Fear of Masters discipline? Snake fighting? Here are the PGA’s BEST quotes

Cam Young talked about his iPhone. 

And Xander Schauffele talked about trees. 

And Jesse Droemer talked about snakes. 

And Keegan Bradley talked about Bud Light and cereal. 

Talk, talk, talk, talk. It can be cheap, as the saying goes — but major championship press conferences are more than sessions full of other commonly spoken phrases. Maybe that’s due to what’s at stake. Maybe that’s because of the questions. But the answers are more than thoughts about the need to keep the ball in the fairway and the desire to make putts. There’s occasional gold spoken from the dais. 

After 15 press conferences over the past three days at the PGA Championship — should you be curious, the pressers lasted nearly five hours — here, then, are a few things that were spoken:

Cam Young was asked about his iPhone 

Young is reserved, but an easy way into a person’s personality is through a question into how long they scroll. 

“It depends,” he said. “If I’m on my own on the road, it’s a lot more. It’s probably four hours or something. And if I’m at home with my family, it’s probably more on the order of half that.

“I try to be conscious of it. So I know when I’m by myself, it’s somewhere in the four, four-and-a-half range, and when I’m not, when I’m at home, it’s usually two or under two.”

What does he look at when he’s on his own? 

“I don’t know,” Young said. “I go on YouTube. I like to read articles. I look at golf swing videos for more time than I’d like to admit, yeah.”

Luke Donald was asked whether he brings Ryder Cup talk to the dinner table 

To best capture the moment, here is the complete exchange between European Ryder Cup captain Luke Donald and a reporter, with the reporter’s question in italics. 

Luke, you’re clearly a firmly organized fellow and very good at details and things. I’m just wondering how you cope with all the issues of the Ryder Cup? I mean, you must have had hundreds of questions before Bethpage, before you took the job on and since you agreed to do it. I’m wondering if you and Diane [his wife] have an agreement that over dinner you’ll talk about wine, painting and the family and anything other than the Ryder Cup?

“I think the dynamic between Diane and I is interesting,” Donald said. “I don’t get too involved — especially when it comes closer to the Ryder Cup.

“Right now we’re certainly having some discussions together at dinner whenever the time is right about the team spaces. Certainly I don’t talk to her about the golf course. She doesn’t really talk to me about ladies clothes.

“I just have complete trust in what she does, and she has complete trust in what I do. There are some overlaps. Like right now we’re talking about team spaces. There’s a distinct difference between part of the hotel to the other. One’s a ballroom, one’s sort of part of the old hotel, and which might be better for our team. Those are things we would discuss together.

“But there’s definitely stuff that I have complete faith in what she does, and she has complete faith in what I do. So we don’t need to go into too much detail then.

You don’t have a feeling, ‘Look, we have to stop talking about this. There are other things going on.’

“I mean, we talk about other stuff as well,” Donald said. “If something is needed [to be] discussed with the Ryder Cup that involves both of us, then we talk about it. If not, we’re just dealing with everyday life.”

Scottie Scheffler talked about why Masters practice rounds are so calm 

Scottie Scheffler was asked whether he treats major weeks the same as normal tournament weeks, and he said that wasn’t possible, as each environment is different — and the one at Augusta National was especially so. 

“When you look at the Masters,” he said, “you look at the practice rounds there, and the Masters is like the only place on earth where people actually follow the rules because they’re just afraid to get kicked out all the time. So those practice rounds are actually quite calm in terms of there’s not a lot of yelling, there’s nobody running around, there’s not a ton of noise. Except when you’re swinging, there’s camera clicks on every single shot because people are allowed to have real cameras out there. So you’re at the top of your backswing, for every practice round, it’s just camera clicks.

“You come here and there’s a lot of noise and a lot of energy. That’s why you can’t treat them quite the same because there’s so much energy around the tournament. You come into the press room, there’s more people, more fans, more noise. There’s just a lot more stuff going on.”

