Tyrell Hatton recaps his opening round 69 at the WGC Mexico Championship, 4 shots off the lead.
Q. What was your assessment of today?
TYRRELL HATTON: Overall, pretty happy with that. I’ve only been back hitting balls for the last three and a half weeks, so it was a long layoff. I’m quite happy. Obviously I’ve done well here in the past, so I know the course pretty well, and yeah, it was just good to kind of get back out there and play competitive golf again.
Q. You’ve had three top 20s here. What is it you like about this place?
TYRRELL HATTON: I kind of always enjoy short, kind of fiddly golf courses, I guess, and this is certainly up there with the best of them. And I guess it’s funny because you need patience around here, and that’s something that I don’t really have. For some reason the course has kind of been fairly kind to me, and hopefully it continues this week.
Q. Give us a sense of the conditions out there. The wind seemed to be picking up later on in the round.
TYRRELL HATTON: Yeah, the wind picked up a lot. We noticed it probably from the 7th. Definitely windier than how I remember it in previous years. You can kind of see from the scoring, it’s not really that low. But obviously there’s a few challenges this week with the altitude and the wind obviously swirling around now, so that makes it quite tough for club selection.
Q. Bogeys on 13 and 15, so that was a nice way to finish, wasn’t it?
TYRRELL HATTON: Yeah, I kind of struggled with the putter all day, actually. I gave myself lots of chances, but I was leaving a lot of putts short, and then that one on the last, I kind of — when I stood up over it, I didn’t feel too comfortable, so I kind of just stepped back a little bit, gave myself a tiny bit more room, and it was the best stroke I made all day, and it was nice to see that one go in.
Q. How is the wrist?
TYRRELL HATTON: It’s still not 100 percent, to be perfectly honest. I’ve still got a little twinge there, but I’m hoping that obviously now I’m back playing, kind of it’ll ease up. It is just going to take time. The recovery was a bit longer than we thought it would be. Obviously I was hoping to start my season in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, but this week is a good test for it, give myself four competitive rounds and see how I feel at the end of it. So I don’t want to kind of push it too much if it’s a little bit sensitive at the end of the week, but I don’t think it will be. It’s just a case of kind of getting back out and playing again.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports