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AT&T CLASSICMay 18, 2007Troy MattesonDULUTH, GEORGIA JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: Thank you, Troy, for joining us for a few minutes here in the media center at the AT & T Classic. Nice round out there, eight birdies, and top of the lead right now. I don't know what's going to happen later on today, but talk about what you were doing well out there today. TROY MATTESON: Things have been really good for me. I haven't been playing good the last bunch of weeks or actually months, but I've been working with -- over the last three weeks I worked with Randy Smith a little bit, and he's really helped me with my game, as well as Jeff Patton here in town. You know, I've just tried to get some new thoughts on my game and my swing, and this week it's starting to come together. It's been, you know, a long couple months, but hitting some better shots and hitting some better drives, keeping the ball in the fairway has really helped me. Today it came together, the putting came together, so it's a little bit of a shock to see a 64 after not working on it that long, but I'll take it for sure. Q. It's a little bit of a sports cliché, but did you feel it from the start, or did you -- could you kind of tell this morning it was going to be a good day for you? TROY MATTESON: You know, this morning I hit some solid shots off the bat, and then made a few putts and then made a good long putt on 12, and anytime you can make a long putt early in your round it gives you a lot of momentum. Putting for me has been a huge issue, and just to make a few off the bat gave me some confidence to make some more during the round. Luckily I knocked some shots close, too, so I didn't put a whole bunch of stress on my putter until basically the end of the round, I had to make a couple of real key par putts. But you get a little momentum when you start making putts off the bat. You just feel like you can just kind of make every putt you have. Q. What are the problems you have worked on? Has it been putting or your driver or your irons? TROY MATTESON: Jeff came out this week, and I've been working with Randy and Randy gave me some good thoughts on me swing, and I told him I was just getting stale. I was out on the range hitting balls and not really concentrating on any one thing. I'd just go hit balls to hit balls. So Randy gave me some good insights, and I came back with Jeff and I shared some of that with him, and it gave me a different way to get to what I was trying to accomplish. And then Jeff showed me a few things this week, and I adjusted to those changes and it made a big difference. Started hitting the ball much, much more solid this week, and the putting, we just changed -- I worked with Jeff, and Jeff said, looks like your eyes are just a little over the ball, and we adjusted my eyes where my eyes were inside the ball, and that's made a big difference with putting because with putting it's all about seeing the line. If you feel good about the line or feel good about the line, you're probably going to strike a good putt. If you can't see the line, you can't pick up on what you're supposed to do out there with the ball, then you're just not going to hit many good putts. You're wishing it in the hole at that point. Q. How do you feel on this course right now? TROY MATTESON: I like this course. This is one of my favorites. I'm not saying that just because I'm from here. But this course suits my game well. All the times I've played it, I've really enjoyed playing it. It's a fun golf course to play; there's a lot of birdies to be made out there. Just look at the scores. The scores are great. It's kind of fun to play a golf course where you can make some birdies. Over the last several weeks we've played golf courses where you've just got to survive. So I'm pretty comfortable out here. Q. How do you find this course in May as compared to early April? TROY MATTESON: Obviously the grass is much greener. It's a little thicker, a little bit more dense. The rough is maybe not as high but the grass is more dense. It's just in unbelievable shape. The guys have really worked hard and spent a lot of long hours getting this thing in shape, and the greens are as good as I've are seen them. These are really, really good greens. They're easy to putt on because they're so smooth. It's just a fun event. It's fun for people to come here and see a great conditioned golf course and see guys doing well on it. Q. (Inaudible.) TROY MATTESON: It is. This place always looks better when it's green, and coming back to Georgia, I don't get to spend much time in town during the spring and summer, but I love it when I get to come back here. Q. Ryuji was saying some of the pins were easier today. Do you agree with that? And can you shed some light on what holes maybe were easier today? TROY MATTESON: I think there were some easier pins out there. You know, not talking against 11, but 11 probably made it easy for guys to hit their shots in there. It's a wedge or a little 9-iron. Having it on the right as opposed to the left you can kind of fire at it. Even on the left, even though it's just a 9-iron, you just don't hit it against the water as much as you would want to. You know, 12 was hard. 13, if you played it smart, it was an easy pin. If you drove it up there with a driver and you didn't hit it good, it became a very difficult pin. So a lot of that correlation is where are you playing from. Today there are a lot of opportunities for wedges. If you hit a good drive on 1 you had a wedge or 9-iron. 2, if you kept it below the hole you had a good putt at it. You've just got to be smart when you play this golf course. Today the pins were pretty obvious where you needed to be. Like on 2, 2 is a pretty severe par 3 green, and you just need to stay below the hole. If you hit it above the hole, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. So from that standpoint, I agree with him. There were some pins that were easier to play to visually, or a lot easier to play to. But were they actually easier? They're still pretty difficult pins. Q. We've been asking everyone that came in here, but with the change in the schedule, obviously better weather conditions, better course conditions, but its place in the schedule is making it difficult to attract the bigger names. Does that make you feel like this is more a wide-open tournament? Do you feel that's something that can be worked on if word gets out about how great the course is? What are your thoughts about the strength of the field and the date? TROY MATTESON: Well, I think everybody's schedule is different. Guys take off tournaments for different reasons. I can't really speak for the top three or four guys in the world. There could be other things going on in their lives, and they decide to play -- I'm going to play The Masters and I'm going