Xander Schauffele was asked about trees 

To set this up, a topic this week has been the trees at Aronimink Golf Club, or the absence of a few, following a renovation. That led to this back-and-forth between Xander Schauffele and the Associated Press’ Doug Ferguson, who are friendly with each other. Ferguson’s comments are in italics. 

Pardon the vagueness, but do you like trees?

“I do like trees, Doug” Schauffele said. “Do you like trees?”

I like trees, too, Xander. Let’s do ‘Cat in the Hat’ next. In terms of a golf course …

“I know where you’re going,” Schauffele said. “Go ahead.”

Go somewhere then. Keep making me work.

“Yeah, when I hear certain designers saying, ‘I’m going to restore this course to 1915,’ I’m like, ‘Well, it probably takes a good 100 years for a nice tree to grow, just to take it out, just to say it was where it was before,” Schauffele said. 

“I think people keep talking about distance and how the game is played, but just put a bunch of trees on a course — I think Hilton Head is a good example. Do I like Hilton Head? Not really. But it’s hard. It’s kind of crazy, if you look at the winning score at Hilton Head and the winning score at Doral — one’s called Hilton Head, and one’s called the Blue Monster — you’re like, I think the winning score at Miami is lower. It’s just funny when you kind of look at it in that sense.”

“That’s all I have to say to your tree question.”

Is it more framing, or is it more trouble?

“It’s just hard,” Schauffele said. “I think when you have — like this rough, for example, if we had trees in the rough and you hit it in it, this week you’ll see guys kind of gouging it towards the green. If there’s a tree there, you’d be chipping out sideways. This is the type of rough where you can’t get a ball to curve at all. You just grab a high-lofted club and hit a knuckleball and have it kind of trundle somewhere.

“There’s certain weeks where the rough is, you can kind of curve it a little bit. But there’s reasons guys are praying to be on the pine straw or dirt when they hit it off line, versus being in thick rough, just because you can get some movement on the golf ball.”

Collin Morikawa talked about his caddie’s help with his water bottle 

Collin Morikawa has been battling a back injury, and he noted who’s been helping him through it, including his caddie, who did a relatively simple task in which Morikawa was appreciative. 

“Yeah, it’s everyone,” Morikawa said. “I’ve got great physios at home, I’ve got a great physio on the road. Rick Sessinghaus and I have been working for quite some time and talking about the mental game and finding ways to feel comfortable out there. He’s a big, big proponent and component of me being able to play out here, so I owe a lot to him. 

“But I owe a lot of credit to Mark Urbanek, my caddie. At the Masters, we were doing things that just didn’t make sense from simply like him handing me my water bottle. I think it’s ridiculous for him to hand me my water bottle, but if it was going to save me one extra bend that was going to make me uncomfortable, he’s going to do it. So I give him a lot of credit over the last few months of sticking with me through the chaotic things I’m asking for.”

Jesse Droemer was asked about broken bones and snakes 

Jesse Droemer, one of the 20 club pros in the field, went into detail about previous injuries. 

“Yeah, I would say the biggest injuries that affected my golf,” he said, “I broke my left wrist pretty bad when I was probably 10. I broke three bones in my ankle in football. That was pretty rough. But yeah, it’s been 13 broken bones. It’s been a battle. But at the end of the day, it just makes me feel grateful to be healthy and to not have to deal with pain anymore.

A reporter then asked Droemer to confirm whether he had also once been bitten by a snake.

“Yeah, I was in my backyard, I was like 12 or so and stepped on a water moccasin,” Droemer said. “My mom didn’t believe me. I told her I just stepped on a snake, and she just kind of shrugged it off. Then I actually fainted, and my toe was about this big [a couple of inches]. So she had to rush me to the hospital. And then I used to go down into the Brazos River with a machete and boots and look for golf balls. So I had to fight off snakes for that.”

