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THE PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIPMay 5, 2009Geoff OgilvyPONTE VEDRA BEACH, FLORIDA JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Geoff Ogilvy, thank you for joining us here at THE PLAYERS Championship. This is your eighth trip to THE PLAYERS. Maybe some opening comments. You've got two wins this season. I know you'd kind of like to move on and get that third and this week would be a great one. GEOFF OGILVY: For certain. I don't think it's any secret this is a tournament everyone wants to win, probably the biggest tournament we play that's not a major. So yeah, it's developing a pretty good history when you play at the same place every year. It creates an atmosphere that you can't create when you move a tournament around, so it's one we all look forward to coming back to. It's a pretty tough course to play. It's a pretty tough course to master. There's a lot of courses you get to and you feel like if you do the right things you're going to do well, but this is a course that you never see anybody do well all the time. You have to do everything right, be smart around here, so hopefully I can do all that. Q. If you could describe this course in one word, what would it be and why? GEOFF OGILVY: One word? Is that enough to describe a golf course? Q. We're going to find out. GEOFF OGILVY: A positive word or a negative word? I don't know. I'll come up with one before we finish. Q. This week or today? GEOFF OGILVY: Today, hopefully. Q. Do you think this course is sort of suited to Australian players because you can't just bomb it out there, it'll run through fairways and you've got to deal a little bit about wind and fast conditions? GEOFF OGILVY: Maybe. It's also on Bermudagrass -- well, it is now, which makes it -- I mean Queensland is the only play we play on Bermudagrass in Australia so I had no idea how to approach Bermuda until I came over here and it's taken me a while to get there with Bermuda, and I've done well on it since. But it's a similar style. There's not many golf courses we play on TOUR that you have to shape it off the tee both ways. It's almost improved some of these holes because now you hit it through the fairway unless you shape it. It's almost the same thing in Australia because if you're not shaping it it runs through fairways. Like the second hole here does that. 4 you've got to hit a little sneaky fade, 5 you've got to cut it, every hole. We don't do that on TOUR anymore, have to do that. Off the tee it asks a lot similar Australian-type stuff. And the greens, they probably used to play more like Melbourne when now they are oversewn with bent or rye. Oversewn or overseeded? Q. Either. With rye, yeah. GEOFF OGILVY: Because they rolled like bentgrass green. And now, as I said, they are Bermuda. They got flattened a little bit when they changed to Bermuda. Club length is not quite as severe. Elk and Norman both won it twice, didn't they? Q. Norman once. GEOFF OGILVY: A good enough score to win it about four times in one year. So Australians, we should do well here. Anyone else won it that's Australian? Adam, yeah. So maybe. It's hard and fast is the short answer. Q. I suppose my original point was that -- do you feel that that suits the way you like to play golf? GEOFF OGILVY: I prefer it, yeah. Like last week we had a great setup. More of that sort of stuff, for sure. It's part of the reason I think it was moved to May, that and the fact that it seems to fit date-wise with where the TOUR wants the players to fit into the schedule. We used to get a lot of rain issues in March, and the rain issues should be less of an issue in May, hopefully. Q. You finished 32nd last week, which would suggest you are playing half decently. Can you assess the state of your game right now and what you might need to do better this week than last week to have a chance this week? GEOFF OGILVY: Last week I played fine, I just didn't make as many putts as you need to to shoot 11-under. Yeah, a couple more putts a day -- I mean, I hit a hole the lot of times from 15, 20 feet, and when you're winning tournaments and the good tournaments I've had this year I've made those, and last week I didn't. I wasn't putting badly, they just didn't go in. If I play like that and have a few putts go in and play smart -- on this course, as I said, you've got to play smart. It sucks you into doing stuff you probably shouldn't do sometimes, this course. Yeah, my game is fine. 32nd was fine last week for a guy who didn't make many putts. So if I can play the same and make a few, I'll be all right. Q. Pleased with your consistency through the first four months of the year? GEOFF OGILVY: Pretty much, yeah. I haven't had any horrible tournaments. Most of them have been pretty good. My putting to be fair has been really good this year, which at the end of the day, if a guy has played well for any period of time and you analyze it, he's probably been holing putts. People can go on about how well they're hitting it, and it generally comes down to the ball going in the hole when you're putting. I've hit the ball -- I haven't had any horrible periods of bad ball-striking. I've had a couple of days that weren't quite right but my putting saved me. If my whole career was like these first four months I'd be pretty content. Q. Did you think of a word yet? GEOFF OGILVY: No. It's hard to think of one that's not going to go down wrong. Q. I'm guessing as a U.S. Open champion yourself, you probably have a fond spot in your heart for that championship. But that type of golf where a winning score seems to be designed to be around par, does that appeal to you? Do you like that compared to the normal TOUR events? GEOFF OGILVY: I don't like a winning score being constructed before the tournament starts. If a golf course