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MCDONALD'S LPGA CHAMPIONSHIP PRESENTED BY COCA-COLA

June 6, 2006

Karrie Webb

HAVRE DE GRACE, MARYLAND

PAM WARNER: We'll get started. Karrie Webb, thanks for joining us here in the media center. You won the first Major this year, you won McDonald's back in 2001 but it was a different course. Do you want to talk about being here this week.

KARRIE WEBB: It's good to be back here at Bulle Rock. Obviously I did win at DuPont Country Club, but I always felt like it was a love/hate relationship there. So I feel like this course suits my eye a little bit better than that course.

I didn't play particularly well last year. But I like the fact that you got to shape your driver both ways and there's some pretty demanding iron shots out there on some of the par 4s.

PAM WARNER: You were just out there playing. I just want to talk about the conditions of the course. What did you think?

KARRIE WEBB: Well, tee to green, the fairways are in great shape. The rough's well, in the scramble we weren't in the rough at all today. But it looks like it's pretty high.

The greens aren't as in good a condition as last year. They look like they have got some heat or something. There's a few brown spots on them, but other than that they're rolling pretty well.

PAM WARNER: We'll take questions for Karrie.

Q. How has your game changed since the last time you won this event, your physical game and your mental game?

KARRIE WEBB: Well, I guess the mental part of it, when I won this tournament in 2001, I was still on the roll of probably the peak of my career. So I probably mentally had a lot more confidence in all of my game than I probably do now. But obviously I've had a good stretch of tournaments, so with a couple wins there. So that confidence is starting to grow again. That belief is coming back.

As far as technically, swing wise and technique wise, I think I'm probably a better player now than I was then.

Q. Curious, which of your Majors was the most memorable to you and why?

KARRIE WEBB: Well, I would say that obviously right now the Kraft Nabisco is the most, the one in 2006 was the one that I probably, that is probably the most memorable and probably will end up being the most memorable, once I do something in that sort of dramatic fashion, unless I do something like that, that dramatic to win another one.

Q. A lot of attention was paid yesterday to Michelle Wie in New Jersey, I wondered if you paid any attention to it yourself and what's the general feeling amongst some of your peers out here about what she's trying to do and whether that's a good or a bad thing.

KARRIE WEBB: Well, I did pay a little bit of attention. I still didn't know how many shots she missed by, but, oh, it was five shots. I saw, I guess I saw her once during the afternoon that she was 1 under through 20 holes or something. So I was interested.

I think it would have been an unbelievable feat if she would have managed to qualify to play in the U.S. Open, the men's U.S. Open. So, but I think that I don't think that it hurts anybody.

Obviously it's a dream of hers to try and play on the men's Tour, so I guess while she's young she might as well have a go at it.

Q. At Kingsmill I remember you saying that it's not something you would ever want to do. Why is that? And even watching her have some success and trying to do it herself, would it make you want to do it yourself at some point?

KARRIE WEBB: No. None.

Q. Why?

KARRIE WEBB: I just find that playing on the LPGA is enough of a challenge for me. I don't need to set goals any higher than trying to be the best out here. I would be pretty happy with that.

Q. There's a youth movement starting to emerge in your sport. Can you talk about your relationship with some of the younger golfers and how you think they will fare this week in the tournament?

KARRIE WEBB: Well, there's a lot of great young players coming out. And a few of them I've gotten to know. Morgan Pressel is someone that, she her and I have the same trainer in South Florida. So we have sort of had a bit of a common bond that way. And Ai Miyazato from Japan I've had a little bit to do with. But all the young players are extremely talented, obviously, that they're out here, at such a young age, and I always feel like if any of them ever need any advice that I would be glad to give it to them.

Q. How do you think they will do this week?

KARRIE WEBB: I'm sure you'll see at least a couple of them up there. You see one or two of them up there every week as it is now. I don't think there's any course or any tournament that particularly scares all of the young players. They're ready to go. So I'm sure you'll see a few of them up there.

Q. Everything seems accelerated for those younger players. They just don't come out here to get a paycheck. They come out here ready to contend and to win. As fast as it's going, is there going to be a point now where it's going to be thrust on them that, hey, okay, you've won, now you need to win a Major?

KARRIE WEBB: I guess maybe a little bit. I think that happens to everybody. I think I played 12 Majors and I started getting that question. So I was what? 24. And I was getting the "when are you going to win a Major" question for a couple of years. So that's just the way those things go.

I don't think that it's fair or unfair. I think it's too hard to ask someone when they're going to you want to win every single week that you play. It's just not possible to do that. So, but these young players are coming out with great ability to stand up in their first tournament and contend. So it's really exciting to see that, within the last couple years as a group of players, that they're capable of doing that.