“But, yeah, that was pretty serious. But after that, I don’t really have a fear of it anymore, so …”

Fighting snakes?

“Well, I couldn’t afford Pro V1s back then,” Droemer said, “so I would sell the kind of beat-up ones and I would keep the best ones. So in tournaments I wasn’t going to lose a golf ball that I fought off snakes for.”

Rory McIlroy was asked about Scottie Scheffler 

Rory McIlroy, the world’s second-ranked player, was asked about what he admires about Scheffler, the top-ranked player. Answers to this type of question are oftentimes good, as they’re complimentary — and they give a peek into what the player would want for themselves. 

“I think it is, it’s his relentlessness,” McIlroy said. “It’s his — the comfort in which he does the same things over and over. It’s the little — it’s not flashy, but he dots his I’s and crosses his T’s and does all the right things.

“Yeah, I just think it’s that relentless pursuit of the process and not just letting the outcome happen. Whatever that means is what it means.

“I’ve said, again, I think his faith has a big part to do with how comfortable he is with doing that because he accepts whatever happens, whatever comes his way, and he moves on.

“He just doesn’t seem — there’s not a lot of volatility there in his life and in his game, and I think that sets him up so well for the future.”

Jordan Spieth was asked about grilling meat and his swing 

To properly capture this moment, here is the complete exchange between Jordan Spieth and a reporter, with the reporter’s question in italics. 

I read something where you used an analogy of grilling meat to describe the process of working on getting your swing back to where you want it to be. Where did that analogy come from and how is it going?

“I was just kind of thinking,” Spieth said, “I was smoking chicken in the fall on a big smoker I have and it got up to 155 quickly and then takes awhile. I was like, man, this kind of feels like — I was working on stuff and I was — it kind of feels like what I’m trying to do in the swing. I go play and it’s a little bit out of the barriers that we call sustainable. Kind of outside the margins that we call OK.

“So, I don’t know, I kind of was just thinking about it one day and came to me.

“But yeah, it seems to be — I don’t know how — if it’s that way for everybody and just seemed that way for me right now where, you know, it’s there, it’s there. It’s like close. It’s matching what I want to do. It feels good and it’s producing right stuff.

“And then, you know, if it just gets — it’s just not quite consistent enough yet to be able to be contending week in and week out.

“But I know what to do and how to get there. It’s just I have to stay the course and just trust that it will happen.”

Is [smoking] a hobby of yours?

“Not really,” Spieth said, “I’m very average. Probably a 15-handicap at it. In the fall, it’s fun sometimes.”

Keegan Bradley talked about Bud Light and cereal 

Bradley was asked how he celebrated his win at the 2011 PGA Championship, and he answered this way:

“So after the PGA in ’11, my mom and sister were there, and I remember my agent, Ben, was there, and I remember driving out of the Atlanta Athletic Club with the Wanamaker in my lap, holding it like this [in his lap], and we were looking at each other like, this is crazy. Like I was holding it.

“And then I went — we tried to — it was Sunday night. We were trying to get some beers or something. Everything was closed. And we went back, and I had Bud Light and cereal for dinner. We still have a picture of it in my house somewhere.

“And then I took the trophy and put it right next to my bed. I remember waking up in the morning and looking at it, like this is crazy. I can’t believe this.

“And then I got back, and a few of my buddies picked me up. I was single and 25 years old, and all my buddies picked me up from the airport. We went on a few-day celebration tour with the trophy, bringing it everywhere.

“One of those moments that you get to share with people, and you know, some of the fondest memories of my life.”

Did he remember the cereal?

“I forget what it was,” Bradley said. “… Whatever — I was starving. It was midnight. After you’re done with media, and I just remember like thinking, how surreal this was. It was Bud Light and cereal. It was the best meal of my life. Like one minute I’m a rookie and now I’m a major champion and I’m looking on my Twitter and every couple minutes, I’ve gotten 1,000 new followers. It was crazy, the night and the next following couple weeks.”

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