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SHELL HOUSTON OPEN


April 24, 2004


Mark Russell


HUMBLE, TEXAS

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: PGA TOUR tournament director Mark Russell. Thanks for joining us for a couple minutes. Just talk about a couple scenarios, maybe best case scenario for tomorrow.

MARK RUSSELL: Well, we hope to get in tomorrow morning at 7:30, everybody in position to start play, and then hopefully we can start the fourth and final round of the tournament about 11:15 to probably 1:05. If we can do that, we can finish tomorrow. That's the best case scenario.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: And in that best case scenario you guys would not re-pair for tomorrow?

MARK RUSSELL: No, we're not going to re-pair, we're just going to send them back out. They'll have about a 45-minute break, then we'll send them back out. We're doing that in the hopes of finishing tomorrow.

Q. What is the real-life scenario since it's raining?

MARK RUSSELL: He's expecting some rain tonight, but if we don't -- if it doesn't wash all the bunkers out, we should be able to do that hopefully. Kevin Carpenter and his staff have done a tremendous job here, the golf course superintendent. Our meteorologist says we are going to get some rain overnight, but it is going to be some scattered thunderstorms. We could get lucky and come in in the morning and be able to play golf.

Q. Is Monday a possibility?

MARK RUSSELL: Monday is definitely a possibility. If we can't finish, we'll have to play on Monday. We'll have to complete 72 holes, unless we have just a terrible, terrible forecast on Monday, but the weather is supposed to get better, the way I understand it, tomorrow.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: If you could touch on the decision to play preferred lies. Is that because of the forecast for tonight?

MARK RUSSELL: Yeah, we had a terrible forecast and we didn't want to get trapped. We play preferred lies when you can't take relief from casual water. We don't want a guy to drive down the middle of the fairway and his only relief is 50 yards in the rough.

The reason we play preferred lies is if you play preferred lies you're going to get to lift, clean and place within a club length. You're going to have to probably play in some casual water, but we do that when it's the only thing we can do to finish the golf tournament, and it looks like in this scenario that's what we're going to have to do.

Q. You started the third round that way?

MARK RUSSELL: We started the third round that way, that's correct, and we knew there was a chance of this happening and a chance of rain overnight.

We don't like to do that, but if we have to to finish the golf tournament, that's what we'll do.

Q. Is there any way between the third and the fourth round you could go back and not play -- (inaudible)?

MARK RUSSELL: It's possible, yes. If the golf course dries out, absolutely.

Q. So that is a possibility?

MARK RUSSELL: We'll look at that, sure. We knew there was going to be a problem with this third round. As a matter of fact, it was very -- if we were lifting the ball, we could have probably played a little earlier, finished the second round, but we had a situation out there where we had to give it 30, 40 minutes of no rain to let it drain a little bit so that you could take relief from casual water without changing the whole game.

You take relief from casual water, you have to take complete relief. You can't go from bad to better. If you're wet you've got to take relief, you've got to go somewhere where there's no casual water, so in order to do that this afternoon you would have to go up on the woods in a little mound or something after you've driven it right down the middle of the fairway.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Mark Russell, thank you.

MARK RUSSELL: Thanks, guys. Hope we get lucky with this weather.

End of FastScripts.

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