BUICK CLASSIC

June 20, 2003

Skip Kendall

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Skip Kendall, thank you for joining us. Great round today, 66 and puts you 8-under par currently in third place. Some fantastic golf on a pretty tough golf course, with the rough and some of the weather we've had.

SKIP KENDALL: I'm very pleased. I'm very pleased. I've played very well the last couple of days, and excited about the weekend.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Talk about maybe some of the things you did well. Obviously, 66, with just one bogey, maybe talk about the state of your game right now and how well it was today and yesterday.

SKIP KENDALL: Surprisingly well. I didn't know -- I'm just glad I'm here playing golf right now. This has been icing on the cake, and as well as I've played, I'm very happy to be here. It's a tough golf course and I've played well the last couple of days.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: It's going to come up eventually so we might as well talk about it, your incident at the Memorial, but obviously you got some things working now. Do you want to just maybe give a brief overview of what happened at Memorial?

SKIP KENDALL: Well, about three and a half weeks ago on Tuesday day morning of Memorial week, I had just gotten out of bed and grabbed a bagel out of the freezer and cut most of the left part of my index finger off. It was a very sharp knife. I was trying to be so careful, but unfortunately the bagel got cut in half but half of my finger was laying on the cutting board as well.

So I really didn't touch a club for two and a half weeks after that. Just got some really good care and I still probably don't have quite full function of the finger, but maybe that's the answer, I don't know.

Q. Have you cut a bagel since?

SKIP KENDALL: No. I actually don't put them in the freezer anymore. I put them in the refrigerator so I don't have to cut them. I just rip them apart now.

Q. When was the first time you did swing a club?

SKIP KENDALL: It was last week Wednesday. I hit about, I don't know, 10 or 15 shots and it's in a place on my index finger where I can't overlap and I've always overlapped my whole life. So I've had to go to a different grip.

You know, that's worked out well. Actually when I started practicing well I went to an interlocking grip and when I got here on Monday my caddie told me about, "well, why don't you reverse overlap because it's about the closest you can get to an actual overlap." I've been doing that ever since and that was Monday, late afternoon.

Q. Was there a point where you thought it was going to take longer to get back out here and you sped up the process?

SKIP KENDALL: Well, I think God took care of that.

When I got back to Orlando, I saw a hand surgeon on Monday, it would have been FBR week and just after the Memorial week. He told me it would be six weeks before I touched a club. I told him he was crazy, although at the time, it didn't look too good. It was healing, but it looked horrible. And I didn't know. I really didn't know at that point.

But six weeks is a long time and I just figured it would heal faster than that, and it's really healed nicely. It was about, you know, nine, ten days later that I actually picked up a club.

Q. What went through your mind seeing your finger sitting there on the counter?

SKIP KENDALL: It was kind of surreal. The bagel was cut in half, my finger was laying there, and it was like, "no, I just didn't do that. I couldn't have just done that. That's not part of my finger is it?" Yeah, that is my finger. It took about five, ten seconds to register then the blood started coming -- have you guys had lunch yet? (Laughter.)

That started oozing and that was not a pretty sight.

Q. What was your next step?

SKIP KENDALL: I ate the bagel later. (Laughter.) It was a comical scene, actually. My girlfriend was with me, she ran upstairs. We were staying at a house on the sixth green, of people who I always stay with. They were going to call an ambulance but they ended up calling the paramedic people who were at the tournament, the tournament site. So they came over and that was like the Three Musketeers; that was a joke. And they took me down like on one of their carts, it was hilarious because they took me on a cart to the next hole which had a road in between and an ambulance actually picked me up there. If they would have continued on the cart we would have been at the first aid station within three minutes and the ambulance made me lay down on the back and it takes 15 minutes to drive all the way around to get to the same place. It was crazy.

There was a doctor and he just set me up with a hand surgeon in Colombus, Ray Colbus (ph), I had the piece with me and I went to his office and he immediately -- which was unbelievable -- took me across the street to the hospital to an operating room and sewed it back on. So right there -- he didn't hesitate; it happened really quickly and I was very fortunate that he did that.

Q. Did he put the piece on ice?

SKIP KENDALL: Word to the-wise: When that happens you actually put the piece on ice. You put that in a baggy and put that on ice. You don't want the skin to touch ice because that kills the skin.

Q. You didn't know that before?

SKIP KENDALL: I didn't know that before but I picked the piece up and put it in a baggy and put ice in there and when I got to the first aid station, the doctor took it out, put the baggy there and we put that one on ice.

Q. Approximately how long after the incident were you in surgery?

SKIP KENDALL: I would say total, two hours. Maybe a little longer. But right in that range.

Q. Was it just mobility that you needed to get back or feeling or swelling?

SKIP KENDALL: Something like this has never happened to me before. It was painful. When they wrap it up, too, your finger, it would have been -- once they take all the wrapping off and you can't bend your finger like that, because it's been straight for so long. So I couldn't get it to go like that. So I just didn't know how long it would take. It was painful.

Q. You're not going back to your old grip I assume if you keep playing like that?

SKIP KENDALL: Yeah, that would be kind of funny. I can't hit a lot of shots right-to-left right now. So I can pull the ball left if I make a bad swing but I've pretty much taken a hook out of the equation with this grip. For some reason it just doesn't allow me to hook it, so I know I'm never going to hook it, so that's pretty good. I've taken that completely out of my game.

Now, I can pull it left, yeah, but it's not going to go right-to-left. So in a way it's kind of good.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: If we could go over your score card, you started on the back side with a birdie on No. 10.

SKIP KENDALL: I hit a 3-wood off the tee there. Probably only had about 70 yards to the hole and hit a good shot about five feet and made the putt.

12, didn't hit a very good tee shot there. Ended up in the first cut on the right side of the fairway and tried to hit a 3-iron. Came up way short of the green and pitched it about 12 feet or so and missed the putt.

15 was very nice. Hit a 4-iron into the right green-side bunker and holed the bunker shot. So that kind of got things going again.

16, I hit a 4-iron to about 20 feet and made a nice putt there.

18, I hit it just short of the green in two and chipped by the hole just a little bit, maybe four or five feet and made the putt coming back.

1, I hit 5-iron probably 15 feet just right at the hole, just short of the hole.

9, laid up on my second shot and hit a little wedge to about, I don't know, 8 to 10 feet, something like that.

Q. This isn't the typical TOUR course that you guys play, so most guys either like it or don't. I would assume you like it, if you could talk about why that's the case?

SKIP KENDALL: Typically, I think at least in the past, this tournament has always been the week before the Open and I think a lot of guys played here because it's kind of a tune-up for the U.S. Open.

I consider it on that level, especially with the rough as deep as it is this week. However, this week, I think this golf course plays much more difficult when it's firm and dry.

Now, the rough is up, but the ball is plugging in the fairway, so unless you hit a very bad tee shot, you can't run the ball into the rough.

I just consider it one of the better courses on TOUR. It's very difficult. You really have to manage your game well and hit solid shots and really even on the greens, you have to try to be on the right side of the greens to try to even attack a birdie putt. If you're on the wrong side of the green, you're just lagging and the ball could go anywhere. I really consider it a great golf course.

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