Q. What did you do best today in your round?
J.J. SPAUN: I struck my irons a lot better than I had all week. I started to get it more in the fairway, too, yesterday, so it was kind of a good combination of everything starting to click.
Q. Where were you at with your irons at the start of the week and what's changed?
J.J. SPAUN: It was awful. It started at the Scottish. I don't know if it was the turf over there or the wind direction of the range all week there. It just got in my head and I started thinking about my swing, and I didn't have my best stuff there or at The Open.
Then we didn't get back home until the following week, so then all week last week I was just grinding trying to find it and didn't make any progress literally until maybe yesterday. But I got here Monday, worked with my coach. We were kind of trying different things. It wasn't really how I wanted it to be.
But last night we found a nice piece in my swing that I was missing and ran with that today, and it felt really good. The irons were a lot better today.
Q. That seems to happen; players always talk about when they go over to Scotland sometimes the swing gets away. You said it kind of got in your head. How did you get rid of it and try to move on?
J.J. SPAUN: Yeah, I kind of had to figure out what I was doing over there that felt different than what I would do here, and I felt like because the turf is so tight there and dry, like my angle of attack was getting more steep just to compress it more, whereas out here it's more lush, softer, easier to sweep it. I'm a pretty shallow guy. I try to be. That kind of threw me off throughout the entire swing.
We were just trying to figure out how to find the face again, and we managed pretty well this week.
Q. What was your confidence level on, say, Wednesday?
J.J. SPAUN: It was like a 2, honestly. I had no idea what I was going to shoot this week. I didn't know what part of my game was going to be good because I spent so much time working on my swing at home that I didn't even do any short game, so now it's like, how rusty is my short game and my putting.
I like to freak out. I don't like to freak out, but I always end up freaking out. I kind of did this before the U.S. Open, too, kind of going down rabbit holes the week before the U.S. Open.
I don't know. I like feeling uncomfortable in my swing and then finding something to lean on so when I'm out there, it's like, okay, lean on this feel.
Q. Does it feel good now with the position that you're in?
J.J. SPAUN: Yeah, it felt really good today. Hopefully I don't lose that feel by tomorrow.
Q. Does it feel good knowing that all week you haven't had to worry about top 50 or you don't have to worry about top 30? Is it good to know you can try to find something there when you were struggling, go for the next couple weeks?
J.J. SPAUN: Yeah, you're trying to peak for East Lake, honestly. We just are looking at this stretch of weeks as 12 rounds, and my coach put it in a great way where every day we're just trying to improve, whether it was hitting or ball-striking or putting and short game. Each day we've done that incrementally better.
Q. A lot of sporting events you see a moment of silence for a lot of different things. You usually don't see it in a round of golf. Talk about what happened today at 2:59; Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, passed away a few weeks ago. Take us through that moment of the plane, how important it was for the city and for you guys to be a part of that moment.
J.J. SPAUN: Yeah, it's huge. FedEx is so big in this community and so huge for this golf tournament, and to honor Fred in that flyover was really awesome, and seeing his initials on the belly of the plane was really cool.
We took off our hats and paid our respects to what he created and what he's done with this tournament as well.
Very awesome to have his influence still remembered today.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports