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THE HONDA CLASSICFebruary 28, 2008Dudley HartPALM BEACH GARDENS, FLORIDA STEWART MOORE: We'd like to welcome Dudley Hart to the interview room here at the Honda Classic after a great opening round 68 out there. A little bit breezy this morning, probably a little cooler than we are used to down in south Florida. Talk about the conditions and what you saw out there today. DUDLEY HART: It was a little cooler than we are used to, that's for sure, here. Unfortunately I started off the back nine, which was a little bit -- you know, those 10 and 11 are pretty hard holes, even when it's warm and they played pretty long today. I managed to par 10 and I bogeyed 11. But you know, once we made the turn, it got pretty decent. Now it's pretty warm. It's not too bad. It's still blowing pretty good, but you just have to adjust for the ball is not going to go as far, and, you've got to play accordingly. I hit probably almost a club more than I would, at least a club more than I would on No. 11 right now and it was the right club. I just ended up 3-putting. You just know the ball is not going to jump off the face like it will when it gets warmer. STEWART MOORE: You finished tied for third at Pebble Beach and haven't played since then. Does a little momentum even through a break like that, does it carry over? DUDLEY HART: I hope so. That's what I'm hoping for. We've got three more days to go. I felt pretty good today but I definitely could hit it a little bit better. I made some putts and made some birdies, and that managed to compensate for some of the mistakes I made. I'd like to think. So I think no matter what happens the next few days, I feel like I'm heading in the right direction from where I was and is it t still feels better than it did early in the year, so I'm just going to keep working on the things that I'm working on and hopefully get better at them where I don't have to think about it as much. Q. Obviously what you did in Pebble has gone a long way to help make what you need to make. How much does that number weigh on you? Just talk about addressing that whole issue. DUDLEY HART: Believe it or not, I don't think about it at all. I mean, occasionally at night I might think about it. I really hardly ever think about it, I mean, because the way I look at it is I've got 12 events counting this week, and if I play like I know I can play, I may not play well every week, but I'll have enough decent weeks where that shouldn't be a problem. I'm trying to play and prepare myself each week to play the best I can, and I'm hoping that that number is going to be irrelevant, because I'm looking at, you know, hoping to have a good year all year long, not just trying to make that next 150,000 or whatever, and then go from there. I'm trying to do, you know, maybe try to win some tournaments and try to finish as high as I can. Q. Would you have had the same approach if what happened last year had not happened? DUDLEY HART: I think so. I mean, I don't think what happened last year to my wife really changes how you compete very much. You know, once you get outside -- inside the ropes, what I've been doing my whole life kind of takes over, that competitive stuff. I think I'm a little bit more mellow and I don't take it quite as hard. I mean, I'm still competitive out there and I still don't like to hit bad shots and make mental mistakes and things like that. But I think off the golf course is where that will affect me more. I don't really carry bad rounds with me as long as I used to. It's, you know, you realize that a lot worse things can happen to you than playing a bad round of golf. Q. At this level, is it fair to say that when it's blowing like this, it still gets even in a great pro's head a little bit? DUDLEY HART: Without a doubt, certain shots. Certain shots, the wind may help you. Like the ninth tee shot, I wasn't thinking very good, not a comfortable shot for me, blowing left-to-right for me with a dogleg-left and I don't usually turn the ball over very easily. I can snap-hook it but I don't hit the proper draw very easily, and it was just an uncomfortable shot. I wasn't going to aim it in the lake left and try to cut it in the middle of the fairway, and I just kind of bled it into the right rough. I got away with it and made par. You know, there's certain shots that during the round, wind or no wind are uncomfortable, but I think the wind will make those -- you may have three or four shots that are uncomfortable in a round, let's say, that you may have double that number. You just have to mentally fight through it and, you know, I didn't do a good job of that on 9. But I had other shots where the pin is left, the wind is left-to-right and that's a harder shot for me, especially with a longer iron depending what's left of the green. Obviously if I aim it right of the pin, it's going to end up on the right side of the green. Some shots, it's that way for everybody. For hookers, it's the opposite obviously. You just get more uncomfortable shots. Your yardages are a little bit -- you're guessing a little bit sometimes with the wind, a little bit in, a little bit down, quarters. Some of those shots where you really need to be precise with your distance control can be a little dicey, also. Q. For us Florida-base guys that were not at Pebble, would you mind terribly running through that TPC week last year and what that was like and what type of shock to the system that must have been for your family? DUDLEY HART: I left to go to TPC and I left home and my wife just had a bad cold, and she would get pretty nasty colds like coughing, it's been going on for a few years and I would always kind of comment, like something is not right, you should not cough like that. Q. This is from you, the guy who has had a sore throat for a month. DUDLEY HART: Yeah, well, I'm afraid what the doctor might tell me. So I went down to THE PLAYERS, thought she had just another one of her colds. On Wednesday, a friend took her too a doctor because she was kind of sweating, and she was maybe a little worse than normal for her. Q. Up in New York? DUDLEY HART: Yeah, she's up in Buffalo. The doctor said she had pneumonia, so I got a call and said, well, she's got pneumonia. I talked to the doctor, we happened to have a doctor in the locker room at PLAYERS, and I asked him, I said, you know, what do they do for