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CHRYSLER CLASSIC OF GREENSBOROOctober 7, 2006Davis Love IIIGREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA: Third Round
JOE CHEMYCZ: We welcome Davis Love, 4 under par 68 today, 10 under par for the tournament.
Davis, talk a little bit about the conditions out there and battling it to be 4 under. DAVIS LOVE: Conditions were not good. It was kind of nasty and, you know, pretty consistent all day, I'll say that. It never really varied that much. It sounds like it's raining a little bit harder now but it was misty all day and cold and windy. Made it tough on the holes into the wind and certainly didn't feel good on your hands and nose. You had to be real patient. I thought I was very patient. Even though I made a few mistakes, I was patient and let the good holes come.
JOE CHEMYCZ: Questions?
Q When you talk about the weather out here, how is that physically for you in terms of staying warm and loose? DAVIS LOVE: Unfortunately, we're used to playing in some bad weather. I've been out long enough to pack right. I'm one of the few guys that doesn't have to go buy something. I saw the support staff last night at Wal Mart walking around trying to find warm clothes. I heard everybody has been in the mall but, you know, I'm prepared for it. You just don't like it, especially for the fans. That's the hard it thing. Want to come out and watch, this is not the weather to watch in and, you know, I appreciate the ones that did come out because it was a tough day to watch golf. Q What do you think of the hole placement and what do you expect tomorrow? DAVIS LOVE: What's that? Q What did you think of today's hole placement? DAVIS LOVE: They were the pin placements were good. I thought they could have put a few tees up but, you know, it makes it play tough when it's windy and wet and all the tees are back, especially on all the par 3s, they were back. You know, 22 under here, I guess K.J. shot so it's not playing that difficult if the weather will get a little bit better but they set it up good. Q Davis, you were involved in the redesign of this, did you ever anticipate guys hitting fairway woods on second shots on the par 4s today with the wind? DAVIS LOVE: Well, we anticipate the average guy hitting woods into the greens, yeah, but not really the Tour players but I think the golf course, you know, is pretty fair as far as getting on to the front of the green or in fronts of the greens. The par 5s and a couple of the par 3s have big false fronts but, you know, for the most part if you hit it in the rough you can bounce it up in front of the green or up the front of the green and get away with it. But these are extreme conditions, you know, and I'm hitting a 4 wood into a par 4 then I hit a wedge in the Pro Am, you can't really design around that kind of stuff but we did leave we did leave plenty of room in front. So the greens, I don't think guys are worried if they miss a fairway that they're going to have to carry a lake in front of every green, they have to chip out on every hole. So like Chris Cox today a couple times bounce it up in front of the greens or run it up onto the green and get out of trouble and get up and down for pars. That's the way it's meant to be played. Hopefully we don't get this tomorrow. If they do, they'll put the tee up on 14. Q Davis, we've heard a lot about your lack of success in playing the tournament since you redesigned it, here at Forest Oaks. How important is being successful on your redesign as opposed to just being successful at the golf tournament? DAVIS LOVE: Just being successful in a golf tournament, not really where it is or who built the course or how much history you have here. Certainly winning here in the past is a big advantage. You get good feelings about the golf course. But I keep saying that I just need to win and play well and finish off this year. I'd love to be in the Tour Championship. I would love to be in the Mercedes Championship to start the year off and just want to play hard the rest of the year. That's why I took some time off to get rested and ready to go for the end of the year. Q When you look at the past three years, you've had some going into Sundays that you've been in contention and haven't played really been able to pull it off. Is there a common thread that you've seen to that or somebody got hot and it wasn't you? DAVIS LOVE: I've played poorly sometimes and some guys have played well. I think a lot of it is mental, lot of it is physical. I keep myself around the lead a lot even when I'm not feeling well or playing well and I think, you know, I give myself a lot of chances. Just, unfortunately, I haven't pulled it off enough the last few years but that's pretty much been my whole career I've been in the Top 25 or 10 a lot and just for one reason or another haven't won as many as I would have liked, but keep getting there, keep being patient. Get out of your own way, let it happen. Q Did you enjoy the Heels you had today? A It was nice of them to come out. There weren't many of them. It was nice of them to come out and you know, I don't know that I didn't see a whole lot of familiar faces but I heard a lot of Go Heels and lot of support. It's hard to clap when you're holding your umbrella and you got your hands in your pockets but it was nice of them to be out there. Q Davis, people locally talk, like scratch their heads, how can a guy have two MCs and WD here well, the MCs. Is it fair for fans to say just because he redesigned the course he should be able to play well at it? DAVIS LOVE: I don't think so. You don't get any secret knowledge and, you know, when you hit that golf ball it doesn't know who designed the course or how much information you have. It just knows where you send it. You know, it should make it more fun to play. I love looking at the greens and looking at what we did and what we would change but I don't think it's really any advantage. I don't think, you know, Jack or Arnold or any of those guys that built a lot of courses have found that it's the secret. JOE CHEMYCZ: Birdies and bogies. Take us through the holes starting at 1 with the birdie. DAVIS LOVE: Hit a 3 wood and sand wedge to about ten feet on 1, and a driver and 4 iron to about 15, 20 feet and 2 putted. And then 3, hit a 4, 5 wood off the tee and 5 iron just right of the green and a bad pitch and about a 20 footer I missed for par. And 4 iron into No. 4 to about ten feet, and 6 drove it in the left rough by the three little trees I didn't want them to put in there and was right up against one of them and chipped out and hit a wedge about 20 feet and missed it for par. And then 11, drive and a 5 iron, believe it or not, to about 25 feet, and then a 5 iron again at 12 to about 20 feet, and then 14, driver and a 5 wood way on the right side of the green, about a 50, 60 footer. Putted it well by, almost off the green and so 3 putted for bogey. And 16, driver and an 8 iron to about ten feet. And 18, a driver and a 6 iron to about six, seven feet.
