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BMW PGA CHAMPIONSHIPMay 23, 2012Lee WestwoodVIRGINIA WATER, ENGLAND PAUL SYMES: Lee, thanks for joining us. After coming so close last year, you'll be pretty keen to get your hands on the trophy this year. LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, looking forward to this week. Obviously played very well last year and had a good chance. It's always nice to come back to Wentworth. Looks like a great week's weather, and it makes it an even more special week if people are walking around in warm sunshine and it has a summery feel to it, this tournament. Yeah, it's a week that I think everybody that plays on The European Tour and is a European Tour Member looks forward to. PAUL SYMES: Been a few tweaks to the course. Have you played 18? LEE WESTWOOD: I haven't been out there. Going out this afternoon to have a look around. It won't have changed too much. It's just a case of getting here and getting a feel for the speed of the greens and the firmness of the greens I think. PAUL SYMES: And your own form, you've been over in the States for a few weeks and played well at the Wells Fargo, obviously happy with how you played the weekend, particularly. LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, I've played okay this year. I played pretty well. Won in Indonesia and finished five four times on the PGA TOUR. Came in third in the Masters, and got further than I've ever gotten in the Match Play, which wasn't obviously too difficult. It's been a decent start to the year, yeah. Q. Have you heard about the changes to 18, and do they meet with your approval? LEE WESTWOOD: Well, I haven't been out there. Q. You'd have heard about it. LEE WESTWOOD: No, I haven't heard much about it. I heard the fairway has been raised slightly and I think Ernie said he had taken the trap out on the right. Q. And he's taken a tree out, as well. LEE WESTWOOD: I'm not a big fan of not being able to get an advantage from hitting driver on the final hole of a golf tournament. I think if you've got the technique and the talent and the confidence to go up there, especially on a par 5 and hit driver down there, you should be able to do that, and obviously make the hole play a little easier from there and you can being a little more aggressive. It seemed like more before, it was making everybody play into the same parts and there was no real advantage until you got near the green and obviously the wedge players had an advantage. So you know, designing golf courses and remodeling golf courses is tricky and sometimes you need a couple of goes at it, and I think every year we come back, it's improving and becoming a better test. Q. He's also grown the grass, where you spun back in on the playoff. LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, that wasn't‑‑ because there should have been rough there. The wind was out of the right and I over‑drew and pitched it further left than I wanted to. It was a poor shot. That was the reason it went in the water, not because there was rough there. I wouldn't have gone for it with rough there. I didn't blame that on anything like that. It shouldn't have gone to a playoff last year, really, if I'm being critical of myself; 3‑putting 16; and didn't birdie 17 going in with a 3‑iron and then had a 5‑footer on the last for birdie that I missed. So I had my chances. It was my own fault. Q.  How disruptive is having to change caddies during a season, particularly if he's your putting coach, and how are you keeping in touch with Billy? LEE WESTWOOD: Well, we talk most days. He's coming down to see the surgeon that did it in London today so he'll probably be around later on and tomorrow. It's obviously quite disruptive. You know, he's an integral part to the team. As I say, my game and results have obviously improved the last few years as a result of Billy being on the bag, so it is very disruptive. But I've got an able replacement in Sponge and we'll see how the next few weeks goes. I'm looking forward to it. He's a guy that I think I can get on with, a nice guy, very thorough caddie, lots of experience and he's won a Major Championship with Michael. So he's obviously not Billy but I've got full confidence in him. Q. On the putting side of things, wasn't Billy going to be your putting coach? LEE WESTWOOD: Well, because he was there all the time, he was seeing me putting more than anybody; so we had a few drills to work on. So it's just a bit more on me to take a bit more of an onus on doing the drills and what I'm working on. But you know, I think Sponge has been phoning Billy, and Billy has been giving him an idea of what we're working on and what to keep reminding me of. Q. Have you relied on Billy on the greens previously? LEE WESTWOOD: Not really. Not unless it's straight. (Laughter). I tend to read my own putts, and I call him in very occasionally and it's generally dead straight. So, you know, Billy in the end would come over and he said, "It's probably straight." (Laughter). So I prefer to read putts myself, because putting is a feel thing, and you don't know‑‑ another person doesn't know how hard you're thinking about hitting it, if you need to hit it firmer or take the break out, or try and lag it in there. I didn't rely on him too much on the greens. Q. You were the greens last night two or three hours. LEE WESTWOOD: I did quite a lot of practise yesterday, only because I had not done much practise this week. I felt like I played a lot at the start of the year and done a lot of travelling. So last week, I really feel like I needed a week off to relax really and get my head around things again. Yeah, I think I probably dedicated a similar amount of time to most aspects of my game, long game, short game and the putting green. I spent about an hour and a half to an hour and three quarters I think, just getting used to the speed of the greens, because I've not putted on anything as slow as this for pretty much most of the year. Ernie said yesterday he felt you were penalised a bit severely for the shot you played at the last last year. Does that make you feel any better? LEE WESTWOOD: A lot of people have said that but I didn't play the shot I was trying to play. I didn't execute it properly. I had too much draw on it and it pitched too far left, it, so it had a lot of right‑to‑left spin on it. I'm not a big fan of blaming other things. It was more my fault that shot. I think I can see his point of growing some rough there, because I've seen shots come in there, maybe second shots, that you see it now, and it really sets up for a shot that's been drawn in