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WELLS FARGO CHAMPIONSHIPMay 2, 2012Lee WestwoodCHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA MARK STEVENS: We'd like to welcome Lee Westwood to the Wells Fargo Championship. If you want to talk about your thoughts coming into this week and we'll have a few questions. LEE WESTWOOD: Well, it's nice to be back here at Quail Hollow where I didn't play last year but I played a few times before that and of course I enjoyed it. It's a good golf course. You have to be on your game. If you are, you can score well, and if you're not, you get penalized. It's a very fair golf course. Q. How was Indonesia? LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, Indonesia was as hot as usual. But no, I got the right result, played well, managed to get out to an eight‑shot lead at one stage and ended up winning by two. Last day was tough, 32 holes in those conditions. Felt my age around the last nine holes. But yeah, it was nice to get a first win of the year, yeah. Q. Is there a different kind of pressure in a tournament like that where you're almost‑‑ LEE WESTWOOD:  I expect to win, yeah, there is a different kind of pressure. It's almost worse because you turn up, and I think I was 2 to 1 favorite and the next was 14 to 1, so you've still got to‑‑ yeah, anything but a win is obviously going to be a disappointing result. And being defending champion, as well, adds a bit more pressure. So yeah, it was nice to play as well as I did. Q. Yet you still have to shoot the scores. LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, there's good players on that Tour and they're much more used to the conditions and the types of grasses than I would be. You have to play well. Not that many people go to Asia and win regularly. Yeah, I'm quite proud of my record over there. Q. Has Billy had an MRI on his knee yet? LEE WESTWOOD: No, not yet. We're waiting for the swelling to go down. Q. Is this week just having Case help you get through the week or are you‑‑ LEE WESTWOOD: Case is working for me the next two weeks, I think, but Billy, you know, was having a kick around at the caddies' charity football game, not even playing in the match or planning to play in it and put his foot down wrong and torn something in his knee. Yeah, it's probably four weeks minimum depending on the scan that he's having on Friday when he gets back to England. Q. You hope to have him back by the U.S. Open then? LEE WESTWOOD: Hope to have him back as soon as possible, really. He's set a goal for the PGA at Wentworth, which is two and a half weeks' time, which I think is a bit‑‑ well, you'd expect that from Billy, stubborn Yorkshireman. But I think the Scandinavian Masters in Sweden the week before the U.S. Open is probably more realistic. Q. I don't know if you've been out on the golf course but they've changed the 17th hole. LEE WESTWOOD: I haven't seen the 17th but I heard they moved the tee over to the left. Q. I was wondering about your impressions of that. LEE WESTWOOD: I think that's the way the green is set up for it to be played. From the right‑hand side it was always difficult because anything coming in fast and low, which you could be hitting 4‑ or 5‑iron in there is likely to run through the back into the hazard, which I don't think the designer of the hole intended. Yeah, it was one of those places on the golf course that needed to be addressed, and they've wasted no time in doing that. Q. Did you interview caddies after that? LEE WESTWOOD: I didn't need to. I got plenty of texts ranging from caddies to players. Hopefully it won't be. It's one of those things you've got to play by ear, really. There's a couple of good caddies that have said they'll fill in while he's out. Q. When did you guys start working together? LEE WESTWOOD: About three years ago at the Irish Open. Q. He's been with a lot of pretty high profile guys over the years. LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah. Q. What's he bring to the dance floor other than a sense of humor? LEE WESTWOOD: Well, he's not doing any dancing at the moment, but you know, we get on very well, and he brings‑‑ he's very professional, and he knows my game really well. It'll be a loss for a few weeks, but accidents happen. What can you do? He goes skiing twice a year and he's never done anything doing that, and then he puts his foot down wrong on a football field having a kick around, which like I said I could have done at home playing with my son in the garden, and it just blows out. I did remind him that he's now 46 and not 26. But when he goes home and he gets to Washington airport and they stick him on one of those trolleys, which I'm hoping they do, I'm hoping someone will get a photograph of that. I've told him that, as well. Q. How much does it affect you? Obviously there's a comfort level, and like you said, he knows your game and now you have to work with somebody you know not as well and pick up the slack yourself more. Is it a big difference? LEE WESTWOOD: It could be quite a big difference, yeah. I don't use him much on the greens, but certainly tee to green I use him quite a lot. But I've been out here a long time. This is not my first rodeo. I think I'll be able to cope. Case is a good caddie. He's proved that. He caddied for Fred and a lot of other good players, and Fred was up there at the Masters. He's been in sort of big arenas in contention. Yeah, I don't see it as being too much of a problem. Obviously I'd like to have Billy on the bag, but I think Case is a good stand‑in. Q. Just wondering how Billy broke the news to you. LEE WESTWOOD: He phoned me, I think, pretty much as it happened. He asked me if I loved him. I said, yes... Q. I was just going to ask you how you feel this course sets up for your game this week. LEE WESTWOOD: I think it sets up well. It's certainly a golf course that you can't have any weaknesses. It's a major championship style golf course, and they've proved that by getting the PGA Championship here in a few years' time. You