SENIOR PGA CHAMPIONSHIP

May 23, 2001

Tom Kite

TOM KITE: Well, I think everybody that you talked to has been raving about the golf course and certainly I'm going to be no exception to that. This is quite a treat, to get a chance to play a golf course like Ridgewood is fabulous. Obviously we wish it was dryer where we could get to see the teeth of the golf course and not have it be so soft. It's just a pleasure to play here. The golf course is immaculate. I think it's going to be a fun week for everybody. When you got this kind of character on this golf course, it really is going to require a tremendous amount of shot-making ability as well as some scrambling, chipping and putting, bunker play. So every aspect of the game is going to come into -- going to be required this week, and, you know, that's as it should be in a major championship I think. So I'm really looking forward to it. I hope I can stay dry.

TOM KITE: Good, good. I'm just out there working with it a little bit right now and Dave Philips, played a practice round with Dave Stockton today, they've been watching me. And actually I've been putting significantly better. The last couple of weeks have been a heck of a lot better, and it's moving in the right direction. I'm very, very pleased with it.

TOM KITE: Well, it's the double-edged sword. Obviously it's going to make the golf course play a heck of a lot longer, but then the greens are a lot more receptive for the iron shots. Actually, the way the greens are right now, the biggest problem is making the ball stay where you want it to stay, because they're hitting so soft and if they have any backspin at all, the ball tends to pull back off away from the pin, and in a lot of cases, off the front edge of the green. So when they get this soft, the biggest problem is making the ball stay on the green. So that's going to create a little problem. But any time the golf course is softer, it will play longer, but, you know, the scores go down when a golf course is -- especially when the greens get softer. So it's not going to play probably as difficult as they had hoped it would be, even though it's going to be plenty for us; there's no question about it. It's -- these greens, especially some of these greens, are very, very treacherous, and it's going to prove to be very exciting, very interesting.

TOM KITE: I don't know what percentages they break down to, but all of those factors that you named had a lot to do with it plus others. You know, graphite shafts versus heavier steel shafts, metalwoods versus wood wood, the ball, the conditioning, an improved golf swing, all of those things have a lot to do with it; there's no question about it. You know, I'd be hard-pressed to break them down because in my situation anyway, I started trying to make some swing changes in the late '80s that resulted in some improved distance. At the same time, I really stepped up my conditioning program and got more golf-muscle specific in that, which improved the distance. Of course that's, you know, about the time we started seeing the graphite shafts and the metalwoods and all that come around. So I'd be hard-pressed to give you an exact percentage, but, yeah, all that combined, in my case, has produced 25-, 30-yard distance. But, believe me, we won't be averaging any 280s this week. Hard to average that much with the ball backing up, and the air is a little heavy.

TOM KITE: Yeah, I mean, very similar. As a matter of fact, this is really typical of what you would expect to see at a U.S.G.A. event. Matter of fact, we're walking up the 18th hole today, and it reminds me a lot of the old 18th hole at Madina (phonetic) before they redid the golf course. Now it's a dogleg left, but the old hole back when Lou Graham and John Mahaffey had that playoff, that was a dogleg right with a fairway sloping a little bit left, and the hole was very, very similar to the hole that we're playing, the 18th hole here today. So it has a lot of the same feel for a U.S.G.A., what we generally would consider a U.S.G.A. type of golf course. It's wonderful that the PGA of America has decided to come to a venue like this, because, gosh, you know, I guess if you really wanted to get picky and, you know, if you were trying to find something to criticize this thing, you'd say maybe a few of the trees need to be limbed up. But golly, if you've got such a magnificent golf course, any complaints are minuscule compared to the amount of praise that everybody's heaping on this golf course.

TOM KITE: Yes, we are.

TOM KITE: My vision?

