Q. Ryan, nice playing with a 3-under, 67. Thoughts on the golf course and the way you played today.

RYAN FOX: Yeah, the golf course is fun, especially after last week, getting beaten up a little bit. Come here, and it's still tricky. Obviously the greens are small. They started to firm up nicely today, but you feel like you've got some room around here, but you've got to maneuver your ball really well.

I did that really well the front nine and kind of hung on on my back nine, the front nine, and came out with a pretty decent score this morning.

Q. You just said the driving stood out for you the most today?

RYAN FOX: I drove it really well on the back nine, kept it in play a lot, gave myself plenty of chances. Barring a couple of three-putts on 1 and 3, I had a lot of good stuff. A couple of times when I was in trouble later on on my back nine, I got it up and down for par. You've got to do that round here. It's going to be pretty easy to miss greens with them being small and firm.

Q. The story with the pneumonia after Hilton Head and then going home to New Zealand, having a baby, coming back for the PGA Championship on a really, really difficult golf course. How did you go through that process and then play there well enough to have a good week there?

RYAN FOX: I was a bit surprised I had pneumonia. I felt awful at the Masters on the weekend. Tried to play Hilton Head and had nothing left. I thought I'm just run down, tired, maybe a chest infection or something. I went home and was told I had pneumonia, which explained why I felt so bad. It honestly took a few weeks to get over that.

It was quite nice putting the clubs away completely and being dead at home. When I started to feel better, then number two was born, little Margot. Spent probably ten days not getting as much sleep as I'd like. I definitely had to manage the time well in preparation.

I didn't play a lot of golf in the leadup to the PGA, and to be honest, I wasn't expecting that much, but I was kind of hoping being mentally fresh would sort of make up for it and it definitely did.

I played pretty bad the first round but got away with it and had a really good score, then actually played a lot better Friday through Sunday. Didn't quite put a score together, but I kind of felt like the game was really close, and that showed today.

Q. That led you to becoming eligible for a temporary membership of the TOUR, which you accepted. This is your first event as a temporary member. Congratulations. What's the plan going forward as far as your schedule?

RYAN FOX: I haven't quite figured that out, but it was a big goal this year to get that. I knew I was going to get some starts from the top 50, and to get it done in seven events, if you count Hilton Head, pretty happy to do that.

I've got some opportunities now later in the year, and I guess the goal for next year is to get a full PGA TOUR card, whether that's getting that through the DP World Tour, and I'm sitting okay on the money list there up to this point, or whether it's getting it through top 125.

I've kind of got a foot in each camp at the moment. So it kind of depends how I play the next few weeks and what the schedule's going to be going forward.

Q. When you came here, I'm assuming you hadn't played here before until Tuesday when you got your first look at the course. When you went around, did you get a good feeling from the setup, whether it suited your eye? Does it sort of compare to anything that you've seen before?

RYAN FOX: Yeah, I really enjoyed the golf course on Tuesday. It reminds me of home a little bit, apart from the grass. We don't get Bermuda grass at all in New Zealand, but I played a fair bit of it in Aussie and a bit of it in Florida in the past, so it doesn't feel too foreign.

The sort of tight dogleg kind of heading across fairways, that's something we get a lot in New Zealand and what I grew up playing. So I kind of enjoy this style of golf, and I sort of took the theory I was going to take the golf course on a little bit, hit driver a lot. I drove it really good today and sort of took advantage of it.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

132988-1-1182 2023-05-25 17:19:00 GMT

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