WGC ANDERSEN CONSULTING MATCH PLAY CHAMPIONSHIP

February 25, 2000

Hal Sutton

HAL SUTTON: I played good today. We both hit the second green in 2, and 2-putted for birdies, and I made about a 12-footer on No. 4. We were under par all day long, and it was -- I never could get up on him very much. Finally he missed a short putt on No. 13 for me to go 3-up on him, I guess. Then he comes right back and birdies 16 when he had to. And I hit a good shot in there about 12 feet and lipped it out, and he made it from about 6 feet to keep it going. He played good, and I played good.

HAL SUTTON: Well, Duffy is a good player. I certainly wasn't going to take him lightly. He's very long after the tee, which is -- since we're playing in the mud, that's a big item. He's explosive. He can make a lot of birdies. Duffy is a good player. He's gotten better and better all the time.

HAL SUTTON: Well, it was the first time any of us had played match play for a long time. Someone asked me earlier in the week if I thought the veterans had the advantage, and I thought probably the other guys, the younger guys have the advantage. They play a lot more match play golf in amateur golf than we had. We played one match play event a year, which is only one singles event. The rest of them are a team event. So you've got a partner that you're relying on. If you played in every Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup, you'd played in one match-play singles event a year. I mean one round is what I'm saying. We haven't got a lot of experience at match play. So I think the answer to that question is everybody is more comfortable after last year.

HAL SUTTON: I feel pretty good about my game right now. I feel like I'm hitting the ball where I need to at the right time. To me, match play strategy, I think you can always -- you can't look at a guy's score and tell how he's playing in match play, because you're playing off of what the other guy is doing. There were several times I had a 8- or 9-foot birdie putt, where he's running by three or four feet. I'm trying to make it but I don't want to do anything stupid and run it three or four feet by, and have to put the pressure back on myself at that point. So I don't know that you can look at a guy's score and really tell the whole story in match play. So I feel good out there.

HAL SUTTON: Rankings might be a little bit off, but they're not way off. Out here it's talked about all the time. There's very few people when you look down that ranking system that ought to be over three or four spots one way or the other. The only place you're going to find the player that might be out of place is the guy that hasn't played well for 6 months or 8 months or something like that, but he played really good for the two years prior to that. Maybe he's not playing very well, and it seems like it's a slow decline. That's the only place that you might see a little bit of disparity on that world ranking.

HAL SUTTON: Different kind of golf course here than we're playing there. So Darren is long. He's very aggressive. I'm sure he'll be the same way tomorrow. So we'll probably have the let the birdies fly.

HAL SUTTON: Just walk down that 10th fairway down there. That's got to be one of those holes that's below sea level that they keep talking about.

HAL SUTTON: Yeah. No. 9. I didn't hit a very good third shot. I had kind of a muddy lie on a downslope and hit it a little heavy and sucked it back to 25 feet all the way to the front of the green and canned it. I was as surprised as anybody else was. One of those where you're just trying to get it up close, and it wandered in.

HAL SUTTON: No. 9.

HAL SUTTON: It was my shot of the day. I don't know yours.

HAL SUTTON: Okay.