WGC ACCENTURE MATCH PLAY CHAMPIONSHIP

February 25, 2003

Kevin Sutherland

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: We'd like to welcome Kevin Sutherland back to LaCosta. You have some great memories here about last year's matches, obviously.

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: It's great to be back. It's looking like it's a little closer for me getting back to the field. I'm glad to be back, and have an opportunity to play again. Last year was a great week. And I'm just really looking forward to it. I love match play, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: The course is different, switching the 9s. They've added yards, and the conditions are going to be more difficult with the rain.

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: Yeah, the course is playing extremely long. I played 7 holes today, and it's obviously very, very wet. Most of the bunkers are full of water right now, and the fairways are just -- there's not a dry spot on them. And so tomorrow should be interesting. You've got to take a cart to get across the water on 18. It's playing very long.

They have a bunch of new tees. The course is playing different than last year. Last year the ball was running. And for the most part you weren't having much more than a 160 yards into any of the holes. And I don't think any of the par-4s, I had any less than that today. It's going to be a different golf course. Driving the ball is -- I say this, after last year, after I drove the ball all over the place, driving is going to be very important. The rough is longer, it's wet. And the fact that you're going to be 30 or 40 yards away from the green, instead of 140, you're going to be 180 or something like that. It makes a big difference. You need to be in the fairway. So it should be an interesting week.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Last question. The 64th player in the field, Carl Pettersson, just finished second to Tiger at the Buick Invitational. Can you talk about the depth of the field and how strong it is worldwide now.

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: It's very strong. Anybody in the field, if they're on their game and playing well, can win this tournament. There's no question about it. And Carl Pettersson, I've played with him before. He's a pretty good player. Obviously he proved that two weeks ago, finishing second down there and at Torrey Pines. So it just kind of proves the fact that the quality of golf in the world right now is extremely high. And it's different than other sports, like tennis, for an example, where there's a bigger separation between 1 and 64.

And so that's what makes this tournament so unique and so much fun. I think as a player it makes it a lot of fun. Just about anything can happen. And I know that people watching it on TV and that are going to be here, they know that, too. It's always the unexpected. It always makes it interesting.

Q. Kevin, in a strange sort of way in match play, driving it badly and then recovering greatly is more devastating to your opponent than driving it right down the middle.

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: You're right. If you both hit a good drive, you both knock it up on the green 20 feet from the hole and you both two putt, it's different than if I hit it over to the left rough and hit it right of the green, and he hits two good shots, 15 feet, you chip it up 10 feet, he misses it, you make it. He's going, geez, I had him on that hole, I let him get away. And so it's the same result you got at half. But one guy feels better than the other guy in those two scenarios.

There's no question that if you can -- if you happen not to be hitting the ball very well, and are just able to stay in the match, you can gain a lot of momentum from that. And for a sport that seems to move very slowly, momentum in match play is huge. And you can really ride that momentum, if you can get it on your side, especially if you can get it in the middle of the backside or maybe early in the backside, you can get a little momentum going, it really can help you down the stretch.

Q. I don't bring this up to dispute what you say about the depth in the field, but if you look at the guys that have won so far this year, every one of them is ranked very, very high. How do you make the two go together?

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: Well, it's funny, last year we had, what, 18 first-time winners, and this time it seems like the bigger named players, they don't like that very much, I guess, seemed to make their presence known very early in the year. And you can't explain it. I think the difference is that on any given day, though, over the course of four rounds -- Tiger Woods, his ability to rise to the occasion and stuff like that, seems to come to the top over four rounds. And over 18 holes, you know, say I was playing Tiger, if I make a couple of good putts and get momentum going my may, and make a few birdies, anything is possible.

So not to say that you can't beat Tiger in four rounds, but it's easier to do that in an 18-hole match. And so to say that the field is -- the depth isn't there in the field, I understand what your point is, but over a match play event, it seems to change that a little bit.

Q. Do you feel a lot of pressure to get back to this event, because you're not guaranteed a spot, and as you are, I think you're seeded 62nd?

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: Well, I was at the deadline of last week. But there's been some withdrawals, so I think I'm 59 now. I think there's been three withdrawals, so I think I'm 59.

Q. Did you feel pressure during the year to try to play well enough to get back to this event?

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: At the end of last year, no, I wasn't really thinking about it. But at the beginning of this year, yeah, I was. I was thinking -- it was more self-induced pressure -- I'd like to come back and play. I enjoy the tournament and even if I hadn't won last year, I would still feel like I would like to get in that event, and it's an event I enjoyed playing. But I did win, and it made more pressure. But I was conscious that I needed to play well the four or five weeks before the deadline, to get myself back into the field. So, yeah, I felt a little bit of pressure to play well to achieve that.

Q. Given the wet conditions and the length of the golf course, if you're matching up with a real long hitter or if anybody is who's a shorter hitter, do you think that there's a huge advantage this week as opposed to the past?

