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SHELL HOUSTON OPENApril 1, 2008Stuart ApplebyHUMBLE, TEXAS DAVE SENKO: Well, Stuart, thanks for joining us. Maybe a couple things. Maybe get us started, talk a little about you had a chance to play a practice round today. Maybe talk about the course conditions and just how things were out there. STUART APPLEBY: The course looks actually beautiful this. Year. It's been pretty much close to perfect. Good coverage on the fairways. Rough is obviously pretty light and the greens look magnificent just running very, very true. If we can get some drier weather I think it will also play even better. DAVE SENKO: You've had great success here at this course, a win and tied for 2nd last year. Talk a little bit about that. STUART APPLEBY: I've played well here. The other course back I think when Freddie won, I was 2dn there and 2nd last year and won the year before so, yeah, I've played well here; had the key components of my game in the right shape and people ask what is it that brings it here or Houston because I guess I've won it twice over the years. I'm not really sure. Just seems to be a coincidence, if anything, but I'll be looking for some form that I had here when I won in '06. DAVE SENKO: Okay. Questions? Q. Stuart, you started the year very consistently, five Top-10s in a row and then maybe not played as well last couple of times. Which way do you think is more indicative of where your game is right now, kind of the consistent Top-10 guy? STUART APPLEBY: Ball striking has not been as good as it was at the start of the year so I need to strike the ball a bit better. I've been putting well this year. That's probably something I wouldn't pick on. When you're not striking it as well it does make it a little bit harder to putt to get the rhythm. I would say ball striking would be the area I need to improve this week for sure, I think, and then if I can get some opportunities around the hole, I'll make a couple birdies. Q. There's a lot been made about how tournament organizers have tried to simulate Augusta conditions. You played well last year. Was that your best finish at Augusta? STUART APPLEBY: Last year, yeah. Q. Was there a direct correlation been playing this course and going straight to Augusta? STUART APPLEBY: Probably more about form. My form was probably a correlation more than anything than the golf course. They're two very, very different golf courses. They try to make it like Augusta. It's an attempt, that's all it is and, thank God, they make that attempt. I think that helps. You can't get the greens the speed, you can't get the chipping. You know, that's what makes Augusta. It's as good as we can get to correlate toward the next week, outside of playing on a course much like Augusta in the sense of the topography. It's going to be tough. Q. We've touched on this before, but the success Australians have had at this event. Is it a coincidence or something about it? I think it's six different Australians -- STUART APPLEBY: Probably a coincidence, a mix of that and maybe the golf course and the conditions that they're played under, what the scores were. I'd rather see a presentation put to me to where they think based on scores and the types of courses and maybe the course designers and things like that might be relevant but outside of -- I don't know that. Just coincidence. Q. Is there a wind component to that? STUART APPLEBY: If you did a bit of a breakdown of all the winds, the temperature, the style, the firmness of the greens, firmness of the golf course, all those things would play into it. I imagine it would be reasonably, this course would -- this event over the years has potential to be a bit breezier or a bit firmer than many others. That might relate to our golf more. Q. This is one of the better fields they've had here. What do you think about the field this week? STUART APPLEBY: I have not seen the field this week at all. I haven't seen it. I think, you know -- Q. Five of the Top-10. STUART APPLEBY: That would make sense based on next week. You know, it's a good quality golf course. If you play proper golf you're not going to get unlucky. Everything is visual and out there in front of you. It's not tricky. It's in good shape and we all want tournament competition, tournament stresses this time of the week because you're going to have them at Augusta. Yeah, some players are for playing before the Majors all the time, some aren't. I've generally played before so this fits in now with my previous track record in Houston. It was a no-brainer. Q. I guess it was kind of answers, it really doesn't matter who is here, it's kind of irrelevant? STUART APPLEBY: To me it's irrelevant, absolutely. I have never looked at a field based on he's playing, I'll go play. No one does. Nobody does. Q. With kind of the standard that you set in your game the last few years, was last year, do you look at that, was that -- is last year's tournament here a good memory or not so good? STUART APPLEBY: When you've got an opportunity to win you want to win. When you don't, you're -- it's not successful. You have to look at the bigger picture. I played well the next week. You know, if you look at form you would say Adam would have been the man to play better. He just had a win with super, super confidence. Sometimes that can be a trickier hurdle to get over in itself. Big picture, you've got to look at every shot as the big picture as much as it comes down to one shot which it does sometimes in tournaments, you've got to move on from those things like that. I use that as a real, you know, learning -- another period of when I'm playing well to the reason why I play well. I -- I was driving the ball fantastic, swinging well and making a lot of putts. The start of this year has been much like that. So, you know, just keep shooting my game to the level where I can move from the middle of the field to the top of the field or if it's in the Top 10, move to the win. Q. You put yourself in a great position at the Masters last year. You're talking about -- none of us sitting here have ever had winning a Masters in sight. Can you talk about what it's like to try to put that one behind or move on? STUART APPLEBY: It's very easy, very easy. It's golf. That's what happens in golf. You just always putting things behind you, always moving forward. Best players always do that. It's not hard, no, not at all. That's the nature of the game. The more emphasis you put on pigeon-holing something, the harder it is to move forward. That's really the crux of the game. My play this year has been around playing and relaxing which is what I basically did at Augusta last year. I was not relaxing enough the previous years and just playing golf and using my own natural abilities. I was getting in the way. Last year I decided to play golf and I think having the tough conditions was helped a bit because I knew it was going to be extremely difficult for everybody. So, relaxing and taking