THE PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIP

March 19, 2002

Matt Kuchar

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: I'd like to welcome Matt Kuchar to the interview area at THE PLAYERS Championship.

Matt, a good couple of weeks for you. First, a PGA TOUR victory, an invitation to the Masters and your first PLAYERS Championship. If you want to get us started a little bit with some opening comments, and maybe a little bit about the golf course today.

MATT KUCHAR: Yeah, I'm excited to be here. This is my first PLAYERS Championship, and now I'm a local resident of the Ponte Vedra area, so it's exciting for me to be playing this tournament.

I think like everybody says, it's the fifth major, and so we've all seen it on TV, and it's fun for me to be a part of. I'm looking forward to the excitement. I know it's been -- for the past month, this whole city has been kind of abuzz about the PLAYERS Championship and now it's finally here. So I'm looking forward to getting going.

Q. Another guy that was a pretty good golfer at Georgia Tech won this tournament, and also lives out in this area. I just wondered if maybe he had any special secrets for you to pass on to an old school chum, or I shouldn't say school chum, but another alumnus?

MATT KUCHAR: No, I wish he'd share some of the secrets. I think most of us keep our secrets to ourselves, for the most part. But I know everybody was excited for Duval when he won here. You could see how excited he got. I know he doesn't show a whole lot of excitement, but for him to win here in his home, it looked like he was pretty pumped up about it. I think everybody has that feeling, that comes away a winner here. It feels almost as if they have won a major.

So, I'm just excited to be associated with the Ponte Vedra area, now THE PLAYERS Championship.

Q. If you had a chance to sit and talk to Dave, would you ask him for a couple of pointers or maybe a little bit more about the course for knowledge, or have you played it enough here lately?

MATT KUCHAR: I haven't played it enough to really feel like I know the course intimately, like some of the guys who have been here for a long time, or even the players that have played here for the past number of years.

It's fun to go around a course with guys that have played a number of years. I played today with Greg Norman and Steve Elkington and Charles Howell. Greg and Steve have each played here who knows how many years, and each are past winners. They were very helpful. It's fun just to watch how they play this course. They would kind of stop and tell Charles or myself whereabouts to hit it on certain greens and where not to hit it. It was pretty helpful.

I know just the two or three little times that they stopped and said, you know, this is really where you want to play from here, and this is where you should hit your approach shot, those are very helpful tidbits.

Q. Matt, this is one of the tournaments where you have major championship winners, you have rookies who have never won, and you have first-time winners, like yourself. With a dynamic like that in the locker room, with so many different types of players -- golf is one of those sports where you actually share a locker with people you are trying to beat, I'm just wondering, is it cliquey? What's it been like for you the first few months out here?

MATT KUCHAR: I've been lucky in that I had a lot of experience prior to coming out. This is really my rookie year, I guess, but I've played a lot of tour events up to this point.

So I feel like I know almost everybody out here. I enjoy talking or hanging with all of them. It's fun for me. I really couldn't name a single bad egg. I enjoy being around all of them. We all pull up a chair and kind of eat together, if there's an open spot at a table. It's a great atmosphere.

I think golf is one of those few games where everybody really pulls for each other. I mean, of course, you want to win and do the best, but you never want to beat somebody because they have something bad happen. You want to beat somebody when they are playing their best. You kind of cheer for everybody. It's kind of -- it's the nature of the game and I think that's part of the great thing about the game; that's how you want to win. You want to win because you beat somebody playing their best so, we all cheer for each other to really do their best.

Q. As a guy who just went down the stretch and won his first tournament, what does it say that Tiger Woods and his coach both assert that he will hit certain shots on certain holes that might not be the most conducive to winning that tournament at that moment, as a means of developing his game under live fire for Augusta National, and that he can still win?

MATT KUCHAR: I understood that he's preparing for the Augusta National and playing courses as a preparation for Augusta.

Q. He hits shots at Bay Hill, and here -- he may hit a draw on a fade hole, as a means of testing his game, for, say, the power draw that he might have to hit around the corner on 13 at Augusta, and still wins these tournaments. Do you believe it?

MATT KUCHAR: Yeah, I believe that he does that. I think Jack Nicklaus has said the true definition of this game is through the majors, and we have to really treat the majors as something special. I think Tiger has taken that same approach and kind of devotes everything to major golf.

I've always thought that you want to prepare to win, and the more you get used to winning, the better you're going to do. The more you can win, I think that's the best preparation for going into tournaments.

And so, if he's winning tournaments, I mean, that's the best thing you can do and if he's doing that by pretending he's playing Augusta National on a totally different course, even better.

Q. Among the players here that are your age and younger, who impresses you the most, and why?

MATT KUCHAR: I think Charles Howell is probably the best of us all. I think he's always been such a hard worker, ever since I first met him, probably when I was 14 years old. You knew the kid was going to go on to the PGA TOUR. He's always been kind of the prodigy, and to see what he's done, he's always been kind of a little skinny kid, and he is now just really a strong kid. He puts in a lot of work in the gym as well as on the course, on the range.

He's really devoted a lot of time and effort to his game, and it's paid off. He hits it forever. I think right now, he's probably the best of whoever the young guns may be. But, I really can't take away from anybody else.

I know Ty Tryon always impresses me. I think he's got a great swing, and I think that it's been hard to be in the position that he's been put in, with so much pressure, so much attention on a 17-year-old, I think is really tough. But I think he's a great kid and I think he'll do well. It's just a matter of when.

It may be a situation like me last year, where I started out and missed my first three cuts, but then I was still able to earn a PGA TOUR card, earn enough money to earn a card. I think Ty may come through very similarly, once he kind of get over the hump.

Q. When you did some of your tour hopping last year, a few in Canada, South America and all that, what are some of the life experiences, things that you might have picked up in a remote tournament site or something like that?

MATT KUCHAR: I loved Australia. I wish I had done the Great Barrier Reef, so I think that will draw me back. But the people there were marvelous people, as friendly as can be.

The golf was different down there. It reminded me of Scotland with good weather. Everything was very firm, very fast, and it was fun. It was almost like the greens were kind of like last week's greens at Bay Hill, not quite as firm, but they had that type of firmness where you had to be creative and play different shots. I enjoyed that. I even enjoyed last week, even though I don't think my game is at all suited for that course; I just don't hit it that far. But I enjoy trying to figure out a way to play it.

One of the cooler experiences that I kind of step back and said, "Wow, this is different, this is really neat", was the time in Mexico. I flew from Pebble Beach down to Guadalajara for a tournament, and we played -- we played there. I ended up missing the cut at Pebble Beach and my putting was just atrocious at Pebble Beach, and I go to Guadalajara and putt brilliantly, tie for Medalist honors but lose in a playoff.

And that very next day, about 60 of us jump on a Greyhound bus together and take like a five-hour journey through Mexico. It was an experience where you saw all of these kids playing in this tournament in Guadalajara, who I had known a couple from junior golf and known a couple of their names, but when I was down there, everybody was so helpful to each other. Those that knew Spanish kind of acted as interpreters for everybody else. They would go out -- you would never see guys eat just two of them together. It would always be groups of like at least eight eating together, and everybody is rooming two, three, four people, even, to a room, just to kind of save money, get by, and then traveling together on a bus. It was almost a real team atmosphere, even though it's an individual game. It felt as though we were all kind of like on a big team, and that was pretty cool.

The Canadian Tour, the events I played in were in Myrtle Beach, so it didn't really feel like Canadian Tour events. (Laughter.) Although the weather may have been more like Canada weather.

But I think that was probably one of the neater experiences I've had in golf.

Q. Was it -- this is probably trite phrasing it in your case -- but how much of a culture shock was it going from Pebble Beach one week to Guadalajara the next?

MATT KUCHAR: It didn't shock me. It's just kind of, I guess, part of the job that we do. You go to all of these different places. I had been to poor parts of the world. I kind of look forward to going to these new places. It is somewhere I had not been, and it's somewhere where you go to anxiously, to see what it's like. I don't know if it's on the top of my list for places to go back to, but I've done it. I'm glad I did.

Q. Is this February of 2001, last year?

MATT KUCHAR: Take the week after Pebble Beach last year. I'm not sure of the date, but just last year.

Q. Were you the one speaking the Spanish or being helped with the Spanish?

MATT KUCHAR: (Laughs) Thankfully, I had one of the interpreters helping me out.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Thank you very much, Matt.

MATT KUCHAR: Thank you, guys.

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