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CN CANADIAN WOMEN'S OPEN CHAMPIONSHIPAugust 24, 2011Cristie KerrMIRABEL, QUEBEC THE MODERATOR: We'd like to welcome Cristie Kerr into the interview room. Thank you for joining us today. Former winner of this tournament back in 2006, you've been to many of these events. Talk about being here this week and getting to enjoy Montreal? CRISTIE KERR: Montreal's been great so far. My husband went into the city and had dinner in old town Montreal, and it was a great experience. I'm glad I went into the city to see it because it's one of the cities that I've always wanted to see. I've played this course. It's a really, great, classical style golf course and it's in terrific shape. So looking forward to the Pro-Am today and the tournament. Q. You've had a great season, lot of top three finishes. Kind of what is the state of your game right now and how pleased are you with your season overall? CRISTIE KERR: I'm pretty pleased with my season. I'd love to be able to get that first win on the season, but I think I've tried a little too hard as of late to do that, and usually that has the opposite effect for me. So I've just got to try to go out and do my best. And kind of revamped and worked on my golf swing with my coach last week a little bit. It had gotten a little bit off. When you're struggling to get up-and-down for par a lot of times, it's more difficult to score. I feel like this week I'm a lot more comfortable with what I'm working on with my swing and working on the short game hard. So I'm looking forward to the tournament. Q. Having seen the golf course early this week, what are your initial thoughts on it, and what are kind of going to be the keys on this course this week? CRISTIE KERR: Yeah, I think if you drive the ball straight, you're going to have chances to make birdies. I think the scoring will be fairly good here. Depends on the weather. I think tomorrow we're maybe expecting some rain, so I think that you know you get off to a good start in the tournament and keep building from there. Q. You talked about working on something with your game recently. Are you yet at a point where you can play rather than think about that or are you still trying to, you know, work around that thought process? CRISTIE KERR: I think there are always periods of time where you're comfortable with what you're working on and you're able to go out and play. And there are sometimes when you really need to grind on your technique because something with the plain of the swing or the body motion gets really off. It's kind of a thing where it gets a little off over you a period of time and then all of a sudden you're like, wow, I really need to work on this. So that's kind of the point I was in the last couple of weeks. I feel like I'm back on a trend to go comfortable and be able to go out and play. But when you're on the golf course and you don't know which way it's going to go, it's hard to play because you have -- you're held back like somebody's got a leash on you and you can't just let go and play free. So I feel like I'm on a trend to being able to play free golf again. It's hard to be able to look at the swing and say this is really off and we really need to work on this and how can you let it get like this? But that's golf. Q. We just had a NASCAR race in town last weekend, and some drivers, rookies, who had come to the track for the first time will use PlayStation. They'll have various means of being able to see the racetrack and the track is not an entirely virgin thing to them when they arrive. Is there such a thing for a golfer, when you know this tournament's coming here? Would you have a look at this golf course in a virtual sense to see what may suit your game and where you want to avoid certain things? CRISTIE KERR: Not really. I don't think we're quite at the stage yet where we're going to go out and play the golf course on PlayStation before we go out and play. I really am horrible at video games anyway, so it wouldn't do me any good. But that's where we have our caddies for. Our caddie is kind of our eyes before we play the course. My caddie, Jason, who is from Edmonton, he's a Canadian. He came out and walked the golf course on Monday while I had rest. And when we played yesterday, I knew where to hit it because he's kind of my virtual eyes in that respect. So we rely on our caddies a lot when there is a course that we haven't seen before. Q. The PGA TOUR set up Shaughnessy as a test of golf as some of the best players in the world there were sort of complaining about how tough it was. Do you feel that this course here has been set up by the LPGA as a true National Championship tough test for golf for your athletes? CRISTIE KERR: You know, I think it's a really good golf course. I've only played it once and it's hard to tell till you get in the heat of the battle. There are a lot of long par-3s here. There are a lot of greens where you can't hit it over the green. It's going to be a good test. Q. When did you first hear about the Solheim Cup picks and what were your initial thoughts? CRISTIE KERR: I like the picks. That's what they are, they're picks. You can go down the points list if you want or go completely off the page. I think that Rosie wants the best possible team to take over there, and both of the picks that she did pick have strong games and are both extremely long hitters, so I think that's going to suit us very well over there. Q. Can you tell me about the Asian golfers on the Tour right now? They're being so dominant this here. Yani Tseng with her five majors at 20 years old. What do you have to do as a golfer to overcome maybe her and all of the Japanese and Koreans, because they're getting very, very strong the last few years? CRISTIE KERR: Yeah, the Asian contingent on Tour is very strong. They're all very hard working golfers. They all have this mindset where you must get this done. You have to play well, and they're all really good, technically very sound. To answer your question, we need to multiply. We need to make more Americans and more Europeans, but it's not quite happening. This is the cycle that we're in right now. But you want to play against the best players in the world, and that's what we have on our Tour right now. Q. This is sort of a fun question that came to mind when you said you went to old Montreal for some of the best cuisine. But are you going to try poutine while you're here? CRISTIE KERR: I almost tried it last night, but I couldn't eat that much. I had a salad for dinner. We ate quite late. We went to Table 51 at the mall where we're staying. It was nice. But I've heard of the classic dish. Potatoes and cheese and stuff, I don't know if that goes well with my stomach right now, but I'll try it while I'm here. Q. The classic dish might be the most charitable description of that ever, by the way. Thank you. When you come to a city like Montreal, when a lot of athletes come here for the first time, there is obviously a bit a culture shock of language and so on. When you got around old Montreal and the city, what struck you about Montreal? CRISTIE KERR: I think it's a very kind of European feeling city. Old Montreal we went and there were cobblestone streets and old buildings. It's quite charming. For translation, I don't know. One of my very good friends is Vincent Lecavalier, and he's here and he was going to play in the Pro-Am. But his wife is pregnant again. Actually, I don't know if they're quite married yet. It's coming any day now. She's been quite sick, so he couldn't come and play in the Pro-Am. But he's here in spirits, and he's my translator here. Q. How did you become friends with Vinny? CRISTIE KERR: Vinny and I were represented by the same management company, God, this must have been the year before he won his first Stanley Cup with Tampa. I don't know which year that was. Like 2003, December, we all went out and got to know each other. We were represented by Pantheon, which is the same management company, and a large part of their practice was hockey. And Kent Hughes, his agent, is very good friends with my husband, Eric, who was part of that company at the time so got to know Vinny and a lot of the Lightning. I'm actually probably the one that introduced Vinny to golf. Because we were sitting there having dinner and he was like show me how to grip the club, and he had never played before. Q. Is he good? CRISTIE KERR: He's actually very good. He's a single digit and he's a lefty. So I can't take all the credit for him playing golf, but a little bit of it. He's crazy for golf now. He just loves it. I think maybe he wants to stay in Tampa because he can play golf year round. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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