part -- taking part of the golf course just dishes at me a deal, dishes at me something tough, that's fine. You just move on. You absolutely have to because there's no point. You can't just learn anything from dwelling on what might have been. I can dwell on that as good as anybody if I wanted to. Every round you can be critical. If I would have done this, if I hadn't made the bad swing there. Tall story. The Queen had balls, she would be King. Q. Stuart, you were one of the ones complimentary of the conditions last year. How does it compare this year from last year? STUART APPLEBY: Very familiar. I don't think it's any better. It was a very high standard last year and I think this year again -- I don't really see -- things that -- what they controlled they've controlled well. Outside of Mother Nature, that's as good as you're going to see it. Q. Stuart, everybody knows about 18, No. 18, but is there another hole or two that you feel like are difference-makers on this course? STUART APPLEBY: Not really. I mean probably more about where the wind is coming from and then you can say today this hole is nothing like the day before. So in dead still conditions no special hole in golf, really that stands out. You can look at Augusta and say no wind? All of a sudden the 11th and 10th and 12th, tricky, they're difficult. You can have a hole one, 7-iron, next minute it's a 4. 18 is a good hole. Today I hit a good 5-iron to get to a front pin. We had 9-irons and wedges in there and short irons through the last year. Not one single hole. I think all the holes can be very, very important. You start off, you know, with a stretch of 3-over after 5, that could be the mess that gets you out of a playoff or gets you out of winning or what have you. You don't look at them four days later but that is still very important. Q. Stuart, one of the guys that's comes in here later today is Stricker, who two years ago when you won this tournament, two years ago he's in here on a sponsor exempt, finishes 3rd and kind of re-jumpstarts his career. When you see a guy like that that's been, you know, where he's been and back, what do you think or what -- STUART APPLEBY: I played with him at Doral. To think when you see Steve Stricker play golf now and not even now just certainly recent times you have to think that the guy has been doing that for a long time. For him to be the -- where he's obviously made a huge shift physically and mentally but you would have to say he was a sleeping bear because he just -- he plays too good of golf to think he was an average player. Very rarely do you see someone make a transition like that. You see improvement maybe over a period of time, five, ten years but this guy has changed in golf terms was a flick of a switch. He will tell you it's long and tough and what have you but, really, he turned from mediocre golfer into a world class and consistently now, not even just occasionally. Q. You've talked about how improvement tends to be so incremental. STUART APPLEBY: He's made improvements from really what you should be making in your first ten years of the game, not in the last ten years of your game. Q. I saw where you said something recently that Tiger and Phil seem -- Phil is one of the guys this week. Tiger and Phil seem to be the two guys that maybe separated themselves talent-wise. STUART APPLEBY: I think media-wise Tiger is No. 1 and Phil is a distant No. 2 and then there's the rest. Vijay is in there, Ernie is trying to get where he was. It's the Tiger show. If you look at the crowds, you'd have to say the 60 to 70 percent of Tiger and then the rest is really Phil and then the rest -- there's the others. So, you know, from a standpoint of media promotion, Tiger's dominance of the game only got stronger for his performance. Certainly recently. If he ever falls asleep he has quiet spell for three, four events and that's about it. Certainly the most media absorption and spectators. Very few people in the world -- you couldn't find ten more people more recognized than him in the world so you pretty much -- he's an easy horse to ride. Phil is obviously, he's been brilliant for the game. There's certainly a gap. Seems like that a bit in -- certainly the Ladies' tournament right now with Lorena is a bit like that, too, standing out front holding the band wagon up for the whole Tour it seems like. Tiger has been that role model, been that ambassador for us for a long time. Q. So when you're not one of those guys but yet you're a guy who still has very high standards and plays, you know, at the level you do, how do you kind of keep that kind of force or -- STUART APPLEBY: It even gets easier as time goes on, I think because you get so much more -- you get so much used to it. You know, I think early on when Tiger -- when Curtis Strange said you can't expect to win every week, that's silly. Now you back on that, Curtis thought maybe that was probably not the smartest thing I ever said because you can tell that Tiger is truthful and we expect Tiger to do great things. If he doesn't we're not surprised. I don't think anybody is. I think as a player, you know, you've got to still focus on your own game. That's the toughest thing because there's so much other stuff. It's like almost you're irrelevant as a player when it comes to playing in tournaments when you're playing with him. Certainly like Augusta for me last year, there's another guy in the group, that was me. That's probably the hardest thing you've got -- crowd and Tiger and the whole thing. It's probably the hardest thing to keep focused with your game. But, you know, you have to get used to this sort of stuff. He doesn't seem to do anything that's out of the ordinary. He does the ordinary stuff all the time which is magnificent for him. I don't know. We'll get more used to it. It's an amazing ride. Q. Was that a factor for you last year, that whole dynamic? STUART APPLEBY: I can't look back and say whether I was paired with somebody else, whether it would have been any different for me. I think I did a pretty good job of getting that -- all that external mess out of the way and focusing on what I had to do. Q. You did get yourself back into the hunt? STUART APPLEBY: Yeah. I look at what I had to do to win that tournament, the score I would have shot. It would have been a pretty amazing shot to win the tournament without even going into a playoff considering the conditions and everything else. Q. You had to shoot 70, I think? STUART APPLEBY: Yeah, maybe. That would have been one of the low scores of the day. To do that in the last group with Tiger would have been a big effort. Now, if that's what I have to do, that's what I have to do. I didn't do it but I learned a lot there. I learned that I can play Augusta and know what I'm doing around there, which I was starting to doubt that after many years of no success. DAVE SENKO: Everyone okay? STUART APPLEBY: Thank you. End of FastScripts |
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