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CHARLES SCHWAB CUP CHAMPIONSHIP


October 23, 2004


Allen Doyle


SONOMA, CALIFORNIA

Q. After 71, 73, you came back in pretty miserable conditions today to have a great round, 67. Maybe talk a little bit about that. You find yourself 5‑under, four back going into tomorrow.

ALLEN DOYLE: I had a good round. You really get to the course on a day like today and you say, What happened to the weather, it's so crappy. It's one of those days where you stayed patient and if you were hitting the ball good, and I did today, you don't get ahead of yourself, you're expectations aren't real high, I think I missed two greens today. So I hit the ball very, very good. On the back nine, I got on a little bit of a roll and lo and behold, we shot a real good round today.

Q. Just go through your birdies real quick, starting at No. 1.

ALLEN DOYLE: I birdied 2, had about 90 yards, hit it in there about a foot.

Then I birdied 8 from about 30 feet. Then I birdied 13, hit it in the right rough and I had to lay up about 140 yards, hit an 8‑iron right in the left fringe cut about a couple of feet off the green, about 12 feet from the hole, and I chipped it, and I chipped it in for birdie.

And then 15, I hit it a good 4‑iron in there on one of those utility clubs. That's a 4‑iron in there for me. Hit it in about 6, 7 feet, made that to go to 4‑under. Then the par 5, I hit probably 130 to the hole, hit a 9‑iron in there to 15 feet and made that.

Then 17, I hit an 8‑iron, I think we had 149, hit it about pin‑high about 15 feet and made that.

Then had the bogey on 18.

Q. What happened on 18?

ALLEN DOYLE: Well, 18, I hit it in the right rough. We've hit 3‑wood there all week, and it was so lousy and so bad, we figured we could hit driver. It just seemed all week that driver on the back nine has gone south on me. Why, I can't tell you. It got a little right and the wind pushed it in the rough. I didn't have a brutal lie, but I didn't have a good lie. I was in the hazard and made a good shot out of the hazard to about 6 feet and I thought I made the putt. Hit a good putt, I thought, and it just lipped out on me pretty severely. So we make our only bogey of the day. But I guess if somebody had given me the chance to take 67 before we started out, I would have taken it.

Q. How do you explain (Inaudible)?

ALLEN DOYLE: It always happens. There are very few rounds out here where no matter how hard you think the course plays and no matter what's going on, someone always has a great golf score. I guess today that was me. Again, I kept in the present. You wonder why the mind works the way it does. On great days, I guess the expectations go way up and we have trouble matching those. And when the expectations go down, it just seems that we play within ourselves and it's not anything that we don't know before we start, it's just the way the game works, I guess.

Q. At the halfway point you thought you still had a chance to win it and now you do have the chance.

ALLEN DOYLE: Golf, that's the way it works. I've won some ‑‑ anybody that you've talked to in the past and you've talked to in the present and in the future have won golf tournaments from odd positions. So that doesn't mean that it happens often. But there were 29 other guys that had it in their minds today that if they went and shot a good golf score ‑‑ I guess all 29 weren't in that mix if they were too far over par, but I've won some golf tournaments from back in the pack. It happens.

I've always said that it's easier to play from behind than it is in the lead. You don't have anything to lose and you go out and you play and you see what happens. Plus we're playing for a lot of money and you want to end the year on a good note. That's the other thing that you are thinking about also.

Q. How much did the golf course change? How was it today? Really long?

ALLEN DOYLE: For me, it's really long. If you look at me ‑‑ in my driving statistics, although I'm leading in accuracy, I'm probably way down in distance. It will be interesting to see what they do tomorrow. It would ‑‑ I don't have any say in it, obviously, but I think if they would have moved the tees back on some of the holes that they have forward, it would be unfair to two‑thirds of the field.

You've got six to ten guys maybe that if you can blow it over 5 and 6 and 9 and 12 and those kind of things, you have a huge advantage. It would be just as unfair if we showed up this week and the fairways were 20 yards wide. Then I would be the favorite. It wouldn't make anybody happy. So the long hitters would say, you can't make the golf course this tight, it's not fair. It's also not fair if you have this thing playing 8,000 yards, or the equivalent of 8,000 yards, because that might be what it's playing. The ball plugs and it rolls nowhere.

You don't play a hole like 16 to often where you hit driver, 3‑wood, 9‑iron.

Q. Talk about course setup. Different camps want certain things?

ALLEN DOYLE: I don't know. There is inconsistency, but that's what some other guys say. You just want it to be consistent. Certainly this week we're going to get consistency, weather imposed. If that's the case, if it were the case, there are channels to talk to about that and there are places that you don't. It's like the cart issue. When you ask Rick George about the publicity we're getting, and I don't know what he's told people, but I would say well, you gave us the publicity, it's not me. So there are channels that you discuss that stuff, like the course setup, and it should be reviewed every year or every half year and you do the best you can.

Q. Are you the only Red Sox fan in the tournament?

ALLEN DOYLE: It's odd, as soon as they beat the Yankees, you have some of these guys that come out of the woodwork.

Q. (Inaudible)?

ALLEN DOYLE: He's die hard. I'm talking about these other snakes who are all of a sudden Red Sox fans. "We did great, didn't we?" We? We have a standard response to them, Dana and I, we do not accept them as Red Sox fans if they don't root for them all year. They're not Red Sox fans. They can still root for them in the playoffs, but they are not bona fide Red Sox fans.

