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THE MEMORIAL TOURNAMENT PRESENTED BY MORGAN STANLEYMay 31, 2007Will MacKenzieDUBLIN, OHIO JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: Thank you, Will, for joining us for a few minutes here in the media center at the Memorial Tournament. Kind of an interesting round, kind of a slow start, but a great finish. Just kind of talk about what changed. WILL MACKENZIE: Yeah. Can I use that? All right, you know, I got off to a terrible start. I didn't feel real bad or anything, I just -- you know, I three-putted the first hole, but I had 80, 70 feet, and just hit another good shot into that first par 3, landed about four feet from the hole, but, I mean, obviously you can't do that. You need to land it 20 feet short there, and made bogey. So I didn't feel bad today. I didn't go out there like scared or feeling real funky about my swing, I just was making bogeys. I mean, this golf course is pretty difficult, and everybody knows that you can just go out there and play decent but sort of make some bogeys. But I decided to be aggressive off that first par 5, No. 5, and I thought I pushed my drive a little too far, and it ended up being perfect. I had like 213 yards to the hole, and I hit 5-iron and almost made it. And then I made my eagle putt, and I said, all right, I'm only 1-over now. This is good. I can get this back and shoot a decent round. I actually missed a couple putts on the next couple holes for birdie, and then I hit a fantastic little shot into 8, and I skulled it into No. 9 to about a foot, literally. I sort of thinned it, which was not a great swing, but I made birdie there. You know, then I just felt good -- I started feeling really good with the putter and have been really working on my game hard because obviously I personally haven't been playing very well lately, and I'm just tired of playing bad and just trying to dig it out of the dirt. And today was a good day for me. Q. What's it been like this year, you know, getting into the swank invitationals like this, stepping up to the biggest stage of all the good events? WILL MACKENZIE: Yeah, it's phenomenal. This year has just been great. Yeah, I've just dreamed about playing here. I mean, I came here one time and watched this tournament, and I was just blown away at how lush and pure this place was. You know, to play at Jack's tournament is really special, got to play in Mr. Palmer's tournament, and, you know, even Colonial, and shoot, I didn't even play in Phoenix or Riviera my first two years on Tour. So this year has been great. Once I won at Reno, I got just some great opportunities. I started out the season, you know, solid, and sort of have -- sort of treaded water lately. I'm ready to get out of the funk as soon as possible. But it's been unbelievable beyond my wildest dreams to be able to play these great big events. Q. What was the occasion that brought you to come here the first time? WILL MACKENZIE: I was just seeing some friends. I had some friends that were up here. Q. Do you remember who won the tournament that week? JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: What year was it? WILL MACKENZIE: Like 2001 or 2002. JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: 2001 is Tiger and 2002 is Furyk, I think. WILL MACKENZIE: I don't remember. I didn't see the end. I was here like on a Saturday, and I was just blown away by the pureness of the track. Q. Had you started playing again by that point? WILL MACKENZIE: I was already playing then. I was playing on the mini-Tours and just playing goat tracks. I mean, I was playing -- there was some good ones, but I was -- when you got out here, you were blown away by how beautifully manicured this place was. It was such a grand stage. Of course I haven't been to a major championship, but this was just absolutely a gorgeous golf course. Q. When you look back at that span of your life when you put the clubs in the corner with the cobwebs and were world traveling and jumping out of helicopters and whatnot -- WILL MACKENZIE: The good old days. Q. Was that wasted time or time well-spent or a little of both? WILL MACKENZIE: It's a little of both. Sometimes I kick myself, why did I go beat myself up and jump off cliffs and play real hard, and maybe I could be further advanced in my golf career by now. I could have maybe gone on a golf scholarship to Carolina. Who knows, maybe I would have been out here at 22, 23. But, you know, what can I do about it? I'm real happy with what I did. My rebuttal is I would have burned out sooner or later. I would have said, you know what, I need to play. I need to do these other things. I need to go into the real world, work like you guys do (laughter) -- Q. I wouldn't go that far. WILL MACKENZIE: Yeah, but just live a normal lifestyle. I guess it was normal what I was doing. But then again, who knows what would have happened? I'm happy with it, and I've worked real hard to get here, and hopefully I can stay out here for a while. Q. In all your various white-knuckle things that you've done with kayaking or hang-gliding or whatever it's been, how many near-death experiences -- WILL MACKENZIE: I've been asked that before, and I don't know. I mean, I've been upside down in my kayak, pinned to a rock. Whenever your ki yak stops moving, that's not good. I can be upside down for lots and lots of seconds in a moving class 4, class 5 whitewater situation because I know I'm going to roll back over sooner or later, even without my paddle, even if my paddle gets ripped out of my hand. But whenever you're stuck, you're like, this is a little dicey. So I've had that happen a few times but either worked my way out of it or just pulled out of my kayak and swam. Snowboarding, I mean, I don't know. I just -- I don't know. I mean, I've come close to dying, I'm sure, but not really. Q. Does the adrenaline compare with -- everybody jokes about it being the old-man conservative sport. I'm sure there's a rush to some degree. Here, you kind of have to control it. WILL MACKENZIE: Well, I was -- I liked to hurt my body every day when I was a kid, but I played golf. There's tons of adrenaline. There's nothing like carving shots and hitting shots and making birdies and pushing yourself, and then when you get in the heat of competition, say, face another few players coming down the wire, I mean, that might be more intense than anything I've done. I mean, it's how you react to it and how you look at it, which is how your outcome will be. Q. Most of the stuff you've done, though, has always been individualistic, kayaking or surfing, it's always been you and your board against the ocean or whatever, so I suppose that was schooling of some sort for this. WILL MACKENZIE: Certainly, and obviously I had a tradition in golf. I mean, I had a nice foundation there. But I always gravitated toward the individual sports. I played soccer all through high school, though. I loved soccer, I mean, team sport. I kicked football for my high school football team, sort of a team sport, although I'd stand at the corner of the side line and all the fellows would be, like, come on, Willy, you've got to make this field goal or we'll kill you. Q. You said '99 was a turning point for you in terms of watching the Open, but was part of it your body was beat up and it was time to move on? WILL MACKENZIE: Oh, definitely. That was why I went to Costa Rica, to sort of heal myself because I was really beat up. I had a bad knee, blown-up ankle, huge -- I went like 40 feet to a rock onto my coccyx. That didn't feel very good. Q. Is that your tailbone? WILL MACKENZIE: Yes, sir. What am I going to do? Am I going to keep destroying myself? So I needed to go heal. I did that in Costa Rica because surfing doesn't hurt you, it just makes you strong because you're paddling all day. Down there you can surf morning and afternoon. You can be in the water for probably about six hours a day. And I just came back feeling fantastic. I was going to go back out to Montana or possibly British Columbia or possibly over to like Shawmanee or something like that, somewhere great. Or since I had just surfed for three months, I was possibly going to go to somewhere, some outlandish trip, like Indonesia or something, and just sort of live. Next thing you know I'm teeing it up. Q. Any sharks? WILL MACKENZIE: You know, I've been around when sharks are in the water, but I haven't had anything like a hammerhead come up near me or anything. Q. Costa Rica was '99? WILL MACKENZIE: Yes. Q. You said today you didn't feel that bad, but you weren't playing that well and all of a sudden things turned around. What do you do now after you get done with the interview to prepare yourself for tomorrow? WILL MACKENZIE: Like I said out there, you just need to be ready to go out there and feel like you're in attack mode, like you're going to hit a quality golf shot off the first tee and try to make birdie, unless the situation doesn't call for it. But you have to go out there -- the best players in the world go out there geared up to attack off the first tee. You know, I don't think I was unprepared today; I just -- next thing I know I was 3-over and hadn't really hit it too bad. You know, that happens. You know, I'm going to -- I was in the first fairway today, but I sort of skanked it out to the right and I had 70 feet, and it's like, how fast is this? So I just three-whipped it. You're always a little tentative with the putter early in the round because the putting green is usually flat and then you get on these greens and they've got slope. That's pretty much how it is on every golf course. It's hard to work on your 70-foot, 50 to 70-foot lag putting in a golf course situation on the putting green. Usually you just don't have that same -- maybe that's something I should work on. I'm just going to go out there and try to play great. Q. Had you met Jack before this week anywhere, and have you had a chance to talk to him this week at all? WILL MACKENZIE: I haven't had a chance to talk with him this week, and I don't know if he knows my name, but I've met him on a couple of occasions down at the Bear's Club in Jupiter, Florida. Q. Do you play there? WILL MACKENZIE: No, I play at a place called the Dye Preserve that's down there, as well, but I used to play out