Q. Is the cutoff still 24 or is it going to go down to 20 now or 22?

KARRIE WEBB: You can win a tournament at any age. I'm just saying that I won I don't know how many tournaments after my first three years, but because none of them had been a Major, that seemed to be like the next question that was asked. So it's just, I guess it's just the progression of things. You're not satisfied with just normal tournament wins and when are you going to win a Major, you know, so there's a lot of the girls out here that their first win could be a Major. So it's not necessarily an age specific thing.

I think it does sometimes take a little bit more experience to win Majors, but then you see someone like Birdie Kim's first win was the U.S. Open. So it's not necessarily the case all the time.

Q. So was Hilary Lunke's?

KARRIE WEBB: That's right.

Q. Back to you, you talked a little bit about this last week, but the absolute height of your game, probably '99 through maybe 2001 or so. How hard was it to stay at that level and it's a relates to Annika, who is gone a few months now, can you relate to that in terms of how let me phrase that.

When you look back at what you've done, are you surprised you stayed that high for that long or do you think it should have been longer or what?

KARRIE WEBB: I guess I don't know. It is very difficult to maintain that sort of golf for a long period of time. So I guess knowing what I know now with the few struggles that I've had in the last couple years, I am quite proud of the fact that I maintained that sort of level of golf for two, three, four years.

And then speaking about Annika, I think it's probably one of the most, you know, talked about things in achievements in the sport what she's been able to maintain for what? Five or six years now.

And I think I'm sure she's not completely happy with the way she's playing right now, but she's not winning, but she's definitely finishing in the top 10 every week. I don't know if she's finished outside more than once. I don't think she's far off and we could be sitting here talking about it in a month and she could have won a couple of tournaments and no one would be talking about perhaps the slump or whatever.

Q. All the I didn't say that word. All the fun stuff that you do now in your life, did you have that when you first came out on Tour?

KARRIE WEBB: Yeah.

Q. Okay. So that wasn't a question of finding other interests and

KARRIE WEBB: No.

Q. And finding a balance?

KARRIE WEBB: No. Yeah.

Q. Could you to what do you attribute your play that wasn't up to your standards the last two years and to what do you attribute your rejuvenation?

KARRIE WEBB: There's quite a few things, I guess, attributed to it. I think for awhile there I didn't have a big goal to chase. Like I didn't see the purpose in it. Because I or I knew there was a purpose for it, but I just had achieved more than I had ever thought I could, so I just didn't feel like there was any goal out there worth chasing, besides winning a tournament every week.

But I realized that I needed to not only have those goals but winning and competing at a high level every week, but you needed that something down the road to try and chase after, whether or not you achieve it or not.

So that was probably the start of it. I sort of I think I just I continued to work hard, but I just, I didn't have anything to shoot for. And then with that I felt to become a better player I needed to make a few changes in my game. And those took a lot longer than I thought they would.

So then I lost a little bit of confidence in my game through those changes, and which eventually went more mentally than it did in the physical, because I ironed out the physical part of my game, but then it just took awhile to get over the hump of trusting that out on the golf course.

Q. You're from a homeland where tennis is a pretty big sport. Do you ever see women's golf getting to the level

KARRIE WEBB: Where what is a big sport?

Q. Tennis.

KARRIE WEBB: Tennis.

Q. Do you ever see women's golf getting to the level of women's tennis where the prize money is almost equal to the money that the men make? And what would it take to get there?

KARRIE WEBB: I don't know. I mean, we're a long way off for making the same amount of money as the men. So, it's not an impossibility. I don't think anything's impossible. I think it would be a big ask for that to happen.

If you look at the women's events, a lot of the events that they're playing for the same money are the ones that the men are at, at the same weeks, at the same venues. It's not necessarily their regular tournaments, like an Atlantic City tournament that we played last week. Those amounts of money that they're playing for are not particularly big.

You can look at I mean, I have a few friends that are on the WTA and their tier one events are okay, but they only have so many of those and they're the ones that, Miami and Palm Springs and whatever, and then their tier two events, they're playing for a total of like 400,000, which is to go all through the singles players and all the doubles players. So it doesn't go down very far.

But obviously the WTA did take off leaps and bounds there a few years ago and I feel like the LPGA is sort of right on the cusp of that sort of thing right now. When the WTA took off there was a lot of good stories out there. You had the Williams sisters, you had Jennifer coming back, Martina Hingis, so there was a lot of good stories to be written about. And I think there's a lot of good stories to be written about out here. You're not just talking about one person anymore.

So I think that's why the LPGA, I don't necessarily think that we're going to grow that big to where we're playing for the same amount of money as the men, but I certainly see us adding more tournaments and playing for more money.

Q. Is it important that the LPGA market this young group of players that's coming out?

KARRIE WEBB: I think it's important to market all the great players on Tour, whether they're in their 40, 30, 20, teens, whoever is playing good. It's important to not just concentrate on one group of, one age group, especially when most of our fans are middle age people.

