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CHARLES SCHWAB CUP CHAMPIONSHIP

October 27, 2005

Jerry Pate

SONOMA, CALIFORNIA

DAVE SENKO: Maybe get us started. 5 under. You had kind of a funny birdie bogeys, seven on the first nine on the front and then pretty much unblemished except for two birdies at 16 and 17 on the back side.

JERRY PATE: I missed the fairway on 6 and had a pretty good lie. And I hit not a bad shot and it hung up in the rough just right of the green and the pin was back. If you hit it like two yards past, bam, it rolls off the green, so when I pitched it, I hit it too hard and it went all the way down. That was bogey.

And then the next hole I really hit the wrong club on 7. The wind was kind of goofy. It was swirling all around. I should have hit 6. I had 175, or 177 I think is what it was. I tried to hit a little bitty 5 and pulled it. And it hung up on the left. I actually was trying to cut it and just didn't cut it. Then in hindsight I should have hit 6 there, and bogeyed that hole. Pitched it down and missed one inside of 10 feet, very makeable really. The greens are perfect.

Birdied 8 and 9. Then kind of plodded along, had putts for birdie on every hole on the back nine, I guess. Didn't make any until I got to 16. Made about a five footer, I guess. And 17, probably should have hit 9. It was 144, and again I wasn't sure what the wind was doing. I hit it about 154, so I had about a 25 footer.

DAVE SENKO: ShotLink had it 29.

JERRY PATE: Okay.

DAVE SENKO: What did you hit?

JERRY PATE: 8 iron. It was a hard putt. It was breaking about a foot left going down into the valley, and I knocked it right in. I had the confidence to make it.

And 18, I hit a big drive. I think it was 290 something. And it was getting cold at that time. And I hit 9 iron from about 130 just to the right of the hole and missed the putt.

I wasn't really excited about the round. I wasn't disappointed about some of the bogeys. I just went out and tried to play, just played one shot a time and just tried to do the best I could and get started with a good round. I think a four round tournament, it's important to get started with some confidence.

Q. (Inaudible.)

JERRY PATE: Not really. Every day is a battle. Today I got to the second hole I just murdered it on the first hole. I hit it in there and missed the putt. I got on 2, I was up first and just cranked it right down the middle. Went to get my tee, and my whole left side, right here, it's just about to kill me right now. And I made seven birdies after that.

I don't know if it hurt me or helped me. I was laying on the ground trying to stretch out my left hip. I think it's the sciatic nerve, maybe. It sounds like it. But there's always something.

Q. You had stuff obviously when you were young. Other guys don't get that until they get into their 40s and 50s. (Inaudible.)

JERRY PATE: My diagnosis, really, is that I have hypermobility in my joints, my hips and my shoulders. And my shoulder surgery problem was multi directional instability, which means that any direction you go, my shoulder was not stable. So the answer has been, No. 1, the last surgery Jim Andrews did tightened it up, No. 2, which was a surgery they just perfected in maybe the last five years, they go in and heat it, the ligaments, and melt them. They have to melt them just right. If they overmelt them, you're done.

And he shrunk my ligaments and my soft tissue up and tightened it around the head of my humerus of my joint, so I could in six months work it out to make it normal again. They go from really abnormally loose to abnormally tight and then back to neutral.

So they checked my shoulders. I went two weeks ago. I took the week off at Houston. I went down Monday and Tuesday and spent two days with him. My therapist said I won't tell you what he said, but he gave a crude description of how my shoulders had atrophied and I needed to start working out more. I worked out hard the last two weeks, and last week it has come around. I don't have any pain in my shoulders. I feel great.

The guys out here that see me working out say I work out too much, because they don't see any other guys work out that hard. And then my therapist, Jim Andrews, has guys working out with pitchers and football employees and he says I'm not working out enough. They have a lot higher standards than the guys out here on the Tour.

Every time I go back to Birmingham and work with Kevin Wolk and Jim Andrews, and my shoulders do better and my game gets better. It's going to be a battle no matter what. But I'm positive. I'm just blessed to be playing, as I've said a million times. I love it.

(Inaudible) out there this time around than the first time around, it has been a great experience seeing all the guys and trying to take a little more humble approach about it and just have fun.

Q. Did you ever see yourself coming back to play golf again (inaudible)?

JERRY PATE: No, all the media is a bunch of lowlifes, Art, and I was one of them. Freebie meals, fly first class on someone else, get drunk every night on ABC and CBS's expense with Rossi and Dave Marr. Go out to Ruth's Chris and send the bill to somebody in New York you don't know.

Q. That's the NBC people.

JERRY PATE: No, you know, I'll be honest. I think I always had great respect to the media. And I've told this to people. I think when I first came out, I really had probably an unbelievable respect, because I had a grandfather that was a tough old Irish man, and he spent three years in Washington D.C. in the '60s and he lobbied to pass flood insurance, ironically, with all the hurricanes. He was from Jacksonville, and was running Traveler's in the Jacksonville office, and they made him a deputy commissioner of the State of Florida Insurance. So he would go to Washington and represent all these insurance companies.

