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THE MEMORIAL TOURNAMENT PRESENTED BY NATIONWIDE INSURANCEJune 1, 2011Luke DonaldDUBLIN, OHIO MARK STEVENS: We'd like to welcome Luke Donald. Luke, you're going to be making your seventh start here at the Memorial, first since 2009. You had a milestone week last week. If you want to talk about your thoughts coming into the Memorial and then we'll take a few questions. LUKE DONALD: Yeah, excited to be back here. Obviously Jack's tournament is very special. I think Jack has had an influence in my career already so far, and it's nice to be back here supporting his event. Obviously coming off a great week last week. You know, all the spoils that went with winning over Lee has meant a lot, and looking forward to getting back to work. Q. How are you different on and off the course since last season? What's the biggest change you've made? LUKE DONALD: No real big changes. Just continued to work hard. I think I have a good group of people around me that are always thinking about ways for me to maximize my potential, and no real different to any other year; just things seem to have fallen into place a little bit easier for some reason. Q. Would you have thought even before the injury in '08, did you ever think about No. 1? LUKE DONALD: It's something I've never really thought about too much. You know, I think as a kid you dream about winning majors and winning tournaments, but for me, you know, I always kept an eye out on the World Rankings and had an interest in it, but I suppose for the bulk of my career Tiger was so far ahead that it never really crept into my mind. But in the last year or so, I guess there's been more of an upheaval in the rankings and there's been a lot more movement, so I knew the opportunity was there. Q. Could you just talk about the scenario and the way it played out. I can't imagine that 1 versus 2 and doing it could be any more satisfying than knocking off the No. 1 guy and taking his seat. That's kind of the way it's supposed to work in sports, right? LUKE DONALD: Absolutely. You know, to be honest, I would have loved to have won by 10 and not had to go through all that stress. You know, I didn't have my best golf last week. I had my best golf on round 1. I struggled quite a bit on round 3. I played decently the other two days. But you know, I think that's what was more satisfying to me than anything else, that even without really feeling totally in control of my game, I was able to get it done. And obviously to do it in that circumstance going head-to-head with Lee and to have everything on the line made it that much more special. Q. I know we've asked you a thousand times about becoming No. 1 over the last few weeks. Was it a distraction at any point? LUKE DONALD: Yeah, media can be a distraction. It's certainly at the back of the mind. As I said, I tried not to focus on it too much. I knew if it did ever come to fruition that it would be very special. But again, it wasn't at the top of my list of things to accomplish. It wasn't a goal of mine certainly at the start of the year or in the last few months. I think, as I said, I've got a good team around me that focuses on making sure that I can become as good as I can be, and whether that was No. 1 or No. 10, it didn't matter. Just had to keep working hard. Q. Jack Nicklaus's press conference yesterday he made the comment that he had seen you practicing very hard down there at the Bear's Club and working on your short game and really striving to become No. 1. To get an endorsement from a man like that, does it really strike home the enormity of what you've achieved? LUKE DONALD: Absolutely. I've read a few -- a few of my peers have been very gracious in their comments, and that's very endearing, and it means a lot for sure, especially from probably the greatest golfer ever to live, Jack Nicklaus. I'm very fortunate; he opened up the Bear's Club to me a few years ago, and I've worked very hard down there. They have such great facilities that I feel guilty if I don't work hard. It's a nice place to go practice. Yeah, I pride myself on -- I am working hard, and it's nice to see it paying off. Q. Do you ever see Jack hit balls down there? LUKE DONALD: Not very often, no. He's about once a month. I think he spends a lot of time on the tennis courts. Q. You mentioned growing up dreaming of winning majors rather than No. 1. How do you assess yourself at Congressional in a couple weeks? Does the Open seem like an unlikely one for you to break through at, or does it make a difference? LUKE DONALD: I've always said if you're playing well, you can win any tournament. It doesn't really matter the circumstances. I'm obviously on a big high confidence-wise. I need to in the next couple weeks look a little bit more at my swing. I wasn't very happy the way I played in that third round at Wentworth. My swing got a little bit off kilter, and that's just a product of playing a lot. It's very hard to keep practicing and working on the right things when you're playing a lot of tournaments. I have to work on that. I will need to play more like I did on the Thursday of Wentworth if I'm going to have a chance to win. But certainly my plan is to go play there next week at Congressional. I haven't played it for a number of years. I played a U.S. Open qualifier a long time ago when I wasn't even exempt for the U.S. Open. Looking