Q. Is playing on the Champions Tour, is that the best part of your life?

ALLEN DOYLE: Well, not really, because I had it made I would say before this, but financially it is. I had nothing when I came out here. We didn't have much ‑‑ my wife and I, we both worked and we worked hard to raise our kids, but if they wanted to go to certain colleges we probably wouldn't have been able to send them to certain schools.

So financially, certainly, it's been like I've hit the lotto, but I'm no happier now than I was 30 years ago or 20 years ago or 10 years ago, I'm just wealthier.

When you get asked, you're signing autographs and someone will ask you, did you have a good day today, a lot of times I answer, well, if you were a professional golfer and you made what I make, no matter what you shot, you would have a good day.

But no, it is not the best part of my life, because we always were happy. We couldn't do everything we wanted, we couldn't do maybe most of what we wanted, but our sites were set relatively modestly and we lived a good, happy life. But now I can do, if I want to do anything, I can do whatever I want, when I want, and that's a good feeling.

Q. Do you wish you had had a professional career earlier, as you look back at your life?

ALLEN DOYLE: No, because when you start to evaluate what ‑‑ there's nothing that I did. I always tried to make decisions that were in the best interest of my family and myself, and fortunately I was always able to do that. And so right now, if in fact I answered the quick question you asked me, is this the best it's every been for me, if I said yes, then how could anything I've done not have been the right thing throughout the whole time. So no, I don't wish that I had more money, but I don't spend most of what I've got now, so it really wouldn't matter financially.

Q. Has it changed your lifestyle much?

ALLEN DOYLE: No, we haven't changed it much. We fly private jets now. So I guess people would say, certainly things have changed. You hope they change for the better. But no, I've had the same truck I've had now for three years. My wife has had the same car that we won, an Escalade. She's had that for four years.

We do have a second home down in Panama City Beach, Florida, but we don't ‑‑ you know, I would hope anybody that knew me then and knows me now would say that any little change I've changed has been for the better.

Q. Let me just ask about this. You won the Charles Schwab Cub three years ago, 2000?

ALLEN DOYLE: 2001.

Q. You donated that money to a number of charities. This year you also donated a substantial amount of money, I guess this year?

ALLEN DOYLE: I pledged when I won the Schwab ‑‑ we talk about money and stuff, I won a million dollars from the Schwab Cub and I never accepted the money. I donated ‑‑ I get it in 10‑year installments, but I'll donate that 100 percent to my charity. This year, I don't know how everybody found out about it, other than they saw it on a Web site ‑‑

I'm donating 1.1 million to a college that I went to school at to upgrade the athletic facility. So I am doing something with the money. Hopefully it's productive stuff that's needed. When you have enough, I guess it's time ‑‑ I've said before, there are counters and ‑‑ there are people that accumulate money and like to count it or people that accumulate it and like to do some good with it. I like to think I'm in the latter. And it's because of the Senior Tour, Champions Tour. If somebody had told me if I would have been doing this five years ago, that I would have been doing this stuff, I would have said they were nuts.

Q. Your caddie is going to go to qualifying school?

ALLEN DOYLE: Yes, he is, Greg Hickman. He played the TOUR for a couple of years I think in the early '90s. I'm not 100 percent sure, but he played the TOUR for a couple of years, like any of these guys that turn 50 and they want to give it a go. So it would be the greatest thing in the world, to turn 50 and qualify out here.

Q. What finally made you in your mid '40s decided to have a pro career? What changes later in life that makes you want to do it?

ALLEN DOYLE: My main change, my two daughters were getting ready for college. And if they had come to me and said I want to go to college X that's $30,000 a year, I would have told them they had to pick college Y for half that. So I felt I could teach at my driving range and play and make a little money and make the difference between what I might need and what I had. Then I saw the Senior Tour was booming and that it was something that when I turned 50 maybe I could do.

So it all fit into ‑‑ I didn't do anything sooner because the girls weren't in college yet and I felt that I had to be home. And so the timing was right, the timing was right to turn pro, to work harder on my game, then I may have done if I didn't turn pro until 50. So there were several factors. The money, the hard work to keep my game up, the fact that the girls were going away so I wouldn't be leaving them. It all kind of worked out.

Q. A lot of players have said they didn't like it here this year. Do you like the golf course?

ALLEN DOYLE: I've never not liked the golf course. We're playing for 1.5 to whatever, to 2‑something here. There isn't a golf course that I don't like. But you want championship conditions if you want a good championship. You can't have a sparse rough, you can't have certain other conditions that aren't conducive to determine who is the best player on that particular week.

When you get to some courses, like Silverado is a resort course. Sometimes it's hard to match up conditions for a championship, the conditions for their paying customers. And that's a fact.

And here, of course, we moved here kind of quick last week. But the course, this year, it's a shame it rained because it was in absolute perfect condition, and I think it was set up for ‑‑ I mean, it will still be a great championship, you know, the weather will not normally affect ‑‑ it will affect the turnout of a tournament, but it won't affect the psych and the excitement, that kind of thing. So this place, they could send us anywhere and put up 2‑point‑something million, and all 30 of us ought to have a smile on our face and say let's go.

End of FastScripts.
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