Q. Tiger Woods was a real driving force behind the men's purses. Do you see Michelle as being maybe being able to do that and if she were to join the Tour?

KARRIE WEBB: Yeah. I was going to say, if she was to join the Tour, perhaps. Obviously she's a big draw and she transcends just women's golf. There's people outside of the golfing world that actually know who Michelle Wie is.

So I think that there is a possibility that that could happen, that she could have that sort of influence. It just depends on if and when she decides to join the LPGA and then how she performs out here, because if she doesn't perform the way we all think that she's going to, you guys aren't going to talk about her as much anymore and so then she doesn't have that influence anymore.

Q. You mentioned knowing Morgan pretty well. She's come out pretty strongly with some comments about Michelle playing on the Tour and kind of promoting Michelle more than women's golf. Do you see the potential rivalry there between Morgan and Michelle and some of these young players and that being good for the game?

KARRIE WEBB: Yeah, I guess so. I don't know the comments that you're talking about, so I'm not sure how to comment on that. But that's the young players. They're coming out and they're you know, nearly all of them have been raised in their families as the No. 1 priority in their family. So they're used to that sort of attention, I guess. So there could be, I haven't seen it at all, but I'm sure that if there's a hint of it, it will be written about.

Q. Could you talk about the state of your game this week and any thoughts of a Grand Slam?

KARRIE WEBB: What was the first part of the question?

Q. The state of your game?

KARRIE WEBB: The state of my game? It's not too bad. I wasn't quite on my game as much as I would have liked to have been last week. But I know it's there and I feel pretty good about things. So I feel like I have a good chance of being up there on Sunday and having a chance to win. As far as talking about a Grand Slam, eight weeks ago or 10 weeks ago I wouldn't even have been sitting here today, let alone talking about a Grand Slam. So I think if I win this and the U.S. Open then we can probably talk about it. I think it's a bit early for that.

Q. Five or six years ago you and Annika kind of like had this rivalry going, every one was talking about.

KARRIE WEBB: That was all written about by you guys.

Q. Right. Right. But what was that? I mean, have you felt that, like, what was that like knowing every week the talk was always you and Annika and how important do you think it is for the LPGA to have something like that again and can it happen?

KARRIE WEBB: I think it's important that obviously that was written about, but it's funny, because I never we were rivals just because we competed against each other to win golf tournaments quite often for a period of three or four years.

But to me rivalry's when there's this slanging match through the papers back and forth with things and that's to me what a real rivalry is. So it never really was anything like that. It was just our golf games doing the talking and the fact that we both wanted to be the best.

Q. You guys made a commercial.

KARRIE WEBB: Right.

Q. Is there a bubbling sense of frustration among the Tour that Michelle Wie is pursuing men's events? You mentioned that she has broad appeal, not just as a golfer, but as a marketing icon, and is there a sense of frustration that she might bypass the LPGA Tour and the goodwill that she achieved might not flow down to the LPGA Tour?

KARRIE WEBB: I don't really believe she will bypass the LPGA Tour. I believe that she will eventually be out here playing. I think that she's trying to finish up high school as well, so she's not playing full schedule like most of us are doing right now.

So and I don't think I don't know. I don't think there's too many people concerned about it one way or the other. She's, even not being a member of our Tour, she's, she already does quite a lot for us when she does play on the Tour. She draws that different crowd to watch the tournaments on TV or come out and watch the events.

Q. Who are the new fans that she's bringing to the Tour?

KARRIE WEBB: I just think she's bringing people, just like Tiger did. He didn't just bring golf fans out. He brought fans just that are, you know, they see they saw him on TV, not just on sports programs, but on news programs and stuff like that.

So, and that's what Michelle Wie has happened with her. It's not just sporting programs that she's on the front page of the New York Times today, so there's people that don't even follow sport that are reading the front page of the New York Times and they see this Michelle Wie. That's going to bring it's not just a particular type of fan, it's just going to bring more people to the game to watch it.

Q. You said eight, 10 weeks ago you wouldn't even have been sitting in that chair. Did you reassess your career goals having won, been the Nabisco champion and were you thinking that?

KARRIE WEBB: No, I haven't had to reassess them. Would I achieve that Nabisco and then to win in Kingsmill a couple of weeks ago, that's what I was aiming to do and I knew I was capable of doing. It was just a matter of when, I guess.

As far as my career goals, for the next few years I would like to see if I can get back to the top again or close to it, because I and maintain a level of golf, I guess, that I played the last five, six tournaments. That's the sort of standard of golf that I know I'm capable of and I would like to see more often than not.

PAM WARNER: Any other questions? Thank you, Karrie.

KARRIE WEBB: Great. Thank you.

End of FastScripts.

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