THE MEMORIAL TOURNAMENT

May 31, 2001

Jesper Parnevik

JESPER PARNEVIK: Of course, I was extremely happy with the round there, because I thought it played pretty tough out there with the wind. Of course, the golf course is in excellent shape, as always, and the greens are on the soft side after all the rain they had the last few weeks. You can get slow to the pin if you hit good shots. That's why you see fairly good scoring out there, even though it is tough to club with the wind. I started off with birdies on the first few holes and just fed off that the rest of the round.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Today I actually went back with the old trusty rubber one, STX, that I used off and on for five, six, seven years now.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yeah, that also has a thing sticking out of the back. It's the one that I used in the British Open a few times. It's the one that I go back to when I want to putt well. Then it stays there for a week and it's out of there again.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yeah, it's kind of like a tube sticking out. I don't know if it is for the weight. I guess you can use it for direction, as well.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Wow. I have hundreds.

JESPER PARNEVIK: No, but tempted to change a lot. Fast greens like you have here, I like the soft -- it has a rubber insert on it, so I like the soft feel. The ball comes off a little bit slower then you might have on a regular steel putter. I feel that I can be a little more aggressive on the putts knowing that it is not going to come off as hard.

JESPER PARNEVIK: No. I haven't played the Colonial for so many years. I didn't feel like flying back and forth for one week. Vijay likes to do stuff like that, but I took a week off. Actually, me and Sergio went to Mexico for a few days, which was planned way back.

JESPER PARNEVIK: No. We had a match down there in Mexico City. He beat me again.

JESPER PARNEVIK: It can be anything from a couple to ten.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Seven.

JESPER PARNEVIK: A few of them. It seems like -- I made my mind up last night. It was a few of them that was in, have a chance. Just have to wait for the right moment, I guess.

JESPER PARNEVIK: It's a feel thing for me. You know, I have this practice device I practice my stroke with a lot, and when it comes down to picking the putter, it is more the feel, and that could change day by day for some -- I can't figure out why. It's how it aims; how it sits when I set it down. Some putters can look really nice one day, and then I set it down the next day and it looks like it is shut or open, and I don't know if someone is fooling around with my putter. Probably it's just me.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yeah. I think I did that in the British Open last year. Not very successfully.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yeah.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yeah.

JESPER PARNEVIK: No. I still try to work on the things that he teaches. One thing that he helped me with a lot is reading greens, which just baffled me how far off both me and Vijay -- how far off we were on just reading putts. It was up to 300%, 400%, 500% off, and, you know, he just showed us, I guess, scientifically, how the correct line -- how you read the correct line, and it's very hard. There's not three, four guys in the world that read actually the correct break. It is more of a case where most players putt with feel and manipulate with pushing right-to-lefters and pulling the left-to-righters, and it is hard to get consistent that way. That's what is helping my putting a lot. I used to be not a great putter, and just by reading the greens better, it helped me to get a more consistent stroke.

JESPER PARNEVIK: They are more flashy when I go out privately. (Laughter.)

JESPER PARNEVIK: Sweden, it's impossible, of course, because I've grown up in the limelight, having my father be so famous. Over here, I'd say the last three, four, five years, even without the hat, it's pretty hard not to be recognized. I don't know if it is because I've done more and more interviews and more and more stories, magazines, without the hat on. Because in the beginning, a lot of people said, "Oh, I didn't recognize you without your hat." But that's kind of disappeared now.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yeah, I think it is going to be great for golf. I don't know why it took so long for them to actually do it. The big boom that golf is experiencing now worldwide -- and, of course, it is the Tiger-effect. I'd be lying if I said it was not. He's probably the most recognized athlete on the planet right now. I think a lot of kids are going to have fun with the trading cards. Yes, you're going to have players, they might not have known about and so on, and they get a card and they might know the player. So, of course, it is going to be good PR for the Tour and for the players. And also, they made the cards very, very nice, so it is going to be a collector's item, as well, for collectors. The authenticity of the signature you have on the card -- not every card is going to be signed, but it is going to be big hype getting a pack of cards and getting a Tiger-Woods-signed card in there. I think it is going to have the effect of being very popular. I don't think they do that in baseball. I have seen it where they have it stamped on there. But this is going to be the player's real signature if they get the card on like that.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I think that's also nice, because then, you know, if you don't happen to get one in the pack, you can walk up to a player and know that you have a signed card from the player. You know, with what's going on with EBay, and so on. These days, you get so many items that you don't really know if this person or that person had really signed it. I think there was a Tiger ball out there on Pinnacle signed by Tiger; went for a thousand bucks. And I don't think he plays too many Pinnacles (Laughter.)