there because of the way the angle of the green sits. And you wouldn't want a ball landing on there and running around to the left and dropping in the water. That would be unfair. So I can see why he's grown some rough up just there just to give it a little bit of leeway. Could you compare and contrast this and THE PLAYERS Championship, apart from the fact that they are both the flagship events and they are both held at the headquarters; what other similarities, and for that matter, dissimilarities, are between the two of them? LEE WESTWOOD: Well, you probably pretty much answered your own question. They are the jewel in each tours' crowns, aren't they, and they tend to be the best fields of the year outside the major championships, for both tours, as well. Certainly over the last few years this course has been toughened up a lot, and brought up to a toughness level of, say, THE PLAYERS Championship. So that's it, I suppose, for‑‑ well, I can only speak for myself. But winning this would rank alongside winning THE PLAYERS Championship as far as prestige would go. Would you rather win on Sunday by ten shots or by beating Luke in a playoff? LEE WESTWOOD: I'd rather win by ten obviously. That's very easy to answer. How about beating Rory and Luke in a playoff, albatross on the last? LEE WESTWOOD: I really don't care. Go for the hat trick on daft questions, go on. A rivalry between the three of you here, a lot of people would like to see‑‑ LEE WESTWOOD: You weren't happy with the rivalry, were you, last year. It was 1 and 2 in the world. You want more; you're very greedy. As a player‑‑ LEE WESTWOOD: As a player, you turn up trying to win the golf tournament. You're not worried about what else is going on and what everybody else does. To be perfectly honest and to be perfectly ruthless, I would rather I play brilliant this week and everybody else played crap. (Laughter) But that's not going to happen. Are the best bits of you, Rory and Luke the perfect golfer, and what are those best bits of each of you? LEE WESTWOOD: Oh, I don't know. Everybody's got their strengths and everybody's got their weaknesses, haven't they. You know, that's the great thing about golf, not everybody does everything the same, and that's why people like watching certain players. What do you admire about their games? LEE WESTWOOD: Well, I think that Luke is probably the best from 80 yards in in the world. He's phenomenal from that distance. And you know, I like the sort of effortless power of Rory. What about your own game, what do you like most? LEE WESTWOOD: I like all of it (smiling). The course has been made a lot easier this year compared to last year. LEE WESTWOOD: Has it? Especially the par 4 becoming a par 5, the 12th. The scoring should be lower. LEE WESTWOOD: Right. What do you personally prefer, a course that gives more birdie chances? LEE WESTWOOD: I don't mean. I think people like to turn up and see lots of birdies, and also I think they like to turn up and see us have to think about it a bit. I think that's what this course provides. You've got four par 5s out there, and it's a good balance. You've got some short par 3s, some long par 3s, short par 4s obviously, some long 4s. It's quite an exciting finish with the two par 5s to finish. Scoring is always a little bit better when the weather is good. There's sun predicted this week. Having said that, might dry the course out, might dry the greens out a bit and they will play firm, and so then there will be a premium on hitting it in the fairways. Golf is all about adjusting and adapting to the situation, and golf courses can change very quickly during the space of a few days. So that's the main challenge around here I think. Are you just maintaining a level of fitness now or still getting stronger and doing more work? LEE WESTWOOD: Well, the weights I'm lifting, I'm lifting heavier and doing more repetition, so I'm obviously getting stronger. But it's difficult to keep doing it as intensely as I have been doing it. Not getting any younger. And you know, you like to think that you reach a sort of level where you can just keep maintaining it all the time. And you're at that? LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, I feel like I'm at that at the moment. If I have a week off and then guy back to it, it doesn't drop off too much. I'd like to be a bit thinner, but my life's a diet. That's not really going to affect my golf; the strength and the work I do for injury prevention is probably more important. How strict is the diet? LEE WESTWOOD: Not that strict. If you sat and had dinner with me, you would see it wasn't that strict. But a lot of the stuff we do do is to prolong my career; to make it possible that I can play well into my mid to late 40s and still be competitive. Can I talk to you about that? I saw a Tweet a couple of weeks ago, you said it seemed strange that the amount of rough has been cut down since the groove changes. LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, it was quite deep‑‑ quite a deep Tweet from me, isn't it. And I just wondered if you felt that course setups since that change have actually mitigated against you a little bit, because obviously your strength is finding fairways from the tee. LEE WESTWOOD: No, not really, but I just find it interesting that the ruling bodies have decided that this groove change was a good idea, and then we've stopped having thick rough on the golf courses. Sort of like‑‑ So it's neutralised it? LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah. It's like saying, you can't use a driver anymore, and making the golf courses shorter. What's the point. PAUL SYMES: On that note‑‑ LEE WESTWOOD: You understand that note, don't you? Even you understand that. Sorry to get all deep and meaningful. You were talking about your physical fitness. What work do you do on your mental fitness? LEE WESTWOOD: I don't do a lot of work on my mental fitness, no. Maybe that's not why you're No. 1. LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, maybe. This is harsh, though, isn't it. Yeah, I think if you play well, then you really ought to be mentally strong and have confidence. I've spoken to a few psychologists over the years, and. But not me. LEE WESTWOOD: Yeah, they sort of sometimes point out things that you have forgotten to do, but that you realise that you were doing when you were successful. So occasionally I think they are good for jogging memories. PAUL SYMES: Thanks very much, Lee. Appreciate it. Play well this week. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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