Paul Waring: Open talk
- Friday, 18 July 2008
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The cheer I got when I birdied 18 is the biggest cheer I have ever got! I am buzzing and so chuffed. My first day at the Open has been great, I absolutely loved it.
I was obviously very nervous on the 1st tee but I had my whole family here and loads of friends and they are a really rowdy bunch, which is just brilliant. So that helped calm me down and I feel like I’ve learnt to deal with my emotions a little better in the last year.
My day started in pretty relaxed fashion. I was teeing off at 12, so I got up at 8.30, had a lazy shower and breakie – just a light one, a bit of cereal, yoghurt, bit of fruit. I’ll keep the fry-ups for the weekend! Then I left at 10 because it’s not your usual warm-up routine here, it takes a bit of time to get to the practice ground, a bit of time to get to the putting green what with getting shuttles everywhere and all the people. It’s just something else that you have to adapt to.
When I got to the course it was straight out to the range. I didn’t spend that long there because of the conditions and to be honest I was really conscious of not getting my stuff too wet, it sounds silly but I think it was important.
On a day like today it’s not about how you are hitting it on the range it’s literally just going there to warm your body up. So I did that and then a little bit of chipping round the green and then it was back to the clubhouse to warm-up and dry off and then I left my bag there to keep things dry and headed to do a little bit of putting, just on my own. To be honest lots of it was about keeping stuff as dry as possible.
I was really happy with my trio. I had a good chat with Kevin [Stadler] and a lot of laughs but Hennie [Otto] had a bit of a struggle and it’s hard to talk to someone when things aren’t going that well for them, you don’t really know what to stay so you just leave it. But he seems like a decent lad and we had a good laugh together on the 1st tee. It’s good to laugh because it keeps it nice and light and jovial.
My heart was really pumping on 4 when I holed my first Open birdie putt. It really got me going, then 10, 11, 12 three really stupid bogeys but that was golf today out there – you were going to make mistakes!
Now it’s just a question of getting some food, sticking a DVD on and chilling out, nothing too heavy, I’ve got a 6.50am tee time!
