We’d like to welcome the champion of the 2022 Honda Classic, Sepp Straka, into the interview room. Sepp earns his first victory on the PGA TOUR after entering the day five strokes back, becomes the first Austrian to win on the PGA Tour. And the 14th player from the University of Georgia. Just start us off, just an opening comment on what it means to win your first victory on TOUR.
Sepp Straka: It’s crazy. It’s a lifelong dream of mine just to be heading to Augusta in a month or so. It’s still surreal. I’m sure it’ll sink in here before long, but yeah, it’s just crazy.
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You move to No. 14 in the FedExCup standings with the win. If you could, just explain what this does for you setting up the rest of the season for you.
Straka: Yeah, I mean, you get to pick your schedule for one. You get to go to places you like to play at. It’s huge. I had a pretty bad fall. Didn’t really play my best and kind of turned it around and been playing really well as of late, and it’s just awesome to be able to capitalize.
Related: Sepp Straka makes it a first for himself and Austria
This gives you a good chance to get into the TOUR Championship and accomplish a lot of those goals that you set out at the beginning of the season. What would it mean for you to reach that benchmark, especially a Valdosta native and a University of Georgia graduate?
Straka: It would be awesome. Atlanta is always the end goal of the year, and to have kind of a good start heading in there down the stretch her in the summer, it’s going to be fun to try to get there.
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When you bogey the 1st, what does that do as far as did you just forget it and just move on, next play, next hole? Is that the thinking there?
Straka: No