THE HONDA CLASSIC

March 6, 2002

Jesper Parnevik

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: We'd like to welcome Jesper Parnevik defending champion of the Honda Classic to the media center.

Thanks for taking a few minutes to come in.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Thank you.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: If you could, talk about getting back to defend your championship from last year, and also, you live in Jupiter; so it's not too far of a drive.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I'm going to stay at home this week, just like I did last year. I think last year's win was probably one of my -- I wouldn't say better ones. I just came off the hip surgery. My game didn't feel 100%, and the way I remember it, I think it was four or five guys that had a chance to win the tournament last year coming in and we were pretty much all tied. I think all of us, actually, bogeyed 18. If I remember right, it was me and Calc and Geoff Ogilvy.

So it was a very satisfying win that way, to come back from the hip surgery and win again that soon, because I was not really expecting to win that soon, after what I had been going through that winter.

So in that sense, it was one of my most gratifying wins, actually.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: You've got quite a streak of tournaments so far this year.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yeah, I never played this many tournaments in my life, I think. This is my 10th tournament in a row. It was just a stupid bet with my caddie a month ago where things were not going as well as we were hoping for on the West Coast, and he asked me if I was going to take a break and I said, "No, we were going to keep on playing until I win." And here I am.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Well, we're happy you're here.

Questions?

Q. What's the most you've played in a row?

JESPER PARNEVIK: I used to never play more than four tournaments, I would say. And the main reason not only is that I made a bet with my caddie, but it was also, I haven't really played the way I would like to play since my hip surgery, even though I won here last year. But my game has not felt 100%. And it does not feel like staying at home, resting would help my cause, so to speak.

It's more of a -- pretty much any player can stand on the range, beat balls and is going to feel good after a while. It's on the golf course that they really find out if it's working or not. That's when I feel right now. I've just got to play tournaments and get close to winning again and see how things work out then.

I felt very well last week. You know, apart from the penalty shot I got there. But, you know, it was the best tournament so far this year.

Q. Do you have a maximum of how many tournaments you will play in a row?

JESPER PARNEVIK: I think actually this is going to be it. Ten is quite a stretch. Actually, the way I'm playing right now, I have a good chance of winning this week. So hopefully it works out that way.

Q. Are you tired?

JESPER PARNEVIK: Actually, no, because I'm playing a lot better now. It's very, very tiring to play ten weeks in a row playing badly, because anyone who plays golf knows it's such a frustrating game. And my game feels like it's on the right path and is turning around. With some good breaks last week, I felt like I would have had a good chance to be up there.

You know, golf, I mean, I've said this before, but the difference between winning and finishing 30th is minuscule. I mean, you cannot even measure how small of a difference it is. It's just a 6-footer, a 3-footer, a ball in the rough, and you are talking 10, 15 shots in the tournament. That's pretty much the whole difference there.

Q. With Doral and Honda Classic and Bay Hill in Orlando, is it difficult for a lot of golfers to actually make a decision as to what tournament to actually play in?

JESPER PARNEVIK: I think so. Coming from the West Coast, it's always been a challenge for players to come over here and deal with jet lag and so on and start the Florida swing.

But for me, it's a pretty easy decision what to play. I live, like I said, about 45, 50 minutes from here, so this one is a given. And I have always enjoyed Doral.

The main problem I would say is the match-play event, or at La Costa, I think that has hurt Doral a little bit in the past, having a huge tournament, some guys will take this and Doral and Honda off and start off on Bay Hill and TPC again.

So a lot of it is just timing for players on how they feel and how they make their schedule.

Q. Can you talk about the hip surgery? How is it now and how has it affect your game?

JESPER PARNEVIK: It's 100% now. It's just that I played for so many months in severe pain that I think I started working the swing around my pain. I actually got into some bad swing habits and so on.

Of course, anyone, when you play for a living, when you're out there on the course, most players don't care how you do it; you just want to hit the fairway somehow, get on the green and make the putts. If you cannot do one move or so on, you're going to work around it. It took me, actually, quite a while to start getting back to where I was.

I actually saw some interesting tape last week down at Jim MacLain's. I just went over to his golf studio there, because he always keeps tape of all of the players that play in Doral, from probably ten years back and he has showed me tape from before the hip surgery, or before I started getting injured, and it was actually quite a big difference, how I swung that year being injured and how I swung before. I think that helped a lot last week for me to come back to where I want to be. Just to see it on video that clearly, what the difference is.

Q. As simply as possible, what did you see?

JESPER PARNEVIK: My setup was different. I was much more tilted in the shoulder. I was leaning back a lot more, to pretty much take the load off the left hip at setup so I was pretty much more on the right side and that made me hang back a little bit at impact.

I started hitting a shot I never have before, and that was the right-right shot. I think that's pretty much where that came from, being so much behind the ball or tilted behind the ball in the setup. And just to see it on video was pretty a amazing, actually, because -- I think Hal Sutton had the same experience last week. He came in there and watched some old tape and his setup was completely different, and he thought he was as well, and he just looked back a few years ago when he played really well. And he had a fairly good week last week because he had been struggling this year, as well.

Q. Did that help you last week?

JESPER PARNEVIK: I think so, yeah.

Q. Looking forward to next year, this tournament is moving to another course. Will that affect your decision on coming back here, or how do you feel about that?

