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April 13, 2014
AUGUSTA, GEORGIA
Q. Your eagle at 2, talk about that shot in. Unbelievable.
BERNARD LANGER: Yeah, it was a beautiful start. I birdied the first and then hit a beautiful 3‑wood on 2. Had to hook it 20, 25 yards and landed nicely between the bunkers, rolled up and around and finished about four feet behind the hole. Nice to see the ball that close.
Q. You went from missing six cuts to 25th last year to better than that this year. Is it showing your game is getting even better?
BERNARD LANGER: My game has been good, even when I missed a cut. I've had some very good rounds here, I just had one round where I messed up and it's easily done here. It doesn't take much, a couple of inches, to decide between a birdie and a bogey here. That's the type of golf course we're facing.
But I've been playing some very good golf the last eight or ten years. So it's not that, it's just putting four good rounds together.
Q. Do you take pride that six 50‑plus players made the cut here?
BERNARD LANGER: Yes, I think it's a statement, yeah.
Q. What kind of statement is that?
BERNARD LANGER: What do you think? I think everybody can figure that out. There's a lot of good over‑50 players. We can compete at the highest level and even on a very, very long golf course like this one.
Q. Why do you think that's truer today than it was ten years ago, attention to fitness, familiarity with the courses?
BERNARD LANGER: I think the guys stay in better shape and they know that there's a great Tour with the Champions Tour waiting for them. In their late 40s they don't kind of quit and say I'm kind of done. They're actually maybe working harder at it knowing they're going to have five or ten years, maybe more, on the Champions Tour. So they focus on that and they pace themselves.
A lot of guys used to say I don't want to be on the Senior Tour so I'll just quit when I'm 40 or 45 or something like that. And it's all changed now. Everybody that comes out, they're always the same, so it's going to be bittersweet leaving the PGA TOUR and the European Tour to play on the Champions Tour, but with only two tournaments, this is where I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life playing golf. It's that much fun.
Q. This tournament in particular, does it speak to the value of experience that not only the six guys that made the cut or you're going to have two or three show up pretty well, experience here really does matter?
BERNARD LANGER: Experience matters, yeah. I mean I was hitting balls next to Rory McIlroy this morning and I hit a 4‑iron on to that green on the range and he was next to me and I saw his ball land right where my 4‑iron landed. And I said what club is that? And he said 6‑iron. So he's hitting two clubs less. And then he hits his drive probably 40 yards past me. He's got a 60 yard advantage on every hole. That's huge. He's hitting a 9‑iron when I'm hitting six clubs more, a 3‑iron, into the green.
It's hard to compete when that goes on because a 9‑iron comes down like this and stops, and the 3‑iron hits and goes. And you've just got to be so precise here. And the targets are so small. You're seeing these big greens, but we've got to hit an area that's four‑by‑four. If you don't hit that, you just might as well put a three‑putt down or something like that.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports
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