U.S. OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP

June 12, 2008

Justin Hicks

RAND JERRIS: We're now joined by Justin Hicks with a round of 3- under par, 68 in the first round this morning.

Justin, seven birdies on your score card this morning. Was there something you saw in the practice rounds about this golf course that you really liked?

JUSTIN HICKS: You know, I've always enjoyed coming out to California to play golf. The weather seems always to be pretty good out here and the conditions for play just really -- the grass seems to grow well. It's firm. A lot of the golf I play back home in Florida, we tend to see a lot softer conditions back there. For whatever reason, I do like playing on the firmer surface. But Florida is home for me right now, and, obviously, it's doing something to prepare me for this.

RAND JERRIS: Were you watching the scoreboards as you were playing this morning? What was it like to see your name at the top of the leaderboard through the morning.

JUSTIN HICKS: You know, I don't watch a ton of scoreboards out there. I know a lot of people say, well, how do you ever know what you need to shoot? For me, I go out there and just try to play as good as I can, and at the end of the day, I add it up, and where that puts me at, it puts me at. I know sometimes that could be a problem where you need to know if you need to make birdie to win or something, but at this level, I guess I kind of rely on the guys on the bag to feed off them, and say I can get a vibe from my caddies when I need to push the envelope a little bit, and I can get a vibe from them when things are going pretty well, and you're taking a cruise.

Q. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be surprised when they see your name at the top of the leaderboard. How surprised are you?

JUSTIN HICKS: Hopefully not too surprised, at least my good friends. I thought it was a pretty good round. I guess, you know, certainly I'm not shocked, but a little bit surprised at the thought of it, at the top of the leaderboard currently. You know, the way I play a lot of times, though, is I like to think of whatever I'm doing, there's somebody else out there that's probably got you by several.

So you can't ever play good enough out there. I think you have to push yourself to that envelope on a daily basis when you play competitive golf for a living, because there's so many good players out there. If you think, I've got a really good round going, maybe I can coast in, relax, I'm 6-under or 3-under or whatever it is, you'll come in and somebody will pass you up.

I've played in a lot of smaller events and learned that lesson. So you can never make too many birdies in a round of golf as far as I'm concerned.

Q. Is there any question now, which Justin Hicks you are?

JUSTIN HICKS: Yeah. For those of you who don't know, there's a Justin Hicks that is here in San Diego, and he's a teaching professional, and he played at the Buick this year, which caused a lot of interesting things for both of us this year. The Tour got us mixed up. Companies got us mixed up. Checks were going to my place; checks were going to his place. There was all kinds of fun stuff going on there. They actually withdrew me out of the Nationwide event. I called them up, and they said, you committed to the Buick, and we figured you wouldn't want to go to Panama. No, I'd like to go to Panama because that's not me.

And, you know, I saw him earlier this week and actually had him out and talked to him a little bit about what he could tell me what was going on out here. I don't spend a lot of time in San Diego necessarily, although I love it out here and kind of tried to pick his brain a little bit about the golf course. And he provided a few things, but unfortunately, he didn't play well enough at the Buick this year and only saw the course, we're playing this week just the one round.

Q. When he joined you in the ropes, didn't you hit in for an eagle on 2 or something like that. He must have brought you a little bit of luck?

JUSTIN HICKS: Yeah, that's right. I told my caddie, actually today, I said, wow, that's kind of weird, the other Justin Hicks is here with my wife, because he was walking around with my wife and my sister-in-law and a good friend of mine. And sure enough, a good friend of mine, who's here this week watching me, his name is Jon Turcott, and there's a John Turcott in the field as well. So he always gets the same kind of thing that Justin Hicks gets here, too. There's some weird things going on this week for sure.

But, yeah, it was a pretty exciting moment in the practice round. They don't tend to be too boisterous out there during the practice rounds, and it was a nice way to start our day by holing a sand wedge on 2, and hearing a roar earlier in the week.