forward to going back there, and obviously I'll be high on confidence, so hopefully that will push me a long way. Q. Do you remember when that was? LUKE DONALD: '03, '04 maybe. '03, I guess. I did qualify, though. Q. Along those lines in regards to the Open, every year a lot is made about the winning score being close to par. When you go into the Open, the U.S. Open, like that, do you have a mindset that you have to shoot par, that that's going to be enough, or does par even factor into your mind going into a tournament like that? LUKE DONALD: The mindset is that it's going to be tough. It's going to be a grind. You've got to keep -- I don't know, keep your head down and just grind it out sometimes. It's going to be a tough challenge, and you're going to have some adversity out there, and you've got to deal with it and hopefully take your chances when you get them. Q. To touch on a couple things, could you sort of talk about your work with the rugby guy who doesn't really have much of an identity, I guess, in the States because it's obviously not a sport that's played over here and how that's helped you? And secondly, I haven't looked at your stats lately, but it seems like you're keeping the ball in play a little bit more off the tee this year. You've always made putts and you've always had the short game, and it seems like being in the fairway more often has been a big pick you up. LUKE DONALD: Yeah, first question, Dave Allred, I started working with him at the beginning of last season, and he's really, yeah, just another set of eyes and ears to look at the way I practice. His big thing is working up drills and stuff where I can practice under pressure, so it's a little bit more meaningful, I guess, rather than just standing up there and whacking balls all day long. You know, that's part of his deal. Obviously the performance diary is another one of his ideas, where you're setting yourself goals, making yourself a little bit more accountable, that kind of stuff. But again, he's just another one part of the puzzle. I have a great group of people around me. The second part, yeah, I've certainly -- at the beginning of the year the focus was to get my percentages up, getting it more in the fairway, hitting more greens. I think the last few years -- I've said this before, I think I got it to a point where I was trying to hit the ball too hard. My swing got to a place I didn't really like, and it was affecting me quite heavily off the tee. I wasn't -- for as far as I hit a ball, I needed to hit more fairways than I did. That long off-season I had, I spent quite a bit of time working on things that's definitely resulted in me hitting more fairways, and because of that I'm hitting more greens, so that's been helping my scoring. Q. Can you give us an example of a putting drill and the significance to it? LUKE DONALD: Not specifically putting drills. Not really putting. Most of the short game is through Pat. I'm trying to think now. Mostly when I'm hitting balls, I'll spend more -- well, I might hit five shots where I'm working on specific swing things and then I suddenly have to hit one ball where I actually have to pick out a shot and just play it as if I was on the course. That might be one. A lot of the short game stuff like chipping into six-feet diameter circles and just taking note how many it takes me to get five shots in, just simple things, really. But I'm always kind of taking notes and trying to better them when I go out and practice. Q. If you're called upon to hit the one specific shot on the course and you miss it, what's the punishment? LUKE DONALD: (Laughing.) No punishment. Q. What do you write in the performance diary after last week, assuming it is actually writing something down physically on a piece of paper? LUKE DONALD: I write something every day, yeah, just some goals and accomplishments. I have given out a few in the past, but I'd prefer to keep it more to myself. It means more that way. Q. Obviously golfers at this level work on chipping and putting a lot, but Jack was saying yesterday that you practically wear out the practice green over at Bear's Club. I'm wondering, do you work on chipping and putting more than your peers? LUKE DONALD: I have no idea. I don't really watch them practice. You know, in the last few years I've felt like I had to become very proficient around the greens and on the greens. My ball-striking hasn't been where I wanted it to be, so I had to make up for it in other places. There's no real substitute for having a good short game. It can get you a long way. Q. You keep talking about your team. Do you have an estimate of how big that team is in terms of numbers? There seems to be two different philosophies, some guys kind of like to go alone. How long have you had sort of a team idea? LUKE DONALD: Well, my coach has been with me for 14 years, Pat Goss, since college. We recently brought on -- the team has evolved a little bit. I recently brought on Dave Allred last year. Since my wrist injury I've worked with two physios, one that I parted ways with last year and now I'm with a group of guys called Back9Fitness, Craig Knight and Ben Shear, they work on my fitness, and my caddie John. That's it, really. That's my team. And my family, I suppose. Q. You're obviously doing quite well on both tours. That's not an easy thing to do, though. Could you just talk about the challenges of playing