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: Well, I would think so, over last year. I mean length -- last year the way the course was playing was pretty fast. You weren't hitting a ton of drivers. There was a lot of holes you didn't even need to hit driver on. But this year you're going to be hitting driver just about every hole. There's a few exceptions, but I'm going to hit a lot of drivers. I would think that length is more of an issue this year than it was last year. It definitely would help to hit it further, so instead of hitting a 4 into a green, you might be hitting a 6-iron or 7-iron into the green. Obviously that's an advantage. But you still need to play well.

Like I said, I think -- one of the big things this year is driving the ball straight is going to be more of an issue than it was last year. Last year the rough was spotty and it was dry, so the ball was able to come out of the rough a little better than this year. I've only played 7 holes. I didn't get a chance to play the whole 18, but it seems that it's going to be a little bit thicker.

Q. Beyond the flooding, they left last year, I think, wanting to make the golf course more difficult with the length, grow the rough more consistently. In the little bit you've played you definitely saw that?

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: If that was their goal, then they achieved it, yeah. I would assume it was their goal, because obviously the length was -- they've added about six or seven tees, I think. And the rough seems to be thicker. And I definitely think that was a conscious effort on their part.

Q. You said that anybody in this field, because of who they are, but do you think that they've somewhat narrowed the ability of some of these players to win this event because of the changes they've made and because of the rain out there?

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: Maybe, yeah, that's very possible. If it was a 72-hole event, I would definitely agree with that. If it was a normal stroke-play event I would definitely agree, that I think the guys you see at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the week would be guys who hit the ball longer than average. And I think that they would have an advantage in the situation they have now with it being very wet and the ball -- the ball is just not traveling very far now.

But it goes back to the same thing, too, about match play: Strange things can happen. You get some quirky things that can happen. The putter is a great equalizer in match play. It seems that no matter how you play from tee-to-green, it seems the guy winning that match is the guy who's holing putts. The guy who is saving the par, the guy who is making the great half on a hole that looks like he might lose. Those seem to be the guys that seem to win the matches.

I guess I'm not answering your question, but it seems they would have an advantage, but match play seems to take away that advantage, I guess.

Q. Aside from the million dollars and the exemption on Tour, did it effect the way you played the rest of the year positively or negatively?

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: I didn't play very well. The second half of the year, I struggled. I think there was a lot of reasons why. I think one of the reasons -- I think I was trying to prove to myself that I needed to play a different level, maybe. And I stopped playing the way I normally play. I also think I got in some bad swing habits which caused me to struggle. And I didn't hit the ball very well the second half of the year. So both of those things kind of came into play.

I feel like I'm -- I feel like the beginning of this year I played better than at the end of last year. And I feel like I'm starting to get back on the right track as far as hitting quality shots and getting a little bit more consistent. And so I think it normally should be a positive to win an event, but I think that I put a little bit too much pressure on myself, especially when things weren't going the way they should, I felt they should have, and I started to press a little bit and I didn't play very well. So I think I've learned from that.

In the off-season, you get a chance to take a step back and reflect back on the year. It was a great year for me. I won my first event, and so it was a great year all in all, but I wasn't happy with the way I was playing. So I got a chance to take a step back, and say you've got to do your own thing, you can't try to be something you're not. You need to play your game the best you can possibly play it, and not put too much pressure on it.

Q. Mike Weir actually told us last week the same thing, that after last year he took a couple of months off and said, "I didn't have fun out there. If I'm not going to have fun and enjoy myself, I shouldn't be out there." And obviously we see what's happened to him.

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: I wasn't having -- at the end of the last year I wasn't having a lot of fun. I was trying way too hard. I wasn't just playing golf and I wasn't enjoying the game, I was trying to do -- I was trying to make things happen in a game where you've kind of got to let things happen. It seemed like the harder you try in this game, the worse you play. And so I just kind of did the same thing. I like to have the results that he's had. He's played tremendous golf. And he's a great player, and so it sounds like maybe we were both having the same thoughts in the off-season.

Q. Was there one crystallizing event or one person's conversation that you had that made you decide that I don't have to play like the champion of the match-play event, I can go back and just play like myself?

KEVIN SUTHERLAND: I think it was some conversations I was having with my wife. We got talking about how much pressure I was putting on myself. And she can see that. Someone as close to you as your wife can see what you're doing to yourself a little bit. And I was trying to play like the match-play champion, and I just needed to play like Kevin Sutherland. And so she was -- I was kind of saying that and she was like, well, you know there are a lot of people who have noticed that. But she was the one who kind of said it to me.

I know my golf teacher had noticed it and my brother had noticed it, that I was not playing the game the way I like to play, which was have some fun, and just play the game, and be yourself. And I was trying to be -- not saying something I'm not, but trying to justify to myself what I was trying to do. And so I realized that you can't play golf that way. You can't play trying to prove something that was done ten months ago or whatever. And so you've got to put that back there and just keep moving on.

And so it's a funny game. It just seems -- like I said, a game that moves so slowly, momentum can go either way, and it seems like you can ride it. And unfortunately, I started riding it, the second half of last year, riding it the wrong way. And I was putting too much pressure on myself. So as a result, the results showed that I wasn't playing very well.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Thank you, Kevin. Good luck this week.

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