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RBC CANADIAN OPEN

July 23, 2008

Stephen Ames

OAKVILLE, ONTARIO

NELSON SILVERIO: Stephen Ames, thanks for spending a few minutes with us here in the media center, trekking through that rain. Why don't you just get us started talking about your year so far. I know you're coming off a Top 10 finish at the British. Give us some thoughts on the year.
STEPHEN AMES: It's been good and solid at times, up and down at other times, but I think overall it's -- 14 or 15 events, I've lost count, and I'm quite happy the way I'm in right now, and halfway through -- yeah, more than halfway through my season.
So at this stage I've played well in the events that I needed to play well in, which is good.

Q. What's this weather going to do to this weekend? You can hear it hitting the roof right now.
STEPHEN AMES: Well, I played 14 holes -- well, 13 and a half holes this morning. The golf course is pretty wet, unfortunately, and this is really going to make it even worse now. I know for a fact that it wasn't even ready to play in the Pro-Am, but the 12th green, the bunkers in front of the green, they were still under water.
Unfortunately the greens staff have a lot of work to do to get this ready for tomorrow. Hopefully they'll be able to do it if it stops sometime to be able to do it. If this continues all night, I don't think we'll be playing tomorrow at 7:30, that's for sure, because the golf course will still be under water.

Q. I know that there's a lot of fans that are hoping for a Canadian victor this year. Mike Weir was in here before you and he said if he doesn't win it, he hopes another Canadian does. He named you as one of the hopefuls possibly. Do you share that same mentality? Are you hoping for a Canadian winner as well this year?
STEPHEN AMES: Of course, yeah. Big golfing industry news, Canadian wins their own national Open, yeah. We have 19 players playing this year, and everybody has an opportunity of winning. We're all good enough to be out here, obviously, if we're playing in the event. So I think overall it just gives us more opportunity of one of us hopefully to win it.

Q. It seems no matter how good your numbers are, Weir always seems to be kind of the fan darling in this country. Do you ever feel slighted by that at all, or do you have any kind of a healthy competition with him going at all?
STEPHEN AMES: Healthy, no, I don't have any healthy competition, no. We're there, we're individuals, we're waiting for -- we're always willing our best for the Canadian folks to play well to give back to the country in a sense for the juniors, and whoever plays well, we're all congratulating one another. At this stage, no, always wanting for either one of us to play well and supporting one another.

Q. Just a question about Royal Birkdale and coming back here. How have you had to adjust your game from there to here for this week?
STEPHEN AMES: Well, I think it's a little obvious watching it on television. I've gone from a 10-foot-high ball flight to a 120-foot-high ball flight. Ball flight is the biggest thing obviously that we had to change.
Other than that, the golf swing is the same, it's just your ball position more or less than anything else that I've changed. And of course now with this rain, it's going to be a little bit different, too, how you play it. You can be a little bit more attacking in a sense here now because the ball is not going to run and release, while at Birkdale you were playing for the bump-and-run and running it up the green rather than bouncing it on the green and holding it. Different golf course, more or less, altogether.

Q. Obviously the rain will slow things down in the fairway. Is there any concern about the length the course might play if it's wet?
STEPHEN AMES: Yeah, it would be a little bit longer overall, but I think at the same time you miss the fairway, you're going to get penalized hard because the rough is very thick. I know they haven't been able to cut it for a couple days, and by the looks of things, they probably won't cut it for the rest of the week. So I think overall the guy who puts the ball in play and puts it on the green and makes the putts is going to be the one who wins at the end of the week.

Q. I have a lifestyle question. I understand you're going to be getting involved with Wolf Blass out west. Can you tell me a little bit about that promotion? And I understand that's one of your favorite wines. Is there a particular one you like?
STEPHEN AMES: Actually most of the Wolf Blass wines I do drink at home. It's my wife's favorite. She drinks that most of the time. The association is a -- a lot of the association actually goes back to the foundation, the Stephen Ames Foundation, and that's where the money is raised in itself, so it goes to the foundation, the money that comes from the sales.
And then we have a package deal that involves buying a Wolf Blass. It's a competition you get involved with and do an outing and a golf day with you at Silver Tip in Canmore at the end of the year.
The money for the foundation is used for junior golf in Canada and in Trinidad itself. I do a lot of buying equipment, preferably Nike, and then I run a Stephen Ames Cup, which involves ten juniors from throughout Canada and Trinidad and Tobago, and we have a Ryder Cup system that we play, age groups between 13 and 21, girls and boys, and this year we're going home to Trinidad.
For me it's a Ryder Cup system. The kids have a lot of fun when they come home. We go down to the beach twice -- during the week we go there twice. Then on Saturday after the event then I rent a house and a 60-foot boat and we go down to the islands where they have a couple islands broken off from Trinidad. It's like the Cottage here in Muskoka. You drive to the Cottage, you go hang out at the ocean. In this case it's on the ocean, and the kids have a blast. We have a barbecue out there, and it's a lot of fun. It's an all-day affair, which is great.

