THE PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIP

March 12, 2026

Russell Henley

TPC Sawgrass

Quick Quotes

Q. Nice playing. How would you assess your opening round?

RUSSELL HENLEY: I'll take 4-under par here any day. I mean, I find this place visually intimidating, but I did feel like I did a good job of committing to my shots today. There's a lot of gusty winds and changes of wind direction and rain, and so I felt like I was in a good place mentally and made some good decisions and executed pretty well.

Q. Any shots stick out in particular? Any favorite on the day?

RUSSELL HENLEY: Let's see here. I had a really nice up-and-down on 6, I guess my 15th hole, from the left bunker. That's something that I've felt uncomfortable with a little bit this year is my bunker play, and I've been working on it pretty hard and it was good to see that one go in there tight.

Q. When you get out of position on a golf course, which happens to you probably every round every week, does it tax on you more here depending upon where you get out of position?

RUSSELL HENLEY: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Q. Does that make sense?

RUSSELL HENLEY: Definitely. There's a lot of courses we play where you can just say, hey, as long as you're right, you can be anywhere right. This place is not like that as much. You can be maybe a little right or a little left, but for the most part, you got to take it on. Yeah, that's why, like I said a second ago, it's intimidating, a lot of the shots, but being committed to your shots for me is the most important.

Q. The delay in the middle of your round being so short, how difficult was it to kind of stay in place and get the gears back going right away?

RUSSELL HENLEY: I didn't stay in place. I was beside the clubhouse, we ran in because I thought it was going to be like a tornado, it was raining really, really hard. When I went inside I was hitting the lunch table and Ben Griffin said, You have a restart in four minutes.

Q. No time to warm-up?

RUSSELL HENLEY: Yeah, I didn't know -- yeah, it was kind of a quick, stressful 10 minutes or whatever it was. But made it on time.

Q. Where were you?

RUSSELL HENLEY: I was in the locker room. Just eating some food.

Q. Where were you on the course?

RUSSELL HENLEY: No. 2 green or by the green on 2.

Q. So pretty close in.

RUSSELL HENLEY: Yeah.

Q. You were technically held in position.

RUSSELL HENLEY: That's what I found out afterwards. I didn't know.

Q. You didn't know it at the time?

RUSSELL HENLEY: At the time, it was coming down really hard, like sideways, so I just ran into the clubhouse. I just, I didn't think that would be a hold-in-position type of weather based off my experience. But it was. (Laughing).