What they said: Geoff Ogilvy

JOHN BUSH: We'd like to welcome Geoff Ogilvy into the interview room. He enters the TOUR Championship by Coca Cola No. 24 in the FedExCup standings, making his fifth start at this event. Take us back to last week, third place finish at BMW, exactly what you needed to do to get here.
GEOFF OGILVY: Yeah, last week was obviously pretty good for me. You often we don't often, I guess, but you have sometimes you can weeks in golf where you have to do something or you have to have a good finish and you often don't do that, so it's nice to actually have one where you had to do it, and do it. So it's a tough course, Cog Hill. I've never really played very well around there. I think I played okay the year that Stephen Ames won.
But I've always found it quite tough. So to have a good week like that was pretty good. Sunday was pretty tough withholding the umbrella up all day and it was cold and rainy and not exactly what you want to see when you play golf. But I played my best on Sunday, and I probably played my best over the last five or six holes, which was nice. So it's good to be here.
Q. Do you ever go back to being stuck on that rock on 17 at Boston and wonder how you got here?
GEOFF OGILVY: I don't often, but
Q. You had to take a penalty, right?
GEOFF OGILVY: I did. It was in a pretty deep hole. At that point I didn't think I was going to be playing in Chicago when I was picking the ball out of the hole. But I didn't really know, actually. I thought it was going well before that to be honest because I wasn't playing very well that day. I wasn't really sure, actually. But yeah, I wasn't definitely wasn't thinking of being here when I was in that hole. So the fact that I am is pretty nice.
Q. Luke was in here yesterday, and I asked him kind of the $10 million question, and his thoughts going into it was, well, we're all pretty set anyways, we've got a little bit of a bank account, and the $10 million is nice but I don't really think about it too much. Is that the case with you? And if not, do you really need the $10 million to get yourself excited to play in these events?
GEOFF OGILVY: It's less, I think, about what's going to end up in your bank account and more about the principle of holing a putt or doing like getting up and down like Jimmy did last year. It sounds better when you say that, doesn't it? The money is obviously really nice, but it's like beating your friend for $2 on the putting green. I mean, it's better to beat him for $2 than it is just to beat him for the fun of it, you know what I mean? There would be something about coming down the last nine holes, this is for $10 million and doing it. Irrelevant of what ends up in your bank account, it just sounds better, don't you think?
Q. To me, yeah.
GEOFF OGILVY: That's part of the appeal of the FedExCup is that carrot dangling at the end, whether we need the money or not. The first few guys who have won it Tiger probably didn't even notice it going in his bank account. It was all retirement at that point anyway, wasn't it?
Q. The first one was.
GEOFF OGILVY: Yeah. Vijay would have noticed it go in. That's going to make a difference. Most guys out here have got a lot of money and it's not going to be a life changer, but guys are going to be pretty happy with it, I think. It makes a difference.
Q. When you were young did you play golf when you were young?
GEOFF OGILVY: Uh huh. I started when I was about five or six probably.
Q. Did your golf game when you were young affect what you do today?
GEOFF OGILVY: Probably, I think. I can't really remember, but I think so. I think it all starts there. I think if you start off doing all the right things, good things happen later on, I think. I wish I could go back and change a few things, what I thought was the priorities of what I worked on. I wish I had worked a bit more on my short game when I was a youngster and not my long game.
But I think it all when guys get out here, it's an accumulation of everything they've done their whole golfing life. So I think everything you do from day one is pretty important, I think.
Q. Just wondering if you could talk a little bit about growing up near Royal Melbourne right next to that track and why you bought that house and how close it is and how cool it's going to be to walk to work in the morning when you're over there.
GEOFF OGILVY: Well, it's a pretty cool place to grow up if you play golf. Quite spoiled because Royal Melbourne, like a lot of the greats, is probably a hair short these days, but it truly is a top 10 course in the world. It's an astonishing property, really.
Next door is Victoria Golf Club, which was right up there. Kingston Heath is just around the corner and it's a whole supporting cast. It's a bit like out on Long Island or Westchester County or any of these places in the world, or Surrey in England that are dense with some of the best golf courses in the world around every corner. That's that area in Melbourne.
It was also probably the most visible golf course in Australia, especially through the '80s, because it had golf tournaments it seemed like every year, Australian Opens, famous ones where the greens got too fast, and Greg led a walk off in '87, but then he won the tournament by 10. Watson won in '84. There's a massive tournament called the Bicentennial Classic in 1988 where the whole world where effectively the top 50 in the world played. It was maybe one of the first World Golf Championship type events. There was a World Cup there in 1988, as well. Allenby nearly won the Australian Open as an amateur in 1991.
It was the golf course in Australia that was the best golf course, and it was also the golf course where great things happened in professional golf, and I grew up right next door, so it was pretty nice. A lot of times I would have a ticket but the gate was right around the other side of the property, so I would just jump the fence to get in because that was the easiest. I wouldn't go to school and mom and dad would go to work, and I would jump the fence because that was the quick way. And the other way I had to walk a mile and a half to get to the golf course.
Q. So you were, A, cutting school; and B, hopping the fence?
GEOFF OGILVY: Pretty much, yeah. As I said, a lot of times I had a ticket anyway, but I wasn't going to walk all the way around to the gate. I might as well just jump the fence. I never got caught. I think a lot of people used to do it. I think probably people do it a lot less; it's probably harder to do it these days, but in those days. So I spent a lot of my young life watching professionals play around Royal Melbourne, so a big part of the reason I play golf, I guess. To go back there and I watched the last Presidents Cup in '98, the weekend anyway. I had just turned professional, and I was blown away with the magnitude of the excitement. I just had never seen anything like that on a golf course.
Like anybody, I think, when you first go see a team event, you can't understand that it's just incredible, the atmosphere. I was pretty blown away by that and I guess secretly hoping that it would happen in Australia again.