JOE CHEMYCZ: Any other questions?
Q When you hit the 6 iron at 18 out of that rough, was that sand complex about the way you designed it or did you want didn't think so. DAVIS LOVE: We had a budget to do greens and tees and so then we tried to save as much money as we could to do like No. 1 and 2, because if you remember, 2 you were always two, three groups standing there waiting. So we really wanted to change those holes so we could get off to a better start and to have a little bit more interest so you could see the green a little bit better. Then 3 was such a tough, tough drive. There was no fairway really to hit into. We tried to widen that. Anyway, a lot of those holes we were going through spending money that we were trying to save by not moving a whole lot of dirt other places. We spent most of our dirt moving on 13, flattening that fairway out, making that hole friendlier for the members so if they hit it up the hill it would rundown there where they won't be behind the trees, things like that. The two holes, 14 and 18 that we tried to do a little bit and just didn't quite get there and the grounds crew, they've done an incredible job of filling in the blanks because we really tried to do more than we probably should have from tee to green and they've come back in and filled in the blanks, like the deep grass and stuff like that, given the look about it because it always looked so wide open before. Now, even though it plays wide open to a certain extent, they've really done a nice be job. Would we like to come in and change a couple things? Yeah. I would go to 18 fairway first. The Tour helped us a lot with 18 fairway. We came back and put that bunker way out to the right. What we tried to do was turn the hole towards the driving range a little bit to give it a little more length because we were land locked. We were monkeying with something we really didn't have enough budget to monkey with. We knew where we wanted to go was have the guys to hit driver on the hole rather than we could see it coming, guys were going to be hitting 1 iron off that hole, it would be kind of boring, 1 iron, 7 iron finish. The members aren't affected. They're not going over the hill. Anyway, I think we did, you know, we improved the golf course. Certainly the greens are much better. The greens are complex and we would like to go back and mess with the fairways but if they continue on? In two, three more years I think it's just going to be we're not going to have any complaints. Q What did you here though is pretty rare to put an old style course in play. DAVIS LOVE: I played here when Mr. Hughes owned the course and Little John was on the golf team with us. This is where we came to get something to eat and to play golf and so we loved playing it before. The greens were redone a couple times. And, you know, I think we knew what the golf course looked like, we knew the old style and, you know, we liked the kind of the Chicago golf club, that kind of style green and we thought it would fit very well here and give the members a chance to get the ball to run up on to the greens. You can kind of tell the downhill balls the ball runs on to the green, uphill holes little bit of false fronts. Very, very traditional. Somebody like Lee Jantzen who is studying old golf courses comes up and talks to me about them all the time. If you appreciate some of the old Master kind of things, there's like that goofy No. 2 green, there's some designers that put a green like that on every course they built and, you know, we didn't do a punch bowl and didn't do a "Rhodan" but we did really old style greens and I think the members like it especially if the rough is a little bit lower than it is right now, they have a lot of fun playing it. Q Do you wish that they let you have kept that pot bunker at 7, right in front of 7? DAVIS LOVE: You know, we dug that hole and fill it in and dug it and filled it in. Since since they added the tee, they don't like playing it short, it really doesn't matter but if we were going to play it from the up tee see, we didn't even build the tee that we were playing from. The Tour really wanted that and that's fine. Just take three little trees back out. You know, it was the pace of play issue. For the members, they can still play the up tee and still go for the green and we wanted that to be the hole that everybody took a stab at it and if they didn't get in it, they were in the pot bunker or up the hill to the right with the funny hill on the front right of the green. It would have been a lot of fun but they were worried that we would stack guys up there and we stack guys up on the 8th hole and, you know, I'd love to see them try it, put it way up and put No. 8 tee way up so it will go quick but they were worried about 7, 8, 9, starting to stack up. In weather like this, it really doesn't matter because we're going to lay you up anyway. Q Who overruled you on the trees at 6? DAVIS LOVE: They kept asking us if we would like too put trees in. They said no. Q Who? DAVIS LOVE: The powers that be. Q Here at Forest Oaks? DAVIS LOVE: Between the set up, our set up guys and we're leaning more towards the members, they're leaning more towards a Tour event. So we're trying to balance and I just didn't think that that was fair to the members in 20 years to have big trees grow up on the corner and one of them is dead and I started on the other one today. Maybe they'll go away. I've got a beaver that's chewing trees on my arm. Maybe I'll bring him up here. Q When you say you you're talking the Tour? DAVIS LOVE: Everybody like me is an amateur architect. They like tweaking things and that's how Wing Foot gets a thousand trees that they don't need and then they go back and cut them down. It just happens. Over the years, people have ideas and that's how, frankly, the greens get messed up, greens get messed up on a great course like this. They play with them and the next guy plays with them. The next thing you know, thing don't work and you have to go back and start over. Q I apologize, I don't know if you're trying to not answer it delicately or not. You wanted the trees. DAVIS LOVE: I didn't want them. Q What group or agency DAVIS LOVE: You can ask Mark "Brazil" or might not have wanted them either. DAVIS LOVE: Thank you. |
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