both and maybe what's the biggest stumbling block to doing that? LUKE DONALD: It is tough. It's very -- it's almost impossible to spread yourself 50 percent evenly across both tours. You have to pick one over the other. I play a little bit more over here on the U.S. Tour. This is kind of the place where I was very successful in college. I thought it kind of suited my game, so when I got my Tour card here, I decided to concentrate my golf on the U.S. Tour. But you know, unless you're playing at a very high level, which I obviously have this year, it's hard to make some headway on the Race to Dubai and then the FedExCup. Unless you're really being very proficient at the majors and the world events, it can be tough. You know, I'd probably play a couple more events than I'd like to because of the limit -- because of the maximum number of events I have to play, and it's a little bit more tiring physically. That travel is not easy, jetting around different time zones and all that kind of stuff. It's not easy to do, but I think there's a lot of reward from visiting new places and traveling around the world. I've always wanted to play against the best players in the world, and whether that's here or the UK or South Africa or wherever it might be, I'm happy to travel. Q. You talked about having the grind-it-out mentality like a U.S. Open. You proved that with your match play success the past couple years. Is it the same kind of put your head down, grind it out, match play things you translate to an event like the Open? LUKE DONALD: A little bit. It's just more the -- it's more myself, just not wanting to give up and give in and let a couple bogeys or a double bogey throw me off. It's just more that determination to try and get it back and do my best on every hole, really. That's as simple as it gets. Q. At the end of a golfer's career, what looks better on a CV, one major or having been No. 1 in the world, and can you talk about what you see as the differences in the two feats? LUKE DONALD: I would love to win a major, obviously. I think you can look at it different ways. You can ask someone who probably hasn't had a great career but has won a major. I'm not sure if you'd ask them, there might be a different answer. But I would love to finish my career winning a major. If I don't, it won't be the end of the world. I know I tried my best. Q. What's the difference between the two? LUKE DONALD: I think No. 1 is -- being ranked No. 1 is self-satisfactory in terms of you feel good about what you've done. Winning a major makes you seem more accepted as a great player from your peers. Does that make sense? I guess, I don't know, I haven't really thought about it too much. I'm making it up. (Laughter.) Q. Do you feel like you're No. 1 in the world? LUKE DONALD: I do. I do. I think the way that the World Rankings are, consistency is very -- is highly weighted. If you can keep playing well week in and week out, keep earning those points, then you're going to climb in the World Rankings, and I don't think there's anybody been more consistent in the last nine months than me. Q. You talked about the time after your wrist where you had time to reflect on your game and you realized you were trying to do some things you didn't want to do and you tried to change that, and then I think the second round of Northern Trust is another time where I think you beat yourself up a little after that round, and from then on you've pretty much been on that run. Do you have to think through things a lot to get to another point, or how do you approach it when you're trying to make changes or moves? LUKE DONALD: I suppose when I'm trying to make changes, not to get ahead of myself. I can be quite impatient. I've just got to be patient enough that it's going to take some time. I don't know really how to answer that. You know, at Northern Trust when I missed the cut, it was so frustrating because I spent a good six weeks working on things that I thought were very solid, and they were. I just was probably a little bit competition rusty. But you've just got to keep having that belief that what you're working on is the right things, and obviously it proved to be that. I went on to win the next week, and that kind of spurned on this great run. Just having that belief that what you're working on is the right thing. Q. The top of the World Rankings now is somewhat reminiscent of the late '80s when you had Seve and Langer and Lyle and Woosnam and Faldo making their mark and moving up. In your mind is it just a cyclical thing or is there a reason right now that a lot of the European players and even young European players are up there? LUKE DONALD: Yeah, both. I think it is somewhat cyclical. I think you need one guy to kind of inspire a generation to kind of follow in their footsteps. For me I guess that was probably Padraig Harrington winning his three majors back in 2008 while I was probably on the couch in a sling. I think when you're around people that you're pretty familiar with and see that they are accomplishing great things, it sets a little bit of a fire in your belly that if they can do it, so can I. I think we've got to thank his successes a little bit for this great run in European golf. MARK STEVENS: Thanks a lot, Luke, for the time, and best of luck this week. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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