	products recent interviews FastScripts archive about ASAP Sports

Our Clients:

Browse by Sport

Find us on

Subscribe to RSS

Click to go to
Asaptext.com

View our
e-Brochure

MAYAKOBA GOLF CLASSIC AT RIVIERA MAYA - CANCUN

February 19, 2008

RIVIERA MAYA, MEXICO

NELSON SILVERIO: Thank you very much, we have defending champion, Fred Funk, from the PGA TOUR, rules official Slugger White, Juan-Miguel Villar, president of OHL, Lic. Felix Gonzalez Canto, Gabriela Rodriguez
Galvez- Secretaria de Turismo and ustavo
Maldonado-Representante Municipal de Solidaridad. We will here for a few minutes to take question from the media.
SLUGGER WHITE: This is quite an honor to be up here with these dignitaries. I'd just like to spend a couple minutes here to tell you how excited we are to be being back here. We had a great, great success last year with the golf tournament. The Greg Norman Production team did a great job and took a lot of notes along with our staff and we just hope that we can reach forward and make it as successful as possible.
I've been looking forward to getting back here for a year. The people are fantastic. The golf course is superb, the resort is next to none, and we just look forward to being here. And thank you all very much for your hospitality and look forward to a great week, and Fred, all the best to you this week. Thank you.
FRED FUNK: It's great to be back, and I really got used to being in this room last year, and I want to get used to it again this year; that's a goal.
It's great seeing you guys again, but it's great to be back. Obviously the inaugural event is always a tough event to get going. It's by far the hardest sell because a lot of people are not -- they are wondering on how the event is going to be. But after the first year, with the experience that everyone had here last year, it was easy to sell the tournament for the second year to all the players, because all the players were asking: How was it down Mayakoba, how was the golf course, everything, the town and the food, you name it. They asked and they wanted to know.
There's not one negative thing you could say about it. The golf course is fantastic, which is the No. 1 selling point that the players want to know about. They want to know, what kind of golf course it is, and I thought it's a great Greg Norman design. He did a great job here. Very unique to what I've ever played with the mangroves off to the sides of the hole. It's really demanding. As long as you're in the green, you're okay. If you're not in the green stuff, you're in serious trouble. The grass here with the Paspalum, a lot of people were asking about that, and very wonderful surface to play golf off of. The greens and the fairways and the tees are fantastic, and you don't want to be in the rough. It gets a little tough in there. But that's the same in any tournament.
The resort, like Slugger said, it is second to none. It's just a wonderful feeling, a wonderful place to be. And any time that the players can come and be on like an on-campus environment where we are all in the same facility and we can interact with each other at night doing a lot of dinners together and just seeing each other at the pools and at the beach, it always makes it a special event. It's a great event for the families, which is another great sell for the golf course, and the tournament itself.
The people here, I complimented the chef last year that was cooking for all of us, the players, the breakfast and lunch at the clubhouse was fantastic food last year, it was ridiculous, and I understand he's back, and my hat's off to him.
Greg Norman company and Larson (Segerdahl) who does a great job and everyone that helps us from getting us from off the airplane through the airport to the resort to back on the airplanes and everything in between, it just makes it a lot easier to travel out of the country with all of the help we've got from the tournament. It's never easy to go through customs and especially nowadays, and they have made that just a real ease to go through.
And I can't say anything more positive. Everything is a wonderful experience, and I just hope that I can play as well as I did last year, and get myself in contention to win on Sunday and see what happens.
NELSON SILVERIO: Fred Funk, thank you.

Q. Can you talk about the course this year and the quality of the field this year?
FRED FUNK: I understand they have a new superintendent and he's done a great job. It was in great shape last year but right now it seems to have matured a little better.
So I think Slugger and our field staff is very happy with what it looks like out there. There's probably not much for people to do other than mark the hazards.
As far as the field, I have not seen the list and I don't know how much stronger it is. To me it must be a lot stronger than last year, just because word-of-mouth of how great an experience that everybody had here last year that, a lot more guys would show up. And it's also so easy for the guys to get from here over to the next tournament for the Honda next week, so I think it's an easy transition to come from the West Coast to come down here and then to go back over to Florida.
And with the experience everyone had, it must be a lot better field than last year. I have not seen it, though, and you could probably answer it before me. I haven't seen the commit list. Larson is back there somewhere. He could answer that question, it's really good -- I got the thumb's up, yeah, it's good.

Q. Can you talk about all of the players coming back here for a second year?
FRED FUNK: Again, the reason guys like that are coming is because they had such a good experience or people had such a good experience last year, the players. And they want to come down, and for one, they want to play in some really good weather. You're going to have that this week.
A lot of guys are tired of playing if good cold weather and they want to work on their game when the weather starts getting warm and the older guys you mentioned all like warm weather because their bodies work a little better than in the cold. But I think more it has to do with, again, the guys that had a really good experience last year letting everyone else know that it was a really good event.

Q. Is there more pressure playing in a stronger field?
FRED FUNK: The pressure of playing with a better field, you want to have the strongest players. You want to have as strong a field as possible. It just validates and makes you feel that much better when you win that you beat a better field.
No, whether you win or lose, it doesn't matter -- or whether you win against a weak field, so-called week-field, all the fields are really strong. All of the guys are really good.
A lot of the guys that you don't know their names are really good players and you're going to know their names soon and they are here. It's just that they are not the marketing -- you can't market those guys yet because no one really knows them. But you're going to know them, and obviously the tournament -- when the tournament starts, they want to advertise guys that have a lot of big names that are in the field, and we are going to get more and more of those as the years go through with this event.
But it doesn't really diminish the quality of the field because a lot of these young guys that are trying to come up and get established are really, really good players and you're going to be hearing about them pretty soon, if not this week.