Q. Could you talk about your first nine holes, didn't have a par the entire -- the back nine? So can you just go over those holes?

JUSTIN HICKS: Didn't realize that. Too busy trying to make birdies, I guess, to realize that I hadn't made a par. Yeah, essentially our philosophy this week, when I say "our," my best friend Brad is helping me out this week, and he's actually my agent, so I've got my Jerry Maguire here on the bag with me. We came out here, we knew what we had seen at Shinnecock before in my other Open experience, and I've always kind of felt like Opens set up best for me when it comes to major championships. I feel like I drive the ball pretty straight typically, and a lot of the of the guys I play with, and my best friends know that, and they're the first ones to tell me that as well. They say I drive it straight! er than I putt, which is one of the things when you're hanging with guys at home, but another thing to do it here in the big tournaments.

But we came out here with the game plan of we're going to hit a lot of fairways, and we were driving it well all week long, just like I have been for a good month now, and just to run through a few of the holes. Like 10, we actually hit the fairway but it went through, and being the first hole of the day, I think I had a few nerves going on there. But I missed my shot with the greenside bunker there, and actually does not get a very good lie, it almost plugged, but I had plenty of green to work with. It was one of the tougher pins I thought of the day.

10 was on the mound, and it was right on the top of it, from the angle I came from, if I hit it left. So I wasn't quite sure how I was going to get that close. But that was a fairly easy bogey.

11, the pin was down in front, and I thought to myself if you get anything on the front of this green, you're going to have good luck, luckily we did. We had 12 feet or so and made that.

12, was kind of a surprise. That hole has been very tough all week. We hit a great drive there, though. The pin was in the back, just thought we were going to try to hit something in the middle of the green and chase it back there and the thing almost went in. It literally rolled over the edge. I thought, wow, maybe another eagle, but it didn't.

13, we made a pretty good up-and-down out of the greenside right bunker. They had it the tee up there. I was thinking they were going to save that for later this week, but whatever the case is, they had the tee up there and everyone is going to be going for that, obviously.

14, we had a pretty interesting thing take place out there. My second shot into the green flew over the bunker which we were trying to do just to cover it to get to the right back part of that green, and it landed on a sprinkler head just short of the green. From our angle, we just saw it hit and kick hard right and long and over the green into the hazard. So that was kind of a shock to say the least, because you feel like you have it going good for a little bit there, and next thing you know, something like that happens.

But we took our drop, though, and it was a tough chip because if I didn't get it on the green, it was coming back at me and it would have gone by me back to the hazard. And I kind of had it in the back of my head, well, this could get really ugly really quick, and I pulled off a very good chip shot there and saved the putt and made bogey.

So that was actually a really good bogey after hitting a really good shot and watching it go off a sprinkler head.

15, hit probably my worst drive the day. That's a tough driving hole. Probably one of the better par-4s out here. You get a lot of these looks where the wind blows straight from off the ocean on that hole so it's going left-to-right. And they've got trees up there on the left where if you're in the left side of the fairway, you have to hook it in. And there's one tree on the right, for me I don't fly it 330 yards like J.D. Holmes or something, and if you push it a little bit, you have to deal with that one.

I didn't put my best move on it, so to speak, and lost it right. And tried to get it up-and-down from the fairway, had an 8-iron in there and left myself underneath the hole and maybe 15, 16 feet and just didn't play enough break.

16, was a bit of a surprise, I was trying to get that putt close from the fringe and made a long one there for birdie.

17, I played that hole exactly that way in the practice round a couple of days ago. The pin was in a similar spot, hit it in there with a 9-iron and made like a 12-footer, and did the same thing today.

And 18, 18, to me is kind of an interesting golf hole. I think if you're a real long hitter, it probably sets up for you like you're licking your chops when you get there. But for me, I like the look of that green a lot more with a wedge. It's not necessarily a hole that I've really seen like, wow, I can't wait to just knock that one on in two there.

