based on the incentive of CHRIS DiMARCO: We know who the sponsor is now, right? CHRIS DiMARCO: Since we got the sponsor let's mention it as much as we can. Q. Do you have a deal coming up with that (laughter)? CHRIS DiMARCO: No, I'm just trying to better the Tour. Did I mention it was the FedEx Cup? Q. The FedEx Cup, the basic incentive is another pile of money, but the top players, Tiger, you and some other guys, Tiger is making $10 million on the course, a lot more off the course, Phil is, all those guys are it doesn't seem like money is much of an incentive to them anymore, no matter how much it is. We've seen $8 million tournament purses or $7 million and that isn't really much different than anything else. Do you think that is really going to be a good enough incentive to make this work if some guys are tired, are they going to say come the end of August, you know, I don't really need like Phil this week, maybe a need a week off more than he needed a million bucks. CHRIS DiMARCO: Potentially you're going to see that, but I think what you're going to see is that everybody is going to covet that cup, and that's what you're going to see more of. And also, when you look at this time of the year and you see Tiger and Vijay and Phil, $3 million or $4 million ahead of everybody else, you know that the money title is over, you don't have a chance to catch them. What this does is gives you a fresh new start with four weeks to win the cup if you put yourself in position to do it. So a guy like who's leading the fall series, Olin Browne I think is leading it, so a guy like Olin Browne could potentially have a hot streak and win the FedEx Cup. That's where the excitement is. We're the only major sport that doesn't really have a playoff system and that's what we're trying to do, we're trying to just create more excitement in our sport at the end of the year. Q. Could the money title have been that exciting a race at the end if Tiger didn't win it every year or Vijay? CHRIS DiMARCO: Well, I think Q. Basically it's the same premise. CHRIS DiMARCO: Well, it is but it isn't because everybody starts back at zero with four tournaments to go. So potentially now you've got 100 or so guys that have a chance, 130 or 140 guys that have a chance starting with four weeks, so it gives you that for us it gives you that, okay, we've done well enough to get to this position, finish the year off good, now we have four tournaments that we can really go hard at and try and make a good impact and see how far up we can get. I think that's what they're trying to do. Q. You started off talking about how long the season is, and you're scratching your eye right now so I can tell you're tired. What kind of things have you given up in terms of personally by playing in a sport that takes almost 11 months of the year? CHRIS DiMARCO: Well, you know, early on not much. Once my children got a little older I started having to give up quite a bit. Being away from your kids is not something that I think is healthy, and I don't think it's really good actually to be away from my children 20 weeks a year. That's a lot. They're used to it, I'm used to it, but at the same time it's really hard on my wife. She has to be home with them all the time and she never gets a break, so it's hard. That's the hard part is just trying to keep the whole family together and keep some type of level to the lack of reality that we have out here, keep everything at home real. That's probably the hardest thing for me is to keep that reality at home. You know, this is reality, and the lack of it that we have pretty much out here. Q. Would it be nice to win one in Georgia? Do you think maybe you're owed one here? CHRIS DiMARCO: Yeah, it would be nice to finish the year off with a win. Obviously it would change my schedule next year. Obviously Kapalua would be my wife has already told me she wants to go to Hawaii. She's been telling me all year. We have one more tournament to do it. Obviously the great thing is there's only 28 guys to beat. Obviously they're 28 pretty good players, but I've just got to go out and play golf and hopefully I'll be there at the end. Q. Kind of going back to your image, I mean, you've won tournaments in the past, everybody knows who you are, the public knows you, and yet this year even though you didn't win you probably gained even more respect for what you did on the golf course than in years when you did win, which is kind of weird. Can you discuss that irony? CHRIS DiMARCO: Yeah, it was weird. I think I got more notoriety for finishing 2nd than I would have for winning at The Masters, maybe just because of the stage, maybe because of the fact that I stepped up and I made a good putt, got into a playoff, almost won, took something pretty miraculous to get beat, and then at the Presidents Cup I'm sure stepping up and doing it there was good, too. I mean, it's nice to have the public behind you. I've had nothing but great support, telling me how great it was, great putt, thanks, and we were pulling for you and we were jumping up and down. That's what we play for is to try to entertain and keep the fans into it, and I think that I know that if you look at probably four or five of our biggest watched tournaments on Sunday, I've been part of two of them, and it's been fun. I can tell you it's a lot more fun being part of them than not being part of them and to be able to perform under that type of pressure is what you want to do every week to see what you've got inside. Q. How many times do you think you've seen the replay of Tiger's chip at 16 on Augusta? CHRIS DiMARCO: Unfortunately they show it 50 times every week in the commercials. I flick during commercials now when it's off, I flick. I can see it, visualize it. I was first hand. I was about four feet from the hole when it went in, so I had the best view of anybody. CHRIS REIMER: Lastly, for the sake of transcription, for the record, who won the Georgia Florida game. CHRIS DiMARCO: I think Florida won (laughter). That makes it 14 of the last 16 years. Yeah, that's what it was (laughter). |
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