JESPER PARNEVIK: Definitely not. It will make my decision very easy because it's only ten minutes from my house next year. So I will definitely be there, yeah.

Q. You're into yoga; right? Has that helped you?

JESPER PARNEVIK: I was into yoga a lot more before the hip surgery. As you know, yoga is a lot of stretching exercises and I want to keep my hips as tight as possible. Because when you have that kind of injury, it's usually because the hip joint is too loose. So you want to stiffen up the muscles around it; so you want to build up the muscles and keep it very tight to protect the hip.

So the yoga moves I did a few years ago I'm not doing right now. I'm doing different type of moves instead.

Q. You were involved in that rules situation last week in Doral, and you said at the time you thought the rule was unfair. And of course last year in this tournament, we had an unusual rule situation with Brian Gay waiting for the putt to drop. Are there any other rules that you would like to see changed?

JESPER PARNEVIK: Well, there are a lot of rules that, I would see -- put it this way, most rules make sense. You just use common sense and you know what is a penalty or not and so on.

The rule last week, I was not so much surprised that I was penalized because I actually did drop the ball on it. But the way he explained it was that you could actually go down to replace your ball, and it doesn't matter if you are, you know, a tenth of an inch or just at the ball and you let go of the ball, it's a shot penalty.

And it's not like anyone is trying to cheat or take advantage of anything. You just, you know, you just let go that much too early.

Another thing might be maybe the keeping score. I think it doesn't make sense anymore because pretty much everybody in the whole world knows what score we are shooting. We have two scorers with us. We have, you know, TV. We turn in the score on every hole. Even though it's very, very rare that someone signs a wrong scorecard or forgets to sign the card, it's just not really necessary anymore.

I know Padraig Harrington had a strange thing, I don't remember if it was last year, where he was actually leading the tournament by five shots, and the only way he found out was that the guy in the clubhouse wanted to put up a plaque of all of his scorecards and he took out his first scorecard and saw that he had never signed it.

It's not like anyone -- I think the days are past when anyone is trying to cheat or manipulate the score or anything like that, especially now when it's so official. Everybody knows what we are shooting. So that's probably the one thing that could change one day, I think.

Q. On that line, if you were the czar of golf, could make your own rules, is there anything you would like to put into golf?

JESPER PARNEVIK: Extra rules?

Q. Or just ideas to make the game more exciting?

JESPER PARNEVIK: Like attacking people and stuff? (Laughter.)

No. I think golf, I always feel like golf is probably the best game ever invented when it comes to sports. I think it's the toughest game and it really tests every skill from mental skills to focus to, you know, mechanics and everything.

In that sense, I don't think we have to change much in golf to make it more exciting. I think it's a very exciting game -- it is for the players, anyway. Sometimes you can have a tournament where not much is going on, maybe for the viewer, but the inner battle is always going on.

Q. The Sticky Golf putter, where is that now? Have you been using it?

JESPER PARNEVIK: I've been using it all year. But I'm not going to use it this week. I thought it was unfair to all of my other putters, because I never used a putter for one year. So I thought it was unfair to use this one more faking the one-year anniversary, so I'm actually going to take it out this week.

Q. What are you picking up?

JESPER PARNEVIK: It's another find that I found from the back of my garage. It was actually a putter that a Pro-Am player gave it to me last year at an outing. I just tried it on one hole and I thought it looked great and he said, "Why don't you have it," and it ended up in a closet somewhere. I just saw it, brought it out.

Q. Was that here?

JESPER PARNEVIK: No. It was somewhere else, yeah.

Q. What kind of putter is it?

JESPER PARNEVIK: Actually, I don't know. It's very old -- actually it's longer than any other putter than I've ever had as well.

Q. Is it a mallet?

JESPER PARNEVIK: It's pretty much a blade putter.

Q. How many putters do you have?

JESPER PARNEVIK: Oh, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. I don't know, actually. A lot.

Actually, the funny thing is that a few of the tournaments I have won, I've picked the putter just sitting collecting dust in the garage somewhere and I just look at it and bring it to the tournament and I win. I did the same thing at Byron Nelson, just a putter that was sitting in the back of a corner, and I just took it out before we went to the airplane and won the tournament.

Last year, same thing here. I got a new putter the night before, and hopefully this one will do the same magic for me.

Q. It sounds like you ought to be changing putters every week?

JESPER PARNEVIK: I usually do. But, you know, the theory doesn't work all the time.

Q. Last year, you never met the guy with the Sticky Golf. Has that happened to you a lot?

JESPER PARNEVIK: Oh, yeah, I'm like a magnet to people who want me to try different stuff. Anything from putters to -- actually last week was a funny thing.

After the penalty incident, a guy came up to me on the last round from the crowd and he had a dime that he torched a golf spike onto; so it will stick in the ground for me in the future. So I thought that was pretty inventive.

Q. Are you using it?

JESPER PARNEVIK: I have it, yeah. I've got it in the bag now, so it could go in tomorrow, yeah.

Q. Anything else unusual like that in the past?

JESPER PARNEVIK: Oh, it's so many things. Everybody, it seem like pretty much they have an invention they want me to tryout. The list is too wide to -- I couldn't even remember most of the stuff.

Some things are actually pretty good, and some are not very good at all.

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