Certainly, if I get a good look at it, I'll do it. It's a hole that has a fair amount of trouble going on with it, too, depending on where the pin is. And the wind and the water in front of the green, it feels a lot more comfortable for me to play that three shots unless something really crazy goes on and I have a good look at it.

RAND JERRIS: You hit another birdie on the front side on 4. Tell us what happened there.

JUSTIN HICKS: Let's see, No. 4, oh, yeah, that was actually -- 4, is one of the harder drives of the golf course, as well. The fairway slopes right-to-left and the wind blows hard left-to-right and there's bunkers down the right, too. It's one of those that you just -- you have to step up there and find a way to get it into the short grass. And luckily we've been hitting the driver well and we did that.

When I got down to the ball, the pin was in the front right there and all week long, we kept noticing how well, you know, if anything crazy goes on here or if we miss the fairway or for whatever reason we're trying to get it on the green, if you hit it right of the green, everything funnels right down to the right front part of the green. From there, you can putt to anywhere on that green. You can putt to the left, you could putt to the back. So when we got up there and I saw that pin sitting there on the front right part of the green, I wasn't even trying to land it on the green. I knew right where I was going to hit it. I told myself, and I told Brad, this is perfect, we need to hit something low and hit it right around, and it's a big bowl, and go right through and come right back to the pin.

It's a hole that somebody would make it on, honestly, coming off the backboard, there. But I left myself about a 3-footer or 4- footer, whatever. It wasn't the easiest of putts because it still had some break to it. But I kept my head still and knocked it in.

Q. Can you list the many Tours you've played on, and then also just address at 33 how tough it is to keep playing when you haven't been able to get to the Tour yet?

JUSTIN HICKS: Mini-tours I've played on. Let's see, I moved down from Michigan to Florida and started with the South Florida Golf Tour, which collapsed. And then the Golden Bear Tour, which got bought out by the Gateway Tour, which still continues on now. And I also played some stints with a Tour called the Maverick Tour, which the owner ran away with some money and never was heard from again. He bounced me a check for 25 grand, too, for a win.

And there was a Montgomery Sports Tour in there, as well, for a little bit. And the minor League Golf Tour now, too, which has been a great asset to the area for professional golf along with Gateway.

Now when I go home on weeks off from Nationwide or from the U.S. Opens, if I want to get a competitive round of golf in, there's a lot of options now. That's one of the reasons I moved to the West Palm area, is that I could play golf year-round. I'm at a golf course there called Bear Lakes Country Club. We have 25 guys out there that play mini-tour. There's always games going on, whether it's Skins or Nassaus or whatever. If you want to play in a mini-tour event, you can buy into whatever you like. It's a nice little buffet, so to speak of professional golf at your fingertips.

Q. (No mic.)

JUSTIN HICKS: Being 33, I don't know, I think of myself as pretty young, I guess, at heart, maybe. When I first moved down -- I think I've been going at it now for about 11 years. When I first moved down, I didn't have the opportunity that some people have when they get out of college and they've got -- where they have sponsors or parents or family members or guys at the club or whatever. My parents had a little bit of cash for me, and some of their friends gave me a few dollars, as well. I quickly played and made that money back. When you're putting up $400 and you're making $400, by the time you're figuring your cost of living, you're losing a lot that week. It went quick and I ended up working at a! lot of different clubs down there.

And I think when you're working, you're not playing full-time, it's very difficult to improve as a young man, you know, you're trying to get to that PGA TOUR level and you're spending 40 hours a week in a bag room or a pro shop. I would wake up early and go in early and practice as much as I could. But at the same time, I had to make ends meet. I finally found some great people that were able to help me out, and I could play full-time and that's what allowed me to play some of those mini-tours.