have to be accurate off the tee. The greens, they were as firm as any Tuesday I've seen in a long time yesterday, so there'll be a premium on hitting the fairways. So you're going to have to play well this week and have every aspect of your game in shape. Q. Your tee‑to‑green stats this year are pretty incredible. When was the last time you felt this good about the way you've been hitting it? Not just this year but the last 18 months or so. LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, well, I think all my stats have been pretty good certainly early on in the year. My short game stats are up, as well. I generally don't look at stats too much. You can read into them what you like and you can sort of read them to suit you to make you feel good, interpret them. I don't pay that much attention, but I do know that‑‑ I don't know how many times I've teed it up this year, but‑‑ is it five? Five times, and I finished top four in three of them and mid 20s in the other two. I'm playing pretty consistent golf. Outside the PGA TOUR I've had a win and a second in Dubai. That's proof enough there. They're the best stats, results. Q. Can I ask you a world No.1 question? (Inaudible.) LEE WESTWOOD: No, I didn't know that. I haven't looked. It's not really a priority. I'd obviously like to be world No.1 again, but winning major championships is really my priority from now on, and if I did that, then I think world No.1 would come as a consequence. Winning this week is the priority for this week, and then it's a bit like trying to qualify for the Ryder Cup, becoming world No.1. It's the result of a process of playing well, but you can't really focus on it. It's a good story for everybody else outside the players. But certainly for me, my concentration this week is on trying to win this tournament. And like you say, if I was to win this week maybe I could get back to world No.1, but my focus is next week because that's a massive tournament, the PGA at Wentworth because that's the biggest tournament in Europe, and then probably the U.S. Open after that. Q. Your schedule the next few weeks, can you run through it? LEE WESTWOOD: Here, Sawgrass, week off, BMW PGA, week off, Sweden, U.S. Open, two weeks off, French, week off, Open. Q. Busy. LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, and I've already played a lot, so I need the weeks off as much as the tournaments, I think. Q. Earlier today Rory was talking about how this win here sort of propelled him to feel confident enough that he could go on and win those major championships. When you come back to a course that you've won at before, how much more comfortable do you feel? LEE WESTWOOD: Well, I think that you do have an extra confidence when you come back to a place that you've won, purely because you try and set up a game plan when you come to a golf course, and if you win the tournament, it pretty much proves that you've got your game plan right. I think that's the only real advantage to that. I guess on the greens you might feel comfortable, but we rarely play any greens out here that aren't excellent. Some greens you see the lines a little bit better, but these feel similar to sort of like Augusta. You have to have imagination. You're going to get some really quick putts out there, and you have to have good feel on them. Q. What is Lytham like for you, the Open venue? Do you have much experience outside of the last Open there? LEE WESTWOOD: I played two Open Championships there when David and Tom Lehman won. It's one of my favorites. It's a great golf course. It's a good test. It depends on the wind, but normally you have to try and score on the way out and then hold onto it on the way back in, depending on the conditions, of course, which is the same with all links courses. I have played Lytham Trophy there, as well, as an amateur, so I've got quite a lot of experience on that golf course. Q. You like it, though? LEE WESTWOOD: I love Lytham. I think it's a great golf course, a good test. And it's a bit different to your stereotypical links course where it's actually not right on the sea. It's got houses around it and you've got the usual rail line right down the side of it. But it certainly plays like a links golf course. You've got shots where you've got to run it in 40 yards short, let it bounce up. It's a good test. Q. Talk about the par‑3. LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, that's interesting. You don't get that many other places. Q. What's that club? LEE WESTWOOD: I can't remember, it's probably changed in 12 years. It's probably a 7‑iron now, used to be a 4. Q. In a similar vein, did you play in the '98 Open at Olympic? LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, I did. I finished top 10, I think. Q. Is that a course that's unlike many of the other U.S. Open ones and do you like it? LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, it's a good test, but it can be tricky in places. I don't know how they'll set it up this time, but certainly there's a lot of reverse camber fairways where you're going dogleg left to right and the fairway slopes right to left. It got really firm if I remember rightly in '98 where you were almost having to land it in say the right‑hand rough on some holes that dogleg that way to try and keep it on the fairway. It was only my second U.S. Open, so it was a real test of patience, and you could really let the golf course get to you and wind you up. But I've never been that sort of player. I just thought it needed a lot of concentration, focus and patience, which most U.S. Open venues do, but that one more so. Q. Did you get caught up with some of the trickiness of that 18th green that hurt Payne? LEE WESTWOOD: I remember watching Payne putt it up there to about six inches and then it rolled 30 feet down the hill, and I thought, well, is that sort of fair. But I can't see that happening again. I don't think that'll happen again. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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