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NAVISTAR LPGA CLASSIC PRESENTED BY MAXXFORCE

September 24, 2008

Maria Hjorth

PRATTVILLE, ALABAMA

MIKE SCANLAN: Maria, you're the defending champ this week. Got your third career four top 10s this year. Over 500,000 in earnings. So you're having a pretty good year. If you would, just talk about being back here.
MARIA HJORTH: Yeah. It's always great to be back and being able to defend the title. It's a great feeling. I have a lot of positive memories, of course, coming back to a course where you played really well, and got the victory in the end.
So it's a lot of fun, and the course is in great shape this year. Especially the greens are really, really smooth and nice. So it should be a good week. The weather is supposed to be good all week. So looking forward to it.
MIKE SCANLAN: Questions?

Q. How confident are you?
MARIA HJORTH: Yeah. I played yesterday, and I mean the course is nice. The fairways are still a little bit wet, but it's natural with the warm weather we're going to have this week, so you have to kind of soften up a little bit, so it doesn't get burned out on Sunday.
But I think the course is really nice. It's playing similar, I think, to last year. A little bit more wind, at least today. I don't know what it's going to be like for the rest of the week, which will, of course, make it a lot tougher.
The greens seems to be really, really nice this year. They're great surface, and really nice pace to the greens; and I'm sure by Saturday, Sunday they will firm up a little bit and play a little faster.

Q. (Inaudible. No microphone). (Question about hole #17.)
MARIA HJORTH: Yeah. You can play it really tough if you want to, but also you can hit a solid drive, kind of out a little more to the right and then lay it up and hit your third shot in. So you can play it a little bit of both.
You can play it a little bit kind of easier, maybe not put too much pressure on yourself and playing it as a three-shot. It's down wind and if you can get your drive off well, you can definitely hold a chance at it.
But it's a great par 5, I think, because it's a chance-reward hole. You can take a chance and go for it in two and have a really great chance for birdie. But you can also play a little bit smarter maybe and hit it for three and still have a chance for birdie.
So I think it's a great hole, and it's always fun to have par 5s towards the end of the round because there's so much that can happen.

Q. What makes Robert Trent Jones different? (Sound inaudible).
MARIA HJORTH: Well, I think they definitely know how to run professional events. It's a great facility. The practice facilities here are really, really good. Great clubhouse with very good food. You get into the food area, which is not always the case, which helps out and it's always nice.
You know, the course is in very good shape, so I think just everything around it. You feel very comfortable and very welcome here, and that's a great plus.

Q. Alabama's reputation for weather is known as being somewhat difficult...(inaudible).
MARIA HJORTH: Yeah. We played Mobile a few weeks ago, and that was just horrible. It was 95 percent humidity and 90 degrees or whatever it was. And it was a difficult course, so that was really, really tough. So today it's really nice. The weather is perfect. You can't ask much more as a golfer.

Q. (Question inaudible).
MARIA HJORTH: Of course. Our tour is progressing. We have a lot of new young players coming up from around the world, and of course, we have Lorena here, which is ranked No. 1 in the world; and she's always the one you have to, of course, look for in the back because she's always going to be there.
Cristie Kerr has had a great year and recently had a win. There's so many great players here, so you know you really have to play well and perform well to be able to beat everybody. Every week we come out, there's always new girls popping out that are going to have a good week. And a lot of good rookies, so there's so many you have to look for.
I just have to try to focus on my game and what I can do, and hopefully that's good enough.

Q. Do you feel any pressure out there being the defending champion?
MARIA HJORTH: No. I don't feel pressure. I think it's important for myself not to put pressure on me. Whether the others put pressure on me, I don't really know, but as long as I don't put pressure on myself, I'm looking forward to defending.
MIKE SCANLAN: Maria, thanks so much for coming in and good luck this week.
MARIA HJORTH: Okay. Thanks so much.

End of FastScripts

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