So he knew politics and he knew the media and he knew what he had to take. I had one letter from my grandfather. He's been dead forever, and my mother is still alive, she's 80 today. He said, "Congratulations on winning the U.S. Amateur. Be kind to the media. They can make or break your career."

That's what he said in this letter. And I found this letter, ironically, about two years ago. My wife and I were going back looking at old memorabilia from the U.S. Amateur at Ridgewood.

And he's right, I see these guys today. I heard someone say they didn't like to sit on the couch and do interviews with the Golf Channel. I heard another guy raising hell this year in Hawaii because he didn't like the little camera in the ground. I dogged him. I said, Let me tell you something. You're lucky you even have somebody to pay you to play golf, or you're lucky someone would actually show your mug on TV, with your lack of talent, this guy. He wanted to move the cameras. They were from here to the wall. I said, You have got to be kidding me. You're 55 years old. You're bitching about a camera and you're getting paid to play golf and you're here in Hawaii. That's the part about being kind to the media. I heard someone say they hated to do the interview on the couch. I said, "Good, I'll do it." It just makes you money, is all it does.

I have a different perspective of what media you guys have to go through. I've seen behind the curtains. I can't imagine being a writer and having to write every week or every day. I don't know how often you write a column, and you've got a boss that's a want to be, we had in television, that's your boss, and how he got to be your boss, who knows, he's the one that didn't have the artistic end, and you have got to please him and everybody else. It's a tough job. So being a writer and coming up with a story, to me, is tough, day in and day out. It's positive. The great thing about sports and golf is we very rarely have very many negative stories.

My wife said, "Let's watch the Price is Right." I'm so tired of watching TV. You can't watch anything on TV that's not negative, just about. I think that's the slant the media you guys are a different kind of media, but in the news media they have gotten where they're the savior of the world by telling everyone what's wrong instead of being the saviour Jesus didn't tell anybody what was wrong, he told everybody what was right.

We need to get more Christ like or Godlike, and start telling people what's right in the world. What's right with John Daly, not what's wrong with John Daly; what's right with Tiger Woods, not what's wrong. It's easy to pick apart the winners. It doesn't matter how much money we have or how many U.S. Opens you win, it doesn't mean a hill of beans.

One of my dear friends died Monday from Pensacola, George Archer, I was at his Memorial Tuesday. You're sitting there with tears in your eyes thinking, he's gone, he wasn't much older than me. He won the 68 Pensacola Open and 69 Masters.

I just moved to Pensacola in the summer of 67. George Archer with the big Ping putter. The guy is gone. I hunted behind his bird dog Bandit down in Georgia at the Southern Open. He had his dog for 10 years, a great black and white English Setter. But the guy is gone. Who cares how many tournaments you win. You just say nice things about people.

I think that's a different attitude after doing TV and being off the TOUR. Because I was pretty cold hearted. I liked to beat guys and laugh about it, I did. I had fun and played well and had a good time at it. I wasn't mean spirited. I just had fun winning, or doing well.

A lot of people didn't want you to do well and have fun. They wanted you to do well and be real humble, not sneak off behind, get in your car and leave town that week. I like to laugh and giggle about it.

Q. You mentioned the pain in your hip. I assume you want sunny, warm weather with various ailments

JERRY PATE: I kind of like it about sunny and 75 every day, kind of like Palm Springs in November, maybe 80. But you can't have everything. What's the forecast?

DAVE SENKO: Rain tomorrow and 75.

JERRY PATE: Hopefully I'll squeak by tomorrow in the rain.

Q. Is it more of an issue when you have aches and pain?

JERRY PATE: Not really. I think you get stiff, but I'll wear more clothes. I'll put on a sweater or maybe wear my rain pants if it rains tomorrow. It's that way for everybody. That's no disadvantage or advantage to me or anyone else. Lord have mercy. Again, we're out here to have fun, supposedly, and we are very competitive, we are never not going to be competitive or not try as hard as we can. The scores are irrelevant, whether we shoot 64 or 74. And I think the public would rather see us shoot 64, because these guys can really play, and 67s and 66s. At this stage in our life we should want to have fun and be leaders in the game of golf and show people what good guys we are and talk to them about the game of golf or laugh and giggle and tell them why you hit the 9 iron, not just be these robots like we used to be and some of these young guys are on the PGA Tour. They don't talk to their wife, much less their gallery. They talk to their guru, their teachers, their physical therapists, their pilot.

Q. (Inaudible)?

JERRY PATE: He's unbelievable. Have you seen that the entourage he has around? One of my better lines that I ever used. A guy once interviewed me and asked me what was the difference between going from L.A. to Doral. You remember those days, West Coast Swing and East Coast Swing.

I said, well, in it was my heyday, you took your car down and got a new set of Good Year tires and an oil change, now they get a hot suction on their jet engines. Big difference. They're traveling a little better.

DAVE SENKO: Thanks Jerry.

End of FastScripts.

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