And also I've had a surgery, as well, that kind of slowed me back, too. So I certainly feel like I want to play at the PGA TOUR level, but at the same time, you know, not everyone just comes out of college and marches out there. I'm okay with that. I see guys like Tom Lehman, that they refer to as journeymen. And other guys, a good friend of mine, Ken Duke who got his Tour card at 36 or 37. By no means do I say I still have a few more years until I get to that point. You get to a point where I've been playing full-time for four years, five years -- four years, where I haven't been working. And my career has progressed fairly nicely. I like to think that things are moving in a good direction and I'm learning a lot, and, hopefully, I can get there sooner than later.

Q. So you didn't know that you made seven birdies, you didn't know that you didn't make a par on your first nine, you were closing your ears when people were saying you're in the lead. Is that a defense mechanism to battle the nerves? Does that kind of also maybe take a little bit of the enjoyment away, looking up at the scoreboard seeing your name there at the U.S. Open?

JUSTIN HICKS: For the most part, when I play golf, I get so locked into just hitting good shots and making birdies that there's a lot of rounds that I don't know how many birdies I make. I do my best to think in the present. I haven't read a ton of golf books out there, but the one I have read, it's Rotella's book, golf is not a game of perfect. He harps on staying in the present a lot. I've never met the guy, but I've seen him in events like this.

I keep things as simple as present, and keeping in the present seems to work for me from time to time, like today. I knew I made birdies, but I'm out there just trying to make birdies, because that's what anybody is trying to do, whether or not I lost out on the enjoyment of looking at the scoreboard, I don't know, I'm not out here necessarily for the enjoyment of looking at the scoreboard. I'm out here to play some good golf and see what happens and add them up at the end of the week and hopefully be here Sunday night talking about this.

Q. How are you going to deal with it tonight? What are you going to do, stay in routine or how do you sleep on it?

JUSTIN HICKS: Well, you know, I've got a lot of family and friends out here this week. When I'm at home, I don't talk a ton of golf with my wife. Usually, it's how did you play today? I played pretty good. Okay, good. We kind of go out for dinner and do our thing. And I think that I'm going to do my best to try to maintain that same type of thing as well.

Being 33, it's -- I think I've seen situations, maybe not necessarily like this, although I hope to see more of them, but I've kind of come to understand a little bit of how I work, things that I need to do and things I don't need to do. And so I'm just going to try to not necessarily think too much about it. I know the one thing I'm going to take away from all of this today is that I've already said it before, that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Just because you played well one day in The Open, it doesn't really get you anywhere in golf. It's a four-day tournament, and everything that's done in golf is result-based. There's no, hey, I led The Open one year, what's that get me? It doesn't get you anything. So it's all about what happens over the course of the week and over four rounds, not just one.

Q. We don't see anything in there that indicates that you can get seven birdies in a round like this and lead the U.S. Open. What can you point to in your golfing career that you did that would indicate you could do this? You've proven to yourself that you can do it. What was the most birdies you've ever had in one round, if you can remember that?

JUSTIN HICKS: One of the places I used to work at back in Florida when I was in the pro shop, I believe I made ten. It's a Quail Ridge in Boynton Beach. I don't think they were too happy with letting me out in their games after that. But it's a good question. I can obviously see why you guys might kind of wonder, who does this guy think he is showing up and making seven birdies at an Open?

But in the same sense, for me, The Open is what I've always kind of thought of as a kind of tournament that fits my game. I drive it straight. I'm not afraid to hits greens in regulation. And, hey, something kind of clicked between last week and this week with the putter. We played in Raleigh last week and the greens were fast, or faster than this. I'm really happy I played there, to kind of prepare me for this, quite honestly. I missed the cut, but it enabled me to learn that we had to do some things better in order to be competitive out here this week.

And the first thing of which was, I have two putters that I use that are Camerons and they're exactly the same, but I took the one in, I think I did it before the second round, actually, and asked them to take just a little of the loft off of it because I felt like the one there was "the gamer," so to speak.

I could hear the ball rolling on putts longer than 20 feet. If you're hearing the balls rolling on putts longer than 20 feet, it means that it's not rolling. It means that it's chipping. It was not like a rolling noise; it was a kind of sound coming off the putter.

