	products recent interviews FastScripts archive about ASAP Sports

Our Clients:

Browse by Sport

Find us on

Subscribe to RSS

Click to go to
Asaptext.com

View our
e-Brochure

SENIOR PGA CHAMPIONSHIP PRESENTED BY KITCHENAID

May 20, 2015

Jeff Maggert

FRENCH LICK, INDIANA

JULIUS MASON: Good morning. Jeff Maggert joining us. Seems that he had a pretty good last week. Victory in overtime at the first Major of the year. How are you feeling about that?

JEFF MAGGERT: It feels good, obviously. I'm really enjoying myself on the Champions Tour. Last year I played a lot on the Regular Tour still and just a little bit on the Champions Tour. Just having a lot of fun out here. Obviously, the young kids play so well and they hit it so far on the big TOUR, it was just hard to compete. It's hard to let go of that ego when you turn 50. You think you can still get out there and whip up on those kids, but I played a lot of good events last year on the Champions Tour. I had one win. Just had a lot of fun playing. This year, my game was a little slow to get started, but it was coming around the last month and I just had a good week with the putter down at Shoal Creek. A beautiful golf course. Good course for my game. I drove the ball well and hit the ball well all week. And it was nice to get a win there at Shoal Creek for sure.

JULIUS MASON: You're playing in your second Senior PGA Championship presented by KitchenAid. You finished tied for ninth last year. What's this golf course look like to you?

JEFF MAGGERT: It's very difficult. I think the Move It Forward tee idea should be applied this week to us. We should be playing about 6,400 yards.

JULIUS MASON: 64. We'll tell Kerry Haigh that.

JEFF MAGGERT: But I don't think that's going to happen. No, it's a typical Pete Dye golf course. Very, very challenging. It's target golf to the max. You got to hit the ball in the fairway and you got to hit it on the greens. Pete gets a lot of criticism, obviously, for his difficult courses, but I wouldn't say the golf course is unfair. Obviously, I think someone said the back tees can play 8,000 yards. Obviously, if a 55 year old was playing from 8,000 yards it would be unfair, but at our yardage this week, the course is manageable, but also going to be very difficult. I haven't had a chance to play a lot of Senior PGAs, so I don't know year to year what the courses typically are, but I would think that this was going to be one of their more challenging courses.

JULIUS MASON: Jeff, it's great to have you in town with us. Questions?

Q. Is it difficult for you to get your self geared up to play back to back Majors?
JEFF MAGGERT: It is a little bit, but I've always liked, when I'm playing well, I like to keep playing. So, it's nice to win a tournament and then go to another tournament that's important and a tournament that you want to play well in, because that confidence kind of carries over. Obviously, the demands, if you win a Major on the regular PGA TOUR, the demands of your time are so great and usually it's very difficult to play a tournament the next week. But I had an enjoyable few days. I got home to my house Sunday night after the tournament and spent some time with my family for a day and friends and really just had a chance to kickback and relax. So it was nice to get here yesterday feeling good and refreshed and got nine holes in after the pro-am and played nine this morning. So I've seen the course. Do a little practicing this afternoon and looking forward to tomorrow.

Q. You're intimately familiar with TPC Sawgrass and your comparison in your mind of this course and TPC Sawgrass as to the difficulties.
JEFF MAGGERT: Sawgrass is, the terrain is generally flat. Here, with the hills, obviously, the sides of the fairways instead of rolling off four, five feet, they roll off 40 or 50 feet here. So, that's probably the biggest difference. But I would say most Pete Dye courses are pretty similar style of his architecture. I would say each course is unique, but the style of it is pretty much the same. He builds such penalizing golf courses that golf pro, they either love them or hate them. He probably gets more hate letters than he does fan letters, but I think the biggest thing about a difficult course is tee placement. Obviously, if you're a 18 handicapper, you want to play this course at probably 6,000, 6,200. But a touring pro that's 25 years old, you can play this course at 76, 7,800 yards. I don't know about 8,100. But golf is going in that direction, so there's no reason not to give your self some options 20 years down the road. I was watching the tournament in Charlotte this weekend and it was just three years ago that I was playing that event and the places where these young kids are driving the ball is just mind-boggling. So, there will probably be a time in the next 20 years where we'll see courses in the high 7,000s pretty regular on the TOUR and in Majors. So, if you'd ask me that question 20 years ago I would say, oh, no way, 7,200 felt pretty long. But, so and most of the guys have benefited from technology on the Champions Tour. I mean, I hit the ball 20 yards further than I did when I was a rookie on the TOUR and that's all technology. So, you have to account for that in the golf course designs as well.

Q. Nick Faldo yesterday mentioned he thought the difficulty here was the tiny greens in comparison. Maybe you haven't seen the course enough yet to make that statement yet, but is it that the difficulty here or is it just the fact that you have to hit an exact particular target on each and every shot?
JEFF MAGGERT: Well, the greens are -- I wouldn't say they're real tiny, but because of the slopes and mounds in the greens, they become tiny. The pin placements become tiny areas to hit at. But in general, if you could place a ball right in the middle of the green on this golf course, you're going to be in pretty good shape. So, there's not a lot of advantage to shooting at some of those tight pins, in my opinion. Is it worth risking missing the green by one foot and rolling down a slope 10 or 15 feet and have an almost impossible up-and-down. Or hit it in the middle of the green and take a 20-footer that might, it might be a difficult putt with some break, but the chances of walking away with a four and possibly a birdie are pretty good.

Q. Just wondering if you fall into the love or dislike camp when it comes to the Pete Dye courses or do you want to just wait until Sunday and let us know?
JEFF MAGGERT: It's funny, we talked about that today. When I was 35 years old I would probably be saying some bad things about the course, just because it's just a different stage of my career. I know the course is challenging, but everyone's got to play it and someone's going to be a champion on Sunday. So, just enjoy it and realize that you're going to hit some shots and you're going to have some funny awkward places and that's just the nature of his type of golf courses. I've had a lot of success at TPC Sawgrass. I found it challenging the first couple years, my rookie years, but after I learned the golf course, I actually played a lot of good events there. When you play this tournament, this is just kind of a one-time thing. So we don't have the opportunity to play, have a history of 10 or 12 tournaments on this course. So it's challenging for everyone because nobody really has any local knowledge of playing the course. So that's kind of where you, I feel like you just play a lot more conservative. To use the old cliche, fairways and greens, but that's going to be really important here, not hitting the ball five feet away from the cup, just being on the green 14, 15, 16 times a round is going to be really the key.

JULIUS MASON: Round one begins tomorrow for Jeff at 1 o'clock playing with Don Berry and Bart Bryant.

JEFF MAGGERT: Looking forward to it.

JULIUS MASON: Thanks for coming down.

JEFF MAGGERT: Yeah. All right.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297