TOM KITE: It doesn't affect it at all. As a matter of fact, the first week after I had the surgery, gosh, it's been over three years now, almost four years, the first week after I had the surgery we were playing in San Diego, and believe it or not, we were actually getting some rain in San Diego. I was the only one on the driving range and I was digging it. It was a lot of fun to be out there, not having to fight with the glasses and everything. And, you know, knock on wood, my vision has stayed very, very good right now. I think -- I haven't had a check-up for a long time, but it's at least 20/20, if not a little better than that. And not having to fight with the rain and the fogging up of the glasses and getting the rain drops on it is something that I don't miss at all. The only negative that I found to not wearing glasses is that if you do hit a shot fat, you will get an eye full of mud. Where I had the glasses, they were kind of a protective shield that, you know, saved me a few times. (Smiling.) But that's the only negative I can find to not having to wear them.

TOM KITE: Well, Jack, in his prime, certainly had that quality. I mean, but in my particular case, it was -- I really got excited about the opportunities to compete against him and maybe the opportunity to get up on him every now and then. So I -- I won't say that I wasn't intimidated, but I really relish the opportunity to get in that type of situation. And I would think that what will ultimately happen in Tiger's case, when he starts getting challenged more and more often, is that the guys that get in that position are not going to be scared of him; they're going to really enjoy going head-to-head against the best player in the game and know that if you beat him, then you really have something to be proud of. You know, there were a couple of times that I beat Jack coming down the stretch. Obviously he got me a heck of a lot more times than I got him, but the times that I did beat him are some of my most treasured wins. I beat him in a playoff at Bay Hill one year. I beat him coming down the stretch at Doral when I birdied the last hole at Doral to beat him by two. So those are tournaments that I win, and you always enjoy -- well, any win, even if you've played a bunch of dubs, a win is a win. But when you play on a great golf course and you go against the best players in the game, those are the wins that mean the most to you.

TOM KITE: Yeah, they probably are. Sure. Yeah. I mean, you'd have to ask them. But, you know, again, the ones that are going to do the best job of competing against any player, whoever it is, are going to be the ones that are going to relish the opportunity. But we don't have to worry about him this week. This is a senior event. So he won't be out here for 30 years. He doesn't scare me a bit.

TOM KITE: 24. 30. Doesn't make a bit of difference to me. I'm long gone by that time.

TOM KITE: No question. Well, yes and no. I mean, you have the extra round so it gives you the opportunity to make up for a less than stellar round, where you don't have that in a three-round tournament. But, yes, you have to play well enough to at least hang around on the weekend. You can't go out there and shoot a very poor round and expect to catch up, whether it's three rounds or four rounds or whatever. You're going to have to play very well. I played last week in Colonial on the regular Tour, and you had the same type of situation there. You know, you're going to -- you got a full field, you got a quality field, even though everybody wanted to write about who wasn't there. It was one of the most awesome fields I've ever seen, minus one player. And it's like everybody wanted to write about one player instead of -- I think it's very unfortunate that they didn't give the great players on the PGA Tour the credit for what they deserved. But you do have to go out in a field like that and compete and play hard and play very well those first couple of days to give yourself a chance. So you have to be sharp starting Thursday morning.

TOM KITE: I won't really say surprise. But I'm really impressed with the level of the competition. I knew it would be very, very good. I've played enough rounds with Hale Irwin, you know, after he got on the Senior Tour. As a matter of fact, he came very close to being one of my captain's picks for the Ryder Cup in '97, as Julius knows. We spent a lot of time talking about that, and Hale came very close to being in it. He would have been a wonderful member of the team had he made it. So I knew that the competition was good. And all of a sudden you see guys like Bruce Fleisher, Gil Morgan, Larry Nelson, just to name some, that came out and started challenging Hale and Lee and the guys that were playing well. I knew that those guys weren't rolling over and playing dead, so obviously Gil and Larry, et cetera, et cetera, had stepped up their game to get to that competitive level. Again, I'm not surprised, but I'm really impressed with the caliber of play that's going on out here on the Senior Tour. It's outstanding.

TOM KITE: Thank you all very much.