So I knew that I had to figure a way to get the ball rolling better, because when it gets down to it, if you're not in control of your speed, you don't have much of a chance of making putts off fast greens.

There's certainly a learning process, even at 33, with this game that you're always trying to figure something out. You hear about Tiger all the time changing his golf swing. Well, I'm making adjustments just like he is, whether it be with equipment or with my swing, trying to fine tune things, as well. That, and just a couple of little things I worked on earlier this week with set up really kind of made things feel a little more comfortable on the greens.

Q. You can be the first round leader in the U.S. Open, but because of a certain pairing in the noon cycle, you also might be second mention tomorrow. Are you going to feel like you were cheated out of your 15 minutes of fame for today?

JUSTIN HICKS: Not at all. Not at all. You know, it's great that those guys are all paired together because that way I can just kind of be on the side doing my own thing. I don't have the 80,000 people following me around. I'd love to have the opportunity to see what that's all about, I tell you that. I'm not really concerned with the whole 15 minutes of fame. I'm concerned with trying to make it longer than that. That's why I was saying earlier, that this tournament is not about one round, not about one day. I'm out here trying to have a good week and see what happens with that.

Q. You were an alternate at a local qualifying, you made a playoff through sectional. Can you talk about when you found out you were in the sectional?

JUSTIN HICKS: I played a Nationwide event in Greenville, South Carolina, the BMW Pro Am. We used three golf courses and we're playing these practice rounds and six hour rounds. I made the cut. And so I had played -- because I made the cut the previous week, I had played golf for 11 straight days, 11 straight days I played a round of golf. I was seeing a lot of different golf courses. When I showed up for local, I was pretty fired. I finished playing on Sunday morning and I drove the course and saw it and everything else. And I was like, wow, it's not an easy golf course, but that's what you want to see for qualifiers. You don't want the easy ones, you don't want a shootout.

And my caddie and a very good friend of mine, we drove it and tried to check it out as good as possible. And we went out there the next day and we battled. It was a tough day. Mentally, physically, you name it. And we get done and I'm thinking, geez, I really don't know where that's going to put me. And I walk up there and say, great, I'm right near a playoff, that's just what I need after all this golf, and I just want to go sleep.

We got involved in a playoff that went seven holes and the last five of which I was playing with some 21-year-old guy that flew it like 350 yards, and we're playing 480-yard par-4s, back-to-back, 9 and 18. And I'm, like, this guy has got me by 40, and I'm hitting it 310, 315 uphill. How am I ever going to get out of this thing? There's no trees out there to catch them or anything, they're wide open. I need trees or something, give me something out here to work with, I can't out hit him, I need to out-straight him. The greens are rock hard, too. He's hitting a wedge and maybe little 9's and I'm back hitting 7's and 8's. He finally dusted me off with birdie on the 7th hole. I was, like, great, put me out of my misery and get me out of here.

I missed local only once or twice before. I had a pretty good run of it. I thought, well, that's it. It's just another qualifier, it happens to be for The Open, and we'll move along. But they called me a couple of days later and they said -- it actually worked out really well. I was signed up for Chicago. There's probably, like, 60 guys for three or four spots there. They called me up and said, would you like to play in the sectional?

I said, yeah, that would be great.

And they said -- well, actually after that I said, well, which site is it?

And they said, it's the one in Columbus.

And I thought, oh, because I got the overflow site where they had 80 guys for three spots, and I knew across town the Tour guys are playing for 30 shots. And they said well, you just take Ryuji Imada's place.

That's great. That's one of the best breaks I've heard all summer for me, basically.

These guys are really good golfers out here. I'm not going to take anything away from them, but at the same time, I think when you're playing at the Nationwide level, you've seen so many guys, whether a good friend of mine is Steve Marino that plays out there, and all the guys you've seen coming through the ranks with you, and you know that they took their 66's, that they played on mini-tour levels and Nationwide levels, and now they're just doing it in front of bigger crowds for more money.

