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SHELL HOUSTON OPEN

April 2, 2009

Mark Russell

HUMBLE, TEXAS

CHRIS REIMER: We want to thank you, Mark Russell, Tournament Director for the PGA TOUR for joining us here today. Mark, if you could, just start out with some comments about the conditions and the decision today.
MARK RUSSELL: I always dread coming here, talking to you folks because it's always a situation like this. I much rather have the guys out there playing golf and our staff being totally under the radar and nothing happening, but we just got ultra-strong winds today, and we couldn't keep the ball on the greens.
The greens were fast, but I think if the greens were rolling at any speed today, we'd have had a major problem. We had a wind forecast looking about 25, 35 miles an hour. We can handle that. That's basic Texas weather. But when the winds got up over 45 miles an hour, we just -- we couldn't play.
The competition was crazy. Hit your ball on some of the greens and you just blow it away.
CHRIS REIMER: Questions.

Q. Mark, who was the official out on 18 with Norman's group? Who blew the horn?
MARK RUSSELL: Bobby Ware was probably over there. Bobby Ware was in that area.

Q. Was that, at that point, was that -- was that the only place on the course that an official was ready to blow the horn? How did that all unfold?
MARK RUSSELL: When we suspended play?

Q. Right.
MARK RUSSELL: Oh, no, it was a coordinated thing. We did it all at exactly the same time to make sure that everybody quit. It wasn't a dangerous situation. It was a situation where they had the option to finish the hole if they wanted to. In a dangerous situation, lighting or something like this, they got to quit immediately.

Q. Norman's ball blew about 15 feet across the green. Did that make the decision rather easy?
MARK RUSSELL: No. We had several, several places where the ball started blowing.

Q. Did you also have -- I heard some fencing went down along the driving range?
MARK RUSSELL: I'm sure some things started blowing down. We tried -- and I was hoping that maybe we get lucky and might subside a little bit. We were all tuned in, once we started having a problem and we knew it wasn't going to get any better, we weren't going to make the players play in it.

Q. Mark, the 18th green was syringed shortly after play was suspended.
MARK RUSSELL: It's a situation where you can see the weather conditions we have out there. Tom Brown and the staff here at Redstone decided they needed to put some water on it immediately before they got burned up. With the sunlight like this and this wind and low humidity, that would happen quick with some overseed. So they took precautions, put some water out there and just trying to maintain them.

Q. Mark, how earlier before you actually stopped did you realize there might be a problem, looking at the wind conditions?
MARK RUSSELL: When our meteorologist called me and said, "We've got some winds out west about an hour and a half, blowing 45 and gusts over 50." Realized we might have a problem.

Q. Do you remember about what time he called?
MARK RUSSELL: I don't know. Let's see. We had a two-and-a-half-hour rain delay this morning, also. It was shortly -- shortly after we started playing. Once it cleared up, that's when the wind -- that's when he told us that. And we all said, "We're going to have some problems if we get 45, 50-mile an hour winds."
It doesn't matter where you're playing golf. You got wind like that, no matter what the green speeds are, you know, you're going to have problems keeping the ball on the green.

Q. How rare is this?
MARK RUSSELL: It's happened at Pebble Beach. It happened one time in Las Vegas. Hilton Head two years ago. I wasn't there.

Q. Phoenix.
MARK RUSSELL: That's right. Phoenix. It's been because of the wind.

Q. How high are the gusts? Have you heard? Did it go over 50?
MARK RUSSELL: I'm not really sure about that. I know that they were -- it was constant 35 miles an hour, and then it would blow a lot harder. I'm sure it was 45 to 50. I don't have an exact reading on that, but it was enough to, you know, stop us from playing.

Q. How will you do this?
MARK RUSSELL: We'll have to play golf from daylight to dark from here on out. The weather forecast is pretty good, and I think we can do that. It's going to be kind of crazy, really. We're going to have to start at daylight, play until dark.

Q. You called it like at 3:00. What was the -- I assume the forecast said it wasn't good?
MARK RUSSELL: We got with our guy. He said it's going to die down probably after sunset. It's still going to be blowing 30. So, you know, we thought the worse-case scenarios is put the players back out there, it happen again. We didn't want to do that.
You know, the more the wind blows, the drier it gets. So, you know, we just got in a situation where we couldn't conduct the competition properly this afternoon.

Q. So you're looking at a scenario where probably the cut comes Saturday morning, play the third round Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, and then --
MARK RUSSELL: I think we'll probably make the cut, you know -- my brain is kind of -- probably Saturday afternoon. I think we'll probably be finishing the third round Sunday morning.

Q. How does this impact your sponsors and advertising in terms of reduced daylight today and not being able to play?
MARK RUSSELL: Well, I'm sure it's not, you know, the best thing for them, but, you know, it's all we could do. I wish we could have played golf all day. We can't. Our whole goal now is make sure that we do everything we can to get a Sunday afternoon around 5:00 finish for the Shell people and Houston Golf Association and hopefully have them a winner at that time.
CHRIS REIMER: Thanks so much.

End of FastScripts

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