Q. I was wondering if last week at the British if the pros were talking at all about how they were feeling about Greg Norman's game and what was going on there. Were you guys sticking to your own game? Were you guys talking about Greg?
STEPHEN AMES: We were all talking about it. I think overall I think we were probably considering the fact that if he had won the British Open, it probably would have been the biggest sports thing ever, obviously, after the fact of Tiger becoming a pro. Him winning it at 53 would have been phenomenal. Hats off to him. He's always had a great game, so it would have been great if he had won.

Q. We're always talking about the game for juniors. It would have been great for seniors at that point, too, right?
STEPHEN AMES: If you look at it that way, yeah, it would have been great for guys getting on in age.

Q. The media who are based in and around Ontario are familiar with the junior golf events you do here. I wonder if you could talk about some of the stuff you do in Calgary and maybe how many days or weeks does that take out of your year?
STEPHEN AMES: A lot of the events that I do in Calgary are actually based through the companies that I'm associated with in Calgary. And if I do an outing, one of them is actually with Jim Peplinski, ex-Flames player, and we do an outing there, one in Calgary, and also there's one that we do here in Toronto, as well. Those are the kind of things that I do.
Children's hospital, we do a lot of donations towards that, as well. I give up days where I go play golf with a couple of guys who have donated. This year I think we raised $28,000 for Children's Hospital. We're going out to Coeur d'Alene to play and then flying back that afternoon.
For the junior part of it, anytime that I am in town, I do a lot of the stuff with the juniors at each club to some extent where I'll stop off, do a clinic for them and then have a couple of kids hit balls with me.

Q. The player-teacher dynamic is always an interesting one. It's one of those ones that there's two individuals, they're trying to get on the same page on a number of different levels. When you look at what you and Mr. Foley have been able to accomplish together, why do you guys jell so well together? I'm not talking about anything fundamental or anything like that, but just as two guys.
STEPHEN AMES: Probably because we're honest, open and frank. We speak our minds. We say it how we see it. And that's always been a good thing with us. I mean, when I ask what do you think of my golf swing, what do I need to work on, he says, these are the things that we need to change, and off you go and start working with it.
There are other teachers that look at it and go, well, your backswing is fine, your rhythm is great. They won't say that your position at the top of your golf swing is completely closed and we need to change that because he's worried about the fact that he might lose his job, in that sense.
That's how caddies are themselves, too. Do you think it's a 5-iron or a 6-iron? Well, I think it's a 6. Okay, I think it's a 6, too. You don't want that. You want a person to be honest with you and tell you, look, I don't think it's a 6, it's not enough, I think it's a 5. You get his opinion, you work it out from there. You're making the last decision.
You've got to realize that everything that he gives you a reason for why you're doing this and doing that, I'm asking him why. Very few players do that. They're just, why am I doing this? Well, because you do this a certain way and this causes this and you see it in the divot and all that sort of stuff.
I'm a student of the swing itself, and I want to know why certain things are being done in my golf swing, and every week he comes up with -- he doesn't come up with certain things, I come up with certain things. He looks at me and goes, "When did you figure that out?" When I'm home sitting on the couch, because I've been thinking about it.
I think that's probably the relationship that we have is me being a student of the golf swing, I understand it a lot better than most players do, why certain things work a certain way in my swing and not others, and in that sense he has a wonderful way of explaining to me how the body is supposed to do it and why it does it this way and the same with the club head and all that.

Q. (Inaudible.)
STEPHEN AMES: Yeah, but I want to have an opinion on what I think is right and what's wrong. I'm not going to come up to you and tell you that I don't think you're writing your articles correctly because I don't know how to write articles. I'm going to go -- I'm not going to do the same to Sean and say, look, I don't know how to swing the golf club, because I didn't see it. What I saw is the golf ball and the golf ball went left. Why did it go left? I didn't see my golf swing. You know what I'm saying in that sense? He saw it, he explains to me why it went left, and in that case I have to believe in the fact why it went left is because of this fault, and that's why it becomes that way more than anything else. I'm playing golf, I don't want to play golf swing. Make sense?

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