It gives you the confidence to know that you can go out there and earn spots just as easy as anybody else can. So definitely I like going to the sites where you have a few more spots. You don't feel that pressure if you make a bogey early, like, geez, I should just go home, because there's 25 spots out there. It was pretty incredible, and then I had to get through a playoff there in Columbus, too.

Q. (No mic.)

JUSTIN HICKS: At sectional, the playoff? We had 11 guys for seven spots. That's really the first time you really feel the heat of everything. I was feeling it coming in, don't get me wrong. You see a lot of the guys out there coming right out of Jack's tournament: you go out to the playoff and you look around and Tom Pernice is playing and Steve Marino was playing, Rocco Mediate was playing, Dustin Johnson, Eric Axley, Chad Campbell, Jon Mills. You see these guys playing the Tour that kind of show up, and you're like, all right, well, you know, we've got to treat this just like any other thing. You're another golfer, there are other golfers, and it's not that big of a deal.

But at the same time, your mind wants to start thinking, well, geez, he played in Presidents Cup, he played Ryder Cup, he's been on Tour 20 years, a lot of this stuff kind of feeds into your head from whatever, friends or whatever, your best friends and your family is out there, isn't that that guy? Isn't that that guy? And you do your best to not think of it that way. You think of it as just they're another golfer in the field.

So -- but I played the playoff about as good as possible. I hit one of the best drives, maybe in my life, there, and I had a lob wedge into the first hole, which the first hole is like 430 or 40 yards. I'm not a bomber, by any means. I played a pretty nice shot out there and I walked up to it and I had 97 yards to the pin. And I was not last to hit by any means, either.

I hit it about 15, 16 feet and made the putt. And that was it. And Rocco hit it in there about four feet. Rocco was at the 150-yard marker and we had six guys in our group. And the other five were about anywhere from 100 yards to 105 yards. So he's like 50 yards behind us, and he just chips one up there to about four feet and gets out. He was joking around, everybody hits it long with me, and we got down there and sure enough, I thought he hit a good one, and I looked over and, wow, I don't know if he missed it or whatever. And he was still just joking around about it. But to get back to that sectional, actually. Chad Campbell played with him at Q-School years ago, and he saw me on the tee, him and his caddie, and they came over and said hi to me. And maybe it was just something like that that just made me click a little bit, just a little bit of a feeling of maybe you belong, that somebody might throw you here or there.

I just saw Chad right now, he was walking to the tee when I was getting right back in. He said, how did you finish? He said we finished three. He said, awesome, way to go. It's things like that that make you feel better about where you're going with things. For a guy like me that's not out here every day.

Q. Just for those of us who are still trying to get a fix on who you are, like you moved to Florida 11 years ago, and Tiger moved to Florida about the same time. You're leading The Open and he's led The Open, too. Are there any other similarities between you and Tiger, either on or off the course that you can think of?

JUSTIN HICKS: That's a real loaded question, there, isn't it? He's married. I'm married. He's trying to build a house in Palm Beach County, I think it's Palm Beach County, Jupiter Island, I'm not even sure. I happen to be a resident of Palm Beach County. Maybe once he gets in the area, if he's looking to play a round of golf, I can probably get him out at my place. I think I'm about ten months older than him. And I saw him a number of times growing up at junior events, "Big I," Insurance Youth Classic, is the first time I saw Tiger.

And then I saw him a couple of times in college, as well. We happened to get in a few different events where Stanford was there and I was at Michigan playing for them. So I think having grown up with him a little bit and knowing about him is a little more helpful than never having seen him and showing up and hearing about this guy that shows up with a cape on and shoots nothing and beats everybody every week.

But I honestly can't tell you if there are too many similarities there. He's from California and I'm from the Midwest, so I don't know.

RAND JERRIS: Well, Justin, thanks very much for your time. Congratulations on your fine play.