The Official Site of Hunter Mahan

Fri, Sep 5th 2008, 09:30

Hunter Mahan interview at the BMW Championship

Hunter’s interview with PGAtour.com
Q. Thank you for joining us here in a rain-soaked first round of the BMW Championship. Maybe just some opening comments. Obviously a wash today but maybe what you expect here this week in St. Louis.

HUNTER MAHAN: Yeah, it’s a solid course. I haven’t been here in — the TOUR hasn’t been here in a long time, so I think everyone is pretty excited about being here. It’s obviously a great golf course. I think everyone is excited to be here. Obviously the hurricane is affecting everybody, so it’s affecting us right now. Luckily it’s a short field so we can get it all in this week hopefully. I think everyone is excited to be here.

The Western Golf Association runs a great event, and I think all the players are excited to see this golf course.

Q. What do you like about the playoff system the way it is now, and do you think there could be any tweaks?

HUNTER MAHAN: Well, now it’s — I had no idea that it was going to be so severe in the movement from playing good to playing bad. I mean, if you don’t play well, you know, you’ve got Padraig Harrington, you fall like a rock no matter how good your year has been.

It’s pretty neat that starting it there was — literally everybody in the field had a chance to win it at the end, which is good. But there’s also some negative in the fact that someone could get hot for a couple weeks and be in the TOUR Championship, and the TOUR Championship will get you into the Masters, even though you haven’t really maybe played well enough to be in the Masters, I don’t know. So I think it’s a little extreme. But it does give everybody a chance to win, which is pretty neat, because the prize is pretty — the prize is so big that the fact that pretty much everybody who stepped on the tee a couple weeks ago had a chance to win it, it’s pretty interesting.

Q. How did you pass the time this morning?

HUNTER MAHAN: Well, luckily it wasn’t too much time. I mean, I woke up, saw it was absolutely pouring down rain, figured we were going to be delayed, heard we were. So I was still running, figured I ought to come out to the course just to be safe, just to see if we were going to play or not. I looked at the course. Luckily I’ve heard the drainage is exceptional here, and it looks pretty good. For the amount of rain we’ve had, for most courses it would have been over the first couple hours of rain. The zoysia fairways are strong — it’s a strong grass. It can take just about anything.

I thought we might be able to play, but obviously you can hear the rain falling right now. I don’t think it has any intentions of stopping for a long time. But there’s only 70 guys in the field, so I don’t think playing 36 one day is going to be that big a deal.

Q. Have you talked to any of your Ryder Cup teammates about what the pressure is like, the actual playing of the event? Have you got a feel for what you’re in store for, and do you think that you can prepare yourself for that or just have to wait until you see what it’s like?

HUNTER MAHAN: Yeah, I don’t think you can prepare yourself for something like that. I just think you have to have — me personally, I’m just going to try to have the right attitude about it. I’m looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to that pressure and the situations that we can have. I think it’s great because it’s just one event. It’s just three days. It’s just you against the two guys or the one guy you’ve got in front of you, and I think that’s so neat. You don’t have to worry about the field, you don’t have to worry about each hole and playing one shot at a time. I mean, you can just play one hole at a time and just play aggressively and just have fun at it.

I think being home, being the underdog like we are, I think we’re all really going to embrace that and really be excited to play. I think we’re going to have guys who want to win, and we’re going to try to go out there and win. I haven’t really talked to anybody about it. I think it’s — I mean, I was lucky enough to be there in ’99 on Friday, and you could just feel it in the air. It was one of the more amazing things I’ve ever seen, just the intensity, the excitement with every shot.

But it’s great. You don’t — I mean, it only happens every two years, so it’s going to be exciting. I think the fans are going to be crazy in Kentucky. I have an idea what to expect, but it’s hard to put it into words.

Q. You were at the ’99 as a Ryder Cup spectator?

HUNTER MAHAN: Yeah, just as a spectator. They had the Junior Ryder Cup a couple days beforehand, and they took all the kids and stuff, we all went there on Friday and watched it.

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