DORAL-RYDER OPEN

March 2, 2000

Harrison Frazar

HARRISON FRAZAR: I played really well. Drove the ball pretty well. Missed maybe just a few fairways, I don't know how many exactly. But felt real comfortable with the way the course is set up. They have done an outstanding job on the golf course. It is a wonderful track. I don't know what it was like before the original redo, but if it's anything like this, I can see why Doral was held in such high esteem because it is wonderful. Greens are absolutely perfect, not too terribly fast this morning. If you got a little downhill they could be, but other than that they were perfect. The fairways are soft and receptive. So it was there for the taking this morning.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Just had to bring that up. Yeah, it has been a rough start to the year for me. Combination, bunch of different things: Being sick, trying to travel with a newborn baby, grandfather passing away; things like that. I have kind of set a little bit of time to myself the last couple of weeks to try to prepare and get better and the Florida swing is about the time that I start to play well anyway. I like Doral. I like the conditions here. I like the grass types of Florida, so it is a real comfortable setting for me.

HARRISON FRAZAR: No, I don't think so. I think the golf course is too hard for that. You can do it a couple of times. You can't shoot mid-60s four days in a row out here. Golf course got too much trouble, there is too much penalty out there. Plus the greens are not going to do anything but get harder. And they are probably rolling 10, 10 and a half this morning and if we don't get any rain I'd have to bet by Saturday afternoon they will be rolling close to 12. They are going to be really hard and fast. That will count for a couple of shots at least everyday. But I don't think it is going to be too terribly low.

HARRISON FRAZAR: I was on the putting green Monday for probably 5 or 6 hours, something like that. Then on Tuesday I played in the morning and hit a few balls and spent about another two or three hours out there.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Yeah, that is just one of them. I grew up on hard fast greens on Bermuda and bent. But playing on the West Coast all the time you tend to play on some softer little bumpier poa annua. I had also a lot of confidence in my stroke, lost a lot of my speed control, so I wanted to hit a bunch of different putts at different lengths, different angles of the greens, different break points just so I can get a good feel with pace. One of the keys to playing well here; understanding which way the greens working. So I just spent a lot of time trying to not get too aggressive, but hitting good putts that are falling in the hole.

HARRISON FRAZAR: I'd rather not. I don't want to sound like I am whining, but my wife and I just had a baby and thank God it's the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me, we tried to bring him on the road six, seven weeks. People have done it in the past, I don't know how. It is really hard to play with sleep deprivation. Our child, he is a wonderful baby, we are very, very lucky, but he just does not want to stop and he is up until 11:00, 11:30 every night. At least then. Waking up at 3:30 and 5:00 waking up again at 5:00. That is really tough when you got 7:45 tee time. You can handle it for a day or two, but as it continues on for two, three weeks, just gets harder and harder. I got a little sick because you are going from the desert to 45 degrees and raining in Carmel. It was just too much to handle. I ended up getting sick in Phoenix and I still got a little bit of it but at least I am getting over it, just a respiratory infection, sinus infection, things like that. Then took off the week of San Diego, made some equipment changes right before L.A. Played pretty well. Missed the cut by a shot but I was at least encouraged. Went home worked a little bit more felt really good going back to Tucson, played the Monday Pro-Am in Tucson, played really well got a call Tuesday morning that my grandfather passed away that morning about an hour earlier so picked up and went home. Wasn't able to play there. So just feels like things have been just a little hectic, a little crazy the first couple of months, but as I settle into a routine, as the baby settles into a routine, we will all be a lot better.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Harrison.

HARRISON FRAZAR: They are coming tonight. He has been doing really well. We have been practicing sleeping in the Pack and Play at home, he is sleeping from 9:30 'til 6:30, now we are hoping he will continue it. If not they will be heading back to Dallas.

HARRISON FRAZAR: He was born December 2nd.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Ed Kuykendal. In fact, I thought about him a lot today because I heard the FBI grounds over there having target practice. He was an FBI agent for about 35 years, so pretty cool, kind of an eerie little deal.

HARRISON FRAZAR: You can hear it all day long on the golf course, wind blowing in that direction, you can hear the ra-tat-tat of them firing off the automatic weapons. Kind of spooky.