Q. What do you think about Greg nor Norman coming and playing in this tournament?
FRED FUNK: Greg Norman, old man. (Laughter).

Q. Is that coming from a spring chicken? (Laughter).
FRED FUNK: I'll leave it at that. (Laughter) I can say that because I'm an old man, too.
I'm going to pay for that comment, I guarantee it. We'll keep that in the room here.
SLUGGER WHITE: I think it's going to be a wonderful success again this year. We were elated last year, and just the feedback from the players and the crowds you had and the people you had here, I mean, your galleries were great. Saturday and Sunday were fantastic.
I think we're looking for a wonderful event this year, and I look forward to coming back every year, I can guarantee you that. It will get bigger and better every year, just like Fred says, with the players and word-of-mouth. You're going to see a stellar field here from now on.
FRED FUNK: Looks good on TV with all the canals and the trees, it just looks spectacular on TV. It's a good commercial for itself. It sells itself. So I think that's really a big plus.

Q. Can you talk about the difficulty of the course and will the wind be a factor?
FRED FUNK: It's plenty difficult especially when the wind blows and last year on Sunday the wind blew pretty hard from what I remember, and that's the defense of the golf course. But that's the defense of a lot of golf courses.
So there's a lot of golf courses that we play on the TOUR that when the wind doesn't blow, the guys will shoot a lot lower on the course than it would normally be on a normal day when the wind is blowing 15, 20, 25 miles an hour.
Greg Norman gave a lot of room to hit it on most holes but you don't miss what he gave, and you all of a sudden when the wind blows, those big areas don't look that big anymore because it's a premium on hitting the ball really solid.
And there's about five or six holes out here that you really focus on that you've got to get buy, they are really difficult holes. Obviously No. 3 and No. 8 on the front nine are very difficult par 4s. And No. 12, 14, 15 on the water, 16, 17 -- 17 is brutal when the wind is really blowing. It's really narrow.
I think the neatest thing in the design of the golf course is the uniqueness of how short the par 3s are. Most of what happens on modern golf courses, these newly-built golf courses that have 230- and 250-yard par 3s and here you have a wedge, up an 8-iron, 9-iron, 6-iron, they are all pretty short but they are very challenging, fun holes to play. And it just shows that you don't need length to have a good golf hole. You don't need length to have a good par 3 or even a good par 4.
So I think the golf course is very good. It's at a length that's plenty long enough for us and plenty difficult for the pros, but yet the resort guests can come here and have a great experience and play and really have a good time. They don't have to play it back where we do, and just have a wonderful day on the golf course. That's what you've got to cater to. You can't cater to the best players in the world that are only here one week out of 52.

Q. Sir, let me ask about if you feel more comfortable because you're a champion, and you have a little more handicap because you know about the field?
FRED FUNK: Well, as far as the comfort level, any time you come to a golf course you have had success on, you have a comfort level and feel good about it and know you can play well. That in itself is a good feeling, to always come back to a golf course, whether you've won on it or not, if you like the golf course; if you've won on it, it's even a bonus.
As far as the field, it's great, the stronger the better. You want good players in your field. You want to play with the best. We are used to playing with the best players week-in and week-out, and to me, I never see a field as a weak field on the PGA TOUR. The young kids today that are coming out are so good. The game is at a level that it's never been at before as far as quality, and that I see is only getting better and better.
So it's fun, to matter what group you watch out here or what player you focus in on, there's a lot of good golf you're going to see.

Q. Slugger, perhaps for you and Juan-Miguel, can you talk about why the PGA TOUR selected El Camaleón Golf Course and for this to be the only PGA TOUR event they have in México.
JUAN-MIGUEL VILLAR MIR: We always have the best to take of the golf course, to do the best that we can in order to be a good partner with the PGA TOUR and to work for excellence as we always do, in fact. It's a privilege to be a partner and we are today a partner of the PGA TOUR. This fact exists on our side and will exist for always, but really the reason of the PGA coming to here is not just from the PGA side.
SLUGGER WHITE: That's going to be a little difficult for me to answer. I think Bart Collins can probably shed a little light on that, with Greg Norman Productions and with Larson and his crew, that's a little out of my element. I can get you off a cart path and get you out from behind the TV towers, but when it comes to the negotiating, I think, like I say, I think Bart and his crew could answer that better than I.
BART COLLINS: Well, I don't mean to keep passing the buck on the question. I'm Bart Collins. I work for Greg Norman and Great White Shark Enterprises. A lot of it really came down to OHL and Mayakoba who wanted to have a premium event and showcase it on television, and in order to do that, then would you like to have a PGA TOUR event.
And we are very pleased that we have the GOLF CHANNEL and we are going to continue to work with OHL and the PGA TOUR to see how we can broaden the television exposure for this property and Riviera may I can't. We want to continue to build the event and increase the quality of the field and expand the television coverage. So really, it began very early on with OHL challenging Greg to build a golf course that could host a PGA TOUR event, and then it kind of morphed in there from OHL to having direct discussions with the PGA TOUR to bring the PGA TOUR down to México.
So we look forward to taking it to the next level and expanding the television network coverage.
NELSON SILVERIO: Thank you very much for joining us and good afternoon.

End of FastScripts

ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297

MAYAKOBA GOLF CLASSIC AT RIVIERA MAYA - CANCUN

February 19, 2008

Fred Funk

Gustavo Maldonado

Gabriela Rodriguez Galvarez

Juan-Miguel Villar

Slugger White