to play TPC and I'm going to play this tournament and that tournament, and I just think different guys play differently. This week you're going to see a lot of guys that were at the tournament last week. I would hope you're seeing this year more guys that are playing more often. This is my sixth or seventh week in a row. You know, I just like playing. I have a good time at tournaments, and who wouldn't want to play them all? But the guys at the top, they put a lot of pressure on themselves day in and day out for a lot of tournaments like The Masters, and it's draining. Those guys probably play two, three weeks in a row and that's it, maybe four weeks in a row. It'll be interesting at the end of the year when they have to play four or five weeks in a row and to see how the FedExCup turns out because the goal for us as players with the FedExCup is to play more. So I think over the next few years it'll be interesting to see how the field changes here with the invention of the FedExCup. I think it's a great tournament. I wouldn't miss it. It wouldn't matter if I was 1 in the world or last in the world. Q. What is your maximum amount of grinding? How many weeks in a row? Does it ever take a toll; hotel, airport, golf course, or are you just so happy to be here that you'll -- TROY MATTESON: First of all, I drive a motor home so that helps because I can drive my stuff around the country with me. My wife likes that, too. We take our pets with us. So that helps you with the hotel thing. If I had to stay in hotels, at the end of about four weeks is where I get real antsy to get home. In the motor home my wife stayed out on the Nationwide Tour 25 straight weeks one time. I came home for three days to work on my game and then flew back out. Like I said, just played seven weeks in a row with this one being at home, so this one doesn't really count, but last year I think I finished with ten in a row at the end of the season and didn't play well for the first five and then played great for the last five. Maybe getting worn down sometimes helps you because your brain just can't overthink it. But at the same time it's nice to stay fresh. Right now I'm so young that I'm still trying to find my way, trying to figure out how many I can play in a row, and I haven't found an approach that works. If I play a lot in a row, I play good; if I play a few in a row, I play good. I can also play bad doing the same thing. It's just a matter of personal preference, but I like to play a lot. Q. Between events what's the maximum distance you'll drive? TROY MATTESON: Well, Wachovia to Dallas was like 1,080, and we drove that in a day and a quarter. So it's not that bad. I really like seeing different parts of the country. One thing that was really good on the Nationwide Tour is we got to see a lot of the West Coast, a lot of the Northwest, and if we took a week off and we were already out there, we'd just drive to Montana. Most people haven't driven that part of the country and it's beautiful to see the different things out there. Like I said, my wife and I, we wouldn't give it up for anything. We love to be out there and see different things. And sometimes when you're getting on an airplane all you see is one city and an airport and then you're seeing another airport in another city, and it's nice for us to break up our schedule like that, spend a Monday just driving. Q. Talk about last year you didn't have a very good year until the last five weeks and you played great. Does that tell you that you can go through a stretch of golf for a long time where you're not playing that great, and all of a sudden, boom, you can find it? TROY MATTESON: I think so. Obviously golf is a fickle game. Sometimes you have really good years and sometimes you have really bad years. There are a lot of guys out here that are struggling now, and they've been struggling for two, three years and they're still grinding away at it. There's other guys that are very up-and-down. They have a win and they don't make four cuts and they have a 10th and they don't make three cuts. Then there's a lot of guys that just kind of plod along and make a lot of cuts but don't finish real high. So I think it just comes in so many shapes and forms that you've just got to get through the bad times. That's the goal. No matter how long they are, you just get through them and just grind through it, and you realize that you're going to play really good about 15 percent of the time. Some guys can play good more, but if I can play good 15, 20 percent of the time, that means I'm probably going to play really good four times a year, five times a year. It's just, what do I do the rest of the time? Am I making cuts and finishing 30th? Am I missing cuts? I think that's a lot of it. But you just learn to get through the bad times. Q. How was it for you to play great golf I guess the last five weeks of the season, and boom, you've got two weeks off after that? Was that kind of difficult to take, or did you think you could carry it over to the start of this year? TROY MATTESON: I thought I could carry it over to the start of this year. Obviously starting in Kapalua you're only playing against 30 guys, so if you play decent you've got a chance to finish high. I took some confidence into that one, but obviously having a break between last season and this season, you do for the first several weeks you're at home wish you were playing because you know you're playing well. I wished there were more tournaments at the end of last season, but there weren't obviously. So hopefully we can do that again this year and I can learn to make those stretches longer. JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: There is a possibility that at the end of the day you might be paired with Ryuji. When is the last time you played together other than in college every week? TROY MATTESON: I think we played together maybe three times. JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: Were you guys in college at the same time or was he a little -- TROY MATTESON: He's a little older than I am. Q. Will it be like a football thing tomorrow, Tech and Georgia? Do you guys get a little juice going? TROY MATTESON: I think it's good we've got some Tech guys up there. This tournament -- I think it's been more of a Bulldog dominated event over the years, and I see a lot of guys, Franklin Langham is here, Ryuji, Bolli, a lot of guys are here, and over the years it seems like more. It's nice to see a bunch of Tech guys on the range. You know, obviously we hated one another in school, but we're pretty good friends now. Yeah, it's always good. If he wins or if a Tech guy wins, it's always a little bit of bragging rights to take home with you, but it's all in good fun now. JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: Thank you, Troy. End of FastScripts |
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