there a lot with Hank Kuehne. Q. Does it blow your mind a little bit that you played the Golden Bear Tour and now you're on the Golden Bear course? WILL MACKENZIE: Yeah, it does. But unless you're a phenom, you're going right through those rankings. There's a guy, Steve Marino, who's playing fantastic this year as a rookie. Marino and I were on the Golden Bear Tour. You sort of know who's sort of moving forward. Lots of the guys, you know, you meet them on the Hooters Tour or the Golden Bear Tour or any of those tours, and you just know that they're that upper echelon, they're going to make it, they've got the game to play out here. There's not many of the guys that come right out of college and just roll right out here. Those are the -- there's a select few. But yeah, it's amazing. Q. Do you take an attitude out here when things aren't going well that it could be worse, you could be upside down in a kayak, not moving? Does that help you out here at times in terms of mentally, that nothing really gets you too down? WILL MACKENZIE: Well, I get pretty mad (smiling), pretty frustrated, really. Because you just want to succeed. This is what I'm doing and I plan on succeeding in it. So whenever you're not, you know, you're pretty frustrated. But yeah, that's a good way to look at it. I mean, I could think, you know, I'm just struggling for air here, or I could be -- I could be roofing that house right there, but I'm 4-over par. I could be doing that. But whatever you do, you want to do it well, any job. You know, I'm just a little tough on myself if things aren't going great or decent. Q. Your professional kayaking, is there a Tour for that or do you give lessons? WILL MACKENZIE: I gave lessons, I used to save people in funyaks. I used to have about eight or nine funyaks behind me, inflatable kayaks. I'd teach people to be in a hard boat, too, which I was, learning how to roll a hard kayak. Q. This is Montana? WILL MACKENZIE: Montana, West Virginia, North Carolina, I worked all those places. And I safety kayaked. I was a wilderness emergency medical technician for a few years, and I was a safety kayaker and then also -- I did a lot of videography, as well, out of my kayak for raft trips. Q. Safety kayakers pulling people -- injured people out of places? WILL MACKENZIE: Not injured yet, just swimming people, people that fall out -- the Western United States, there's a little bit of white water than we have in the eastern United States. The eastern United States is what we call pool drop where you have a rapid and then almost like a little pond and then a rapid and then still water. All we have out west is when the snow melt is really at its fullest, which is probably about today, like May and early June, the rivers just really start flushing, like they just turn -- like a class 2, 3 river turns into a class 4 flush, and once the person falls out of the raft, if you don't get them in quick with a paddle, you're going to lose them because the boat is going to be going one speed and he's going to be going another speed. And if he happens to be out of shape, water is 40 degrees, they get hypothermia really quick and just lock up. So I would go down with the raft trip, I'd usually have about six rafts, and I'd just hang out amongst them, just playing around, messing around. I'd usually just be like squirting vertical or like upside down, and people would be, like, oh, my gosh. I'd be like, I'm okay, I'm a safety kayaker. Q. Showing off? WILL MACKENZIE: Showing off. Q. What's the helicopter, do you actually jump out with a snow board? WILL MACKENZIE: He puts his kids down and then you'd jump out. On extreme terrain you carry an ice ax, and when you jump out you might want of sort of self-arrest and make sure you don't get blown off. If the LZ was like really small. But yeah, you'd just touchdown, jump out, then he'd go off. Then you had heaven. You had like 4,000 vertical feet of perfect powder. Q. These guys must love you as a dinner companion, you just push a button and these stories start gushing out about all this crazy stuff? WILL MACKENZIE: Yeah, but who knows. I'm interested in all their stuff, too. Everybody has got their story. Q. Do you ever hear from the old gang, the kayakers? WILL MACKENZIE: Oh, yeah, I'm tight with them. Q. Do they think what you're doing is a little soft? WILL MACKENZIE: Maybe a little bit, but they're like, man, we're proud of you, Bro, keep it up. Q. So after that excitement in the past and playing today, how are you going to relax tonight before you come out tomorrow? WILL MACKENZIE: Well, my girlfriend and I, we're just going to go to dinner and do our usual thing. We'll probably rent a movie and just chill. Q. Action flick? WILL MACKENZIE: Who knows, man. We've got a great TV in our hotel room for some reason. Q. What's the story on your middle name? Is that a family thing? WILL MACKENZIE: Uh-huh, it's my mother's middle name, Mara Ruggles. The boys used to kid me about that at school about that one bad, Ruggles. I used to just hate it, but now it doesn't matter. I embrace it, it's funny. End of FastScripts |
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