Ogilvy's Pre-PGA Press Conference

A few highlights from Geoff Ogilvy's sit down with the press:

I think it would be unfortunate if course setups kept getting longer and longer and longer. I think there would be better ways, I think, to combat how far had we hit it. The longer you make a golf course, the more you encourage guys to hit driver and hit it a long way.

Hoylake was a pretty stellar example of that. You've got guys scared to hit driver on fairways that were really quite wide and the rough was not a big deal. You've got the best golfer in history not wanting to hit driver. I think a lesson needs to be learned from Hoylake, and there's definitely ways to test the best golfers in the world in how far we hit it and discourage hitting it a long way, as opposed to a long golf course you encourage people to hit driver and hit it as long as they can. Hopefully lessons are learned from places like Hoylake and St. Andrews and they start looking at other ways, as opposed to tacking on another 30 yards to every par 4 and every par 5 on a golf course.

There's a par 3 out here over water that's a 2 iron. I mean, yesterday, 13, Tim Clark hit a wood and I hit a 2 iron, and I hit a 2 iron quite a long way, and that's to a front pin. That's a par 3. It's not fun to have a tee on a golf course that the members can't play. I mean, I'm sure there's 30 members at Medinah who can play that tee, but they probably don't want to because they'll probably just be dropping balls in the water all the time. It would be nice if 244 is the limit to a par 3 length, anyway.

And...

Hoylake was, keep it out of the bunkers; anything you could do to keep it out of the bunkers. The rough was actually not a bad spot to be. It was almost better than the fairways in a lot of situations because you had an angle, but you just had to keep it out of fairways bunkers. So that was the whole goal there.

Here it's probably keep it out of the rough. Fairway bunkers are probably a good spot to be in a lot of situations. There's a lot of overhanging trees, a lot of holes where you can be on the fairways like you can hit the left hand side of 16 and be on the fairway and have no shot. You want to just work out what sides of what fairways to be on and go from there because there's a lot of spots off the tee that you get up there and they're not very good, and there's a lot of spots that appear bad that are actually pretty good spots. That's what I look for, just to make the second shot as easy as possible, and that generally makes the rest of the hole play easier. Sometimes that's a long drive; sometimes that's a short one.