pneumonia, do; I need to go home; my dad is an hour away. He said they usually send them home with a bunch of medicine and antibiotics and just rest and whatever. So I started to play my practice round and then about two, three hours later, I got a call, they did some more tests and they found a softball-size mass in her lung, which ended up being a tumor. So she tended up taking -- she ended up spending a little over three weeks in the hospital. They took that tumor out and two-thirds of her right lung. You know, she spent a bunch of time trying to clear up what they were trying to clear up, the pneumonia in the lung before they did the surgery so when they cut that lung open, they were worried about what was infected getting into the other areas. So it was a scary time, and we didn't really know until about a week or so after the surgery, you know, what the deal was. The tumor had -- what the doctor said, had cancer cells on it but wasn't cancer. Basically it was going in a bad direction but luckily she got sick enough that her sold was a little worse than normal, otherwise she probably would have fought through the cold and maybe gotten a little better and may not have found it until, you know, you never know. Q. How do you tell a six-year-old kid what's going on, if you do? DUDLEY HART: We didn't really try to explain it to them. They wouldn't understand and I didn't want to scare them. They knew mommy was sick. Kids are pretty resilient, and we would take them to the hospital a couple times a day and hang out there with her. They were good. They were just like, "Mommy's sick, she's in the hospital" and they took it pretty well. They didn't really know. They kept going to school and doing their routines and it really wasn't that big of a deal to them. Q. Where did you get prepared? You obviously couldn't get prepared in Buffalo. DUDLEY HART: We have golf domes up there, you know, you hit it about 80 yards, hits the wall. Really builds your confidence, hitting really straight. (Laughter). No, I rented a place in Orlando. My wife's got a lot of family in Lakeland, so I rented a place at Reunion in Orlando for the month of December, and I spent the bulk of the month down there. I would go back and forth a little bit because since I went home and didn't play the rest of the year, I didn't play or practice at all. I played with some of my friends at home a couple days a week after my wife got home and everything, but I really didn't -- when you don't have, at least for me, when I knew I wasn't going to play in a tournament or a while, it was hard to motivate myself to go practice for six, eight hours a day. I didn't do that. I just went out and played and had fun with my friends. In December, I kind of came down and tried to get it going, get it geared up. Q. In that month, is confidence a factor or are you feeling good about your return? DUDLEY HART: It's feeling pretty good. But I mean, still, I had not competed. That to me was the hardest. Physically I wasn't really worried about getting back to where I felt like I could hit shots and do whatever. It was more just getting your mind into the right frame of mind so to speak, get your concentration level up, just to get back in the flow of things really. Q. Obviously you had other thoughts on your mind, but how did it play out without knowing that you had any status for this year and that they create that had special category for you and David; just talk about that. DUDLEY HART: Well, I had a pretty good idea that they were going to do that. It wasn't going to change anything how I was going to handle the first couple months at least. Had I not got the medical, I probably would have come back and played a couple tournaments before the FedExCup and then sat out the FedExCup and played -- unless I played well, but I would have been able to maybe play one or two before the FedExCup and then try to play as much as I could the rest of the year. That would have been a little bit dicey but I could have done it that way. But fortunately, I didn't have to get to the point where I had to make a decision which way. They had already made a decision on the medical deal before that. Q. Technically would they have required to you miss at least four months? DUDLEY HART: Yeah, four months. Four months took me right to the week of the FedExCup, which not playing that long, obviously I had fallen out of that and then I had another month off. I just decided to start over instead of playing three weeks in the fall and then taking two more months off. It made more sense to me to start in January. Q. Any idea who got the ball rolling on that? It seems like a pretty fairway of dealing. I could see how some guys might abuse the privilege down the road but it sound like a pretty fair idea. DUDLEY HART: Well, I think Sid (Wilson) and Henry Hughes; I know David Duval approached them about that. So there were two of us that were in that situation. I didn't really even ask for it. They brought it up to me because I didn't even think. It wasn't really a high priority of mine at the time and I wasn't really thinking about it that way. They brought it up and I said, well, I mean, I thought it would be a good idea, whether it's for me, I wasn't sure they could do it in the middle of the year. I thought they might have to wait until the end of the year but figured they should do it that way. Q. Winning the Honda was obviously a big deal, basically won it in your hometown. A lot's happened to you since, the family, different things. Could you just tell us where your career is at, how it affects your goals? DUDLEY HART: It doesn't really affect my goals too much. It just makes -- it makes the desire to be on the road a little bit harder to be honest with you, the desire to play as much a little bit harder, and especially with my kids starting school this year, it's going to be a little bit harder for them to travel. So I'm hitting the point now where a lot of guys that have played out here have already been through or are going through, but where you're just going to be away from them. Until this year, I had only been away from them for two weeks or more once, once since they were born. Being on the road 28 weeks a year, that was pretty good, but that's going to change now. STEWART MOORE: Dudley, thanks so much. Good luck the rest of the week. End of FastScripts |
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