HARRISON FRAZAR: He followed golf closely but he was not a golf fan really. He followed me. I don't think, until I started playing in competitive tournaments, I don't think he knew what a birdie was or as opposed to a bogey. But he tried to follow it. He had Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer and so the last four, five years he didn't really understand a whole lot of really anything. His passing away wasn't quite as hard on us as it was in previous because we pretty much said good-bye him to him a long time ago. It was just more or less dealing with family situations and emotions of everybody else. But he tried to follow golf. He was always very supportive and always very eager to learn as much as he could.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Good question.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Did the reduction in bunkersplay into my being in less; is that what you mean.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Did I avoid more bunkers because of the reductions in the size of the bunkers? I don't really know. I hit it pretty well. I think I only missed two or three greens today only maybe one fairway. I think the biggest changes is the golf course doesn't look quite as intimidating anymore. You can actually see some land where you are trying to hit it, whereas in the past couple of years all you saw was the wall of a bunker or you tried to hit it over one trap and leave it short of the others, now you are playing to areas now and the danger is still there, but little more reassuring when you can see some grass. I don't know how many bunkers I was in. If I had to -- three or four, maybe which is about half of what I average per round the last two years. So it wasn't -- most of them I think almost all of them were fairway or -- maybe only two.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Very little. Very little if anything. Maybe into the wind, maybe figuring a half a club. But not enough to really matter.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Yeah, hit a 4-iron to about the center of the green made about 25-footer there: Next hole hit 3-wood then hit 6-iron about 20 feet, made that one. Birdied 18, I hit -- hit it driver in the fairway, hit pitching wedge about 15 feet, made that. Birdie one, I hit a 2-iron into the short right bunker of the green my second shot then blasted it from there about six feet. Made that. No. 3, I hit 2-iron off the tee, 9-iron into the green about 25 feet made that. No. 6, I hit driver in the fairway pitching wedge to about five feet. No. 8, I hit driver and hit 3-iron just on the front apron just right in front of the green. Chipped it up to about two feet, made that one.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Yeah, I missed about a 5-footer on 10. I miss about a 10-footer on 11. Missed about 8-footer on 12. 16 I missed about a 6-footer. What is No. 3? Oh yeah -- no. No. 5 I miss about 8-footer. 7, 2-putt there, that was about it - the ones I missed that were makeable.

HARRISON FRAZAR: No, no, it helped drastically all the putts that I made from 20, 25 feet the speed was perfect and it just rolled right in the middle of the hole. The putts that I had missed were on a little funny little side angles and most of them, I can honestly say, were really good putts. And a couple of them hit the hole, just didn't stay in. But I don't think I hit any bad putts. I think all the work on the practice green took the pressure away of having to worry about making a lot of short putts because I knew my pace was good. I knew I was going to hit putts that if they didn't go in, they were going to be a foot or two by the hole. So didn't have to worry about making 3-, 4-, 5-footers coming back for pars.

HARRISON FRAZAR: It involved everything. Shafts. I still am using the same irons. I've just been using shafts that were too stiff for me which I think is a common problem with probably 95 percent of all golfers, your stuff is too stiff. I was having to work too hard to hit golf shots getting negative feedback. I would feel like the ball should have been going somewhere and it would be doing the opposite. Went back to a little softer shaft. Since I have done that I am actually getting some positive feedback now, so that when I make a bad swing I know how to readjust. Also I went to the Titleist factory on Wednesday of L.A.; did all the driver testing and found some drivers that were better for me and went and spent a day with Scotty Cameron and saw the video, what my putting stroke was doing; saw the way the ball was reacting and built a putter up to match the way I stroke it.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Yes.

HARRISON FRAZAR: Different putter every week. I tried all of them. I just had things that weren't right for me.

HARRISON FRAZAR: It's not really anything with the putter. It is a product - without trying to get too technical - a broad loft at impact. You have to have enough loft at the point that you strike the ball to get the ball above the ground and start rolling. People had always told me I had my hands behind the ball at address which I don't, but I guess it just looked like it. So, to me, that meant I needed less loft. I was using putters with 3 degrees of loft. What I actually do, I forward press as I come into impact which shuts it down to about 1 or 2 degrees. And you are actually -- you need 4 degrees at impact. Scotty saw this on camera and his computer told us that. We bumped it back to -- I am using putters now with almost 6 degrees loft. It's made a huge difference in the quality of putting and the consistency because the balls aren't skidding and bouncing off-line directly off the face.

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