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FRYS.COM OPEN

October 23, 2008

Arron Oberholser

SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA

JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: Thank you, Arron, for joining us for a few minutes here in the media center at the FRYS.com Open. Nice start to the week, 65.
ARRON OBERHOLSER: Thank you.
JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: Close to home, sleeping in your own bed. Must be nice.
ARRON OBERHOLSER: Yeah, it's nice, always.
JOAN v.T. ALEXANDER: Talk about today's round and I know you haven't played much due to an injury to your --
ARRON OBERHOLSER: Left hand.
Um, today's round was great. You know, sometimes I think as we all know, confidence can be fleeting at best, and it can go from having no confidence to having -- one good round can give you some great confidence. I don't know if this is going to give me great confidence, but it's definitely building in that direction. Like today, it just shows me that I can take some time off and have two surgeries within nine months and still play at a high level.
And it shows me that the surgeries went very well, because I've had zero pain and no issues.

Q. Can you take us through the whole timeline on the surgeries?
ARRON OBERHOLSER: Sure, yeah. The first surgery was October 30th last year, a gentleman in this neck of the woods did the surgery. Unfortunately that gentleman didn't do the best job, so I had to have a second surgery because he missed some things in there. I tried to play through the Masters. I went to another doctor in Baltimore. He found what the problem was. He then -- he tried to fix it with just a cortisone shot. You always want to go the conservative route. It didn't work.
Finally after Tiger's tournament I couldn't take it anymore, and I just said, hey -- I called him the very next day and said, schedule me for surgery ASAP. I went in July 22nd, had the surgery. He removed bone spurs, the remaining bone spurs, and repaired some cartilage, some minor, minor cartilage damage, cleaned it up around the wrist, and it feels very, very good right now. It feels like I never did anything to it, to be honest with you.

Q. When did you start swinging a club again, playing?
ARRON OBERHOLSER: He did such a good job that I started swinging a golf club probably too early, but I started three and a half weeks after the surgery. I started chipping and hitting some -- I was putting a week and a half after the surgery. As soon as the bandages came out I started putting.
I started chipping probably three weeks -- I started hitting full golf shots in probably four or five weeks and then I kind of went a little overboard, got some tendinitis, got that worked out, so everything has been fixed now. I'm ready to go, just need to keep playing and build some golf strength, as they say.

Q. So was it difficult? You were not playing on the TOUR for about three months or so?
ARRON OBERHOLSER: Yeah, well, I've been a part-time player all year because of this hand. But was it difficult? No, actually not, because I was in so much pain before the second surgery that playing was no fun because it wasn't me. I was altering my golf swing because of it, I was doing a lot of things that I shouldn't have been doing, and it was leading to some really bad habits.
So when a doctor told me that it was finally -- he said finally, hey, look, this isn't going to work, we need to do surgery, honestly, that was like a relief because I couldn't have gone on the way it was because I knew something wasn't right.

Q. So when you came back last week to play, were you tentative at all with your swing, or did you just go for it?
ARRON OBERHOLSER: I was a little tentative -- I put it in a divot off a tee, and I was a little tentative on that shot, but I went for it. Like when I walked up to it, I was like, well, this is going to be a good test, and it was fine. No problems, zero. Everything was good.

Q. I saw that you were working with some new instructors on your swing.
ARRON OBERHOLSER: Yeah, uh-huh.

Q. How is that working out for you? If the scoreboard is any indication....
ARRON OBERHOLSER: It's working all right. I'm getting back to what I used to do in high school and college when I really hit the ball well. I rarely missed the center of the club face in high school and college. It was more about more of an attitude problem that I had back then as a young kid than it was actual talent problems.
But it was -- it's nice. These guys, they really know what they're talking about. For the longest time, to get technical for a minute, because of this injury, my shaft at impact was actually behind the ball because I didn't want to lead into the shot with my left hand because it was a little painful. So it's been good now with the changes. I'm going to keep plugging along. It seems to be working.

Q. I'm guessing you'd be grateful that they have these tournaments considering where you're coming back from?
ARRON OBERHOLSER: Yeah, any time you get the chance to play at home, it's fantastic. Are you talking about the Fall Series in general?

Q. I'm talking about the Fall Series and your injury recovery coming together.
ARRON OBERHOLSER: It's great, yeah. It would have been these or the Nationwide tournaments. I'm glad we have these.

Q. Where do you stand in terms of a medical exemption for next year? Have you played in too many to do that?
ARRON OBERHOLSER: No. From what I understand I have a major medical extension, which will give me the average of whatever the Top 125 played, however many events they played, minus the event I played last year, so roughly I'll have between 17 and 19 events next year to make up the difference, to make whatever the Top 125 guy made this year in money, which looks like will be around $850,000 or so.

End of FastScripts

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