Q. Good round of golf on what I thought was a little more difficult day than maybe we expected with the soft greens especially. How would you assess your round?
AARON RAI: Yeah, really good start. There was definitely a little more wind than forecast for yesterday. There was some chances, if you were driving it well. But it's one of those courses that can also bite you very, very fast, so it's kind of a fine line. Yeah, it was a good test out there and it was a good day.
Q. You know this golf course well, how would you assess your strengths on it, because I feel the way that you drive the ball, the accuracy off the tee, especially the way the rough is with the overseed, how important is it for you to lean into that strength of finding fairways?
AARON RAI: Yeah, I think fairways most weeks on the PGA TOUR are absolutely crucial. As you said, the rough this week with the overseed and also with the rain that we had earlier this week is definitely a little thick, but you can actually get lies where it really sits on top, which makes it easy to strike the ball, but it can be very hard to judge how it's going to come out. So you can get a mixed bag when it's sitting on top. Driving is crucial. The holes have a lot of shape as well, left-to-right, right-to-left, so being able to shape it at times to match the fairways isn't imperative, but it's helpful.
Q. You make your home here, you can see the golf course whenever you want, versus this week in championship time, it plays differently this week. How do you have to kind of learn the golf course or manage what you know about the golf course when you're specifically trying to win it this week?
AARON RAI: Yeah, it's a great question. For the most part they keep the fairways pretty short. The rough is relatively lush. Tee to green it's very similar to what we play this week. It can sometimes get a little firmer tee to green. But I feel the greens are the biggest difference. They're a lot faster and they're a lot firmer, and they will get firmer as the week goes on. And there are breaks that you don't normally see 11 months of the year. So I think there's definitely a lot of knowledge that you can apply tee to green which stands you in good stead, but I think it's very hard to rely too much on what you've seen on the greens from practicing here, just because they roll at a different speed and break slightly differently as well.
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