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BMW CHAMPIONSHIP

September 13, 2009

Luke Donald

LEMONT, ILLINOIS

Q. Luke, you're out, you're in, you're out, you're in. Let's go through the round. Great start.
LUKE DONALD: Yeah, great start, and really tough pins out there. I felt like I had 17 downhill putts today. Every putt is downhill and fast and running away from me. It was playing tough out there.
I really had it in my own hands on the back nine and really didn't play too great. I made a couple bogeys, three-putted 12 and hit a pretty poor shot on 13 and missed it short on 14. Obviously it was good enough.

Q. But then you played steady coming in. You made pars, at least.
LUKE DONALD: Yeah, I had chances for birdie, and a bad shot on the last. I hit a very poor tee shot there, and to hit it on the green from where I was was pretty special and might have got me into next week.

Q. Any thoughts from missing it two years ago by the one shot here?
LUKE DONALD: Yeah, you just keep plugging away. Obviously two years ago was Money List, this year is FedEx points. Harder to understand with the FedEx points.
But in the end you just try and play hard and you try and finish as high as you can. You know, obviously I knew I needed a good finish this week to have any chance.

Q. Guys say that you never think about things other than winning the tournament. How much today were you thinking about the fact that you wanted to do that?
LUKE DONALD: I did. Obviously Tiger was seven ahead and it was his to win or lose. I wasn't thinking about winning the tournament, I was thinking about having a good solid day and hopefully move up in the rankings and make it to East Lake.
Obviously I was struggling a little bit coming in, maybe thinking about it too much. But it's good. It kind of focuses you playing for something at least. It's a different kind of pressure.

Q. The putt on 18, did you look at it maybe one more extra time than you normally would?
LUKE DONALD: Not that short one, no. I went through my same routine.

Q. I meant the long one.
LUKE DONALD: The long one, yeah, a little bit, just because it's hard to gauge if it was uphill or downhill. I thought it was pretty flat in the end, but it kind of got away from me a little bit more than I wanted to, but I fortunately made the four- or five-footer coming back.

Q. Can this be a U.S. Open course?
LUKE DONALD: It can certainly be made harder if you make the greens firm. It's going to be very hard out here. You can grow up the rough, put all the tees back, and it would be a tough test. So yeah.

Q. You'd still be around if there was an Olympics here in seven years. Would you have some interest?
LUKE DONALD: I'd love it to be here, and hopefully golf will get in the Olympics in '16, and hopefully it'll be in Chicago. That would be a double bonus for me.

Q. Any thoughts on an Olympic venue being here?
LUKE DONALD: I would love it to be at Conway. I'd feel like I have a good chance there. But we'll see. Medinah and here are probably the favorites, Olympia Fields obviously.

Q. In two weeks you're hoping to be in Atlanta. If you're not in Atlanta, where would you be?
LUKE DONALD: There's a chance I play the Vivendi Trophy, which is the old Seve Trophy, Great Britain & Ireland. I'm not sure if I'm even in that yet, either. I'm kind of on the bubble. If not, I'll wait a couple weeks and go play the Dunhill Links.

Q. Usually the knock on this course was the greens were too soft, and they're still saying that they're too soft. Did they get it right?
LUKE DONALD: It's just that if they were firm, this course would be extremely hard to play. Rees Jones designed for tournaments to keep the greens a little bit softer just so you could get close to some of these pins. These greens are very severe, almost too severe in certain places, and with firm greens you're running through them.

Q. Do you think it was a fair setup today?
LUKE DONALD: It was a fair setup. They did a decent job in moving tees up when they needed to. These pins are tough today. I mean, they were the hardest by far. As I said, it felt like you had downhill putts on every one of them.

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