is set up well and it's a really hard week weather-wise and the score is even par, that's fine. If it happens to rain and there's no wind and we all make lots of birdies, that's fine. I like a golf course that's set up to find the guy who's played the best this week, and sometimes that might be over par. Birkdale last year probably had a bit too much rough, but in weather like they played, I don't know what Padraig shot, but it was over par, right? It had to have been over par. And that was fine. He was obviously the best player in the world. And then some weeks we've had 20-under par on TOUR winning on a really well set up golf course. I mean, Brian Gay separating himself at Hilton Head, that's a great situation. It's perfect. He's obviously playing -- the course setup that allows the guy who's playing the best to separate himself, that's the sort of course I like, whether that's over par or under par the score doesn't matter to me too much. Most of these U.S. Opens are par-72s, so they just knock a couple off anyway. Par is just arbitrary. It could be anything, you could set it at anything. The setup that rewards good shots and allows the players playing really well to separate themselves the players that aren't. Q. Do you think that speaks to the setup when it's bunched? GEOFF OGILVY: Mostly. Was it bunched last week? Q. Yeah. GEOFF OGILVY: Maybe no one was playing good enough to separate themselves. There's a lot of good players on TOUR. I don't know. I mean, it's fun to have a lot of guys who have a chance. It's also fun to see a guy do what Brian did at Hilton Head run away with it because he was obviously by far the best player that week. No one has ever complained about the setup at Hilton Head. Everyone is happy with it every year, weren't they, pretty much? Last week was perfect. Last week's setup was more interesting because when you hit it in the rough off the tee you didn't know what club you were going to hit for your second shot until you got there. Q. Is that also somewhat -- they set it up deliberately like that, the two-inch rough, they set it up so there would be more birdies, more roars. So in a way they were actually trying to affect the outcome of the tournament, as well, because the driving leader wasn't necessarily going to be -- although I think Sean was, but wasn't necessarily going to be the winner. GEOFF OGILVY: You want to try to affect the outcome of the tournament. You want to affect the outcome of the tournament in a positive way. You just don't -- I don't know, I just think you set up a golf course to allow the guy who has the most game that week to separate himself. And I think sometimes when you have a really constricting setup with really narrow fairways and really long rough, you don't let the super-talented guy who can hit it out of the rough or the trees, you take that shot away from him, then you just make him wedge it back to the fairway, that's taking an element of the game -- I mean, what would Seve's legacy be if he played some of these golf courses? You would never have heard of him, and that would be a shame. A lot of Tiger's best shots are recovery shots and Phil's best shots. If you take that away, they're not who they are. So I think you have to at least try to allow that to be a part of golf, which is what they've done around here the last few years and last week. Torrey Pines last year really to some degree, as well. Q. What do you think is the weakest hole out here? GEOFF OGILVY: In quality or ease of play? Q. Quality. Just curious. There's a lot of strong holes out there. GEOFF OGILVY: I don't like the tree that's getting lower and lower and lower on the 6th. That's getting lower and lower. But it's a cool kind of -- not a bad little hole, but there's too many trees in the way on 6. I'm going to say 6 is my least favorite hole. Q. You're obviously a good friend of Scottie's and he's been struggling a little bit with his swing changes. I think you played with him in a practice round last week. Can you give us your professional assessment of where you think his game is and how close he is to coming back? GEOFF OGILVY: I think he's pretty close. He's made a habit of winning tournaments after bad tournaments. He's probably had a longer bad run this year than he's really wanted to. But I mean, Scottie's best attribute is his belief doesn't go away when he plays bad. Most people have a horrible tournament and shoot 75-75. Already to completely rebuild their golf game and they think they're hopeless and they kick their bag and they whinge for two weeks about how bad they played. Scottie just laughs it off and comes back the next week and wins. That's probably his best attribute. I think he's worked pretty hard over the last couple of months, and I think golf is such a confidence game, once he sees a couple of putts go in, he'll be fine. He's playing fine. It's amazing how quickly one or two bad weeks turns into a couple bad months on TOUR. He's playing difficult tournaments, so it's hard to find form last week because it was tricky last week. He'll be all right. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he's on the leaderboard Thursday or Friday here on the weekend. If he does get on the leaderboard, he's going to stay there. Q. In a practice round did you look at him playing and say, nothing wrong with this? GEOFF OGILVY: He's not hitting it as good as he has, but as good as he has is -- at his peak, two or three years ago, he was the best ball-striker in the world, or the best ball-striker I had played with at that time. So he's not that obviously at the moment, but he's hitting it good enough and doing everything good enough to be fine once he just sees the ball go in the hole a couple times. He'll be fine. Q. Do you pay much attention to the World Rankings? It seems like there's a real race on that potentially you could even make a move from 5th and potentially become the No. 1 player in the world. Did you think we'd reach this point in the Tiger Woods era? GEOFF OGILVY: Even if someone does get to No. 1 in the world, I don't think someone is going to think they're truly the No. 1 player in the world. If I got to the No. 1 in the world winning the next three tournaments you're not going to think I'm the best player in the world. You might think I'm ranked No.1 but you're not going to think it. And neither would I. It would be nice to say you're No. 1. The reality is Tiger is the best player in the world at the moment and probably for the next -- for the foreseeable future. Every time that there's been this talk about he's vulnerable and he's not where he was, he goes and wins eight of the next 12 tournaments every time. So I don't think anyone out here is concerned that Tiger is not going to be Tiger anymore. I mean, it's nice to be in the position to make a march up the rankings if I had a really good like three or four months. It's obviously something that would be one of your lifelong goals reached if you make it to No. 1. But like I said, if I was ranked No. 1 I still probably wouldn't think of myself as the best golfer in the world because -- was he just in here? I was watching it on TV, 66 TOUR wins and 14 majors. I'd prefer that over No. 1 ranking for a while. Q. Along those lines, do you think that you as a player, do you look at him and say, oh, right, he certainly didn't have his "A" game and he finishes fourth and then didn't really play that well at Augusta and he's right there, could have won? Do you guys look at it that way as opposed to the guys that say there's something wrong he doesn't win every week? GEOFF OGILVY: That's what the best players have always done. I am sure Nicklaus throughout the course of his career had bad patches where he finished fifth. Other guys have bad patches where they finish eighth. That's why he's the best player in the world. He's got a big heart. He probably has two or three shots less in a week the way he's playing because he fights so well and he refuses to have a bad score sometimes. I don't think we look at it -- when he plays not his best and still has a good finish, I don't think we all look at it as anything other than it is. He's just a good player and he gets more out of what he takes to the golf course than any of us probably on a given day, which would be fair, I think. He never walks off -- you never walk off -- Tiger never comes off a golf course not having got as much as he could out of a day. It doesn't seem that way anyway. He might behave like he could have got more out of it, but he gets a lot out of what he takes on the golf course, and that's one of the reasons why he's the best potentially of all time. He's just good at having a good tournament when he's not playing the best. Q. Having said all that, what does it mean to you to have won a major in the Tiger Woods era? Do you suppose that it's going to be like capital letters someday when you look back on it? GEOFF OGILVY: I don't think so. Do Tom Watson's majors look better because Nicklaus was playing? I mean, does that change their majors in the Nicklaus era? Majors are majors, aren't they? I think. There's always going to be a best golfer in the world. I mean, I'm 18 months younger than Tiger, something like that, pretty privileged to play in this generation, as the guys who played with Jack probably felt privileged to play with Jack all the time in that generation. It's just nice to have won a U.S. Open. I don't think it's -- I don't know, I haven't won a U.S. Open in a non-Tiger era, so I wouldn't know. No, I think it'll be looked back at as major wins now will be looked at as major wins. If you knock off Tiger Woods down the stretch that will be looked at as a big thing, but that hasn't happened too much. So that one would go down pretty well. Q. You have a habit of winning the bigger tournaments. Is this tournament in the past been a little bit more of a struggle for you? GEOFF OGILVY: Well, I have had my ups and downs here. As I said, no one seems to have gotten this course truly worked out. I mean, even Tiger has had some -- I'm sure that was every second question that got asked of him, but this is one of the courses he hasn't worked out and played well every time he plays here. It's a tricky course. You've got to come here playing well. You've got to play smart. As I said before, it sucks you into going for stuff you probably shouldn't go for a lot of the time, which is the best thing a golf course can do. It forces you into bad decisions, always going for the 11th green when you're uncomfortable, always maybe trying to go for too much off the 16th tee and always end up hitting it in the left trees. It asks you questions, and maybe there's not a lot of times where you can come with all your game and your brain every time. You know, you've got to come with it all here, I think. That and the draw, there's been some odd draws around here because you get some nice mornings and some crazy windy afternoons, and you can get some crazy windy mornings and all of a sudden it's nice in the afternoon, so it's hard to get the right draw all the time. But it isn't a tournament I've played particularly well in, but that's not too discouraging because there's a lot of players who -- there's not a lot of players who play well here every time. It's a hard course to get it all going right, I think. I don't have one, not one that's printable. Q. You just said tricky about eight times about the course. You also said it sucks you in. GEOFF OGILVY: Sucks is probably not the word we're looking for. One word is not enough. Well, it is enough but it's not enough in here. End of FastScripts |
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