JESPER PARNEVIK: I think it would be a lot more fun to sign their other cards, rather than a piece of paper or something.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I pretty much gave up on that a few years ago. Depends who it is. If you see the same face coming up to you four, five, six different times, yeah, it bothers me; or if they ask kids to come up, and you see a kid handing it over to some guy in the stands. Yeah, it's not the way it should be, but like I said, I pretty much gave up on it. I guess it's their business. I guess it's a living for them, I don't know.

JESPER PARNEVIK: In what way do you mean?

JESPER PARNEVIK: They signed, I think, close to 90 players on TOUR. So they are going to get the 90 players that you want on the trading cards. So all those players are really looking forward to having the cards out, and it's going to be -- the rookie year, though all of them are not rookies, but it is going to be the rookie collection.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Definitely. I mean, there is a big golf craze going on now because of Tiger, of course. That means that maybe something that recognized players might have to do something different to stand out, to be recognized and so on. Because, you know, some guys can be leading the tournament and you still see Tiger on the front page and all that is written is about Tiger. I don't think any of the players mind that because like I said, when you are as outstanding of an athlete as he is -- it's almost like when Jordan was big, everything written in the sports page was about Jordan. If he was doing something, he could just have a cup of coffee somewhere, they would write about it, and same thing about Tiger. In that sense, I think the players -- both have to step up and have to try to play better to challenge him, because right now, he is pretty outstanding.

JESPER PARNEVIK: A lot more, actually. I think it's close to 20.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yeah, pretty much. Sometimes when it is a new collection coming out, I try to -- like we did at the Scandinavian master last year, Lindeberg had the new collection coming out so I wore two outfits per day. I changed after nine holes and kind of did a catwalk on the fairway. For the spring collection, I did the same thing at Pebble Beach. I actually switched clothes after nine holes. They call it Jesper's Catwalk -- Fairway Walk, actually.

JESPER PARNEVIK: I have a very nice -- I don't know what you call that color now. Yeah, I have a new one this week, actually. Hopefully would use it, but I had a really, really white one that was very nice before that, but they changed to new colors this year.

JESPER PARNEVIK: The shoes are FootJoys, but they are -- they make them for me kind of the way I want them. I would like to have seen a little more -- more stylish golf shoes. I hope it is going to go in that direction. It was pretty much golf shoes looking the same for a very long time, and they were actually, I think, more stylish back in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Now they are becoming more of a tennis shoe turned into a golf shoe, which I don't fancy, but it seems like some of the other players wear.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Those players were very stylish when they played golf. If you take Hogan Snead, even Arnie when he was winning all those tournaments, they were very stylish in the clothes they were wearing. And I think they were a little more picky about what they were wearing than some players are today. You know, that was one of the things why Lindeberg wanted to get into golf, to bring back fashion and style into the golf. Because you had great personalities and great styles back in those days and you can really pretty much tell who the player was just from a distance watching someone on the fairway.

JESPER PARNEVIK: No. I don't think it is ever really going to get past that. Even if I win a few majors, still, there's going to be talk about my clothes and so on. I have a lot of really close friend that are journalists, and they call this kind of the Box Syndrome. Any time you have to write a story, you have to write about something, and pretty much, you have the same information about different players and you kind of just tend to write about that when that player is the guy you are going to write about. I don't mind.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yeah, there are some bad ones, yeah. The purple pants I wore at the British Open, I never wore again, for example. There were a few others ones that I tried once and didn't shoot a good enough score.

JESPER PARNEVIK: Yeah and no -- yes, I am, but we kind of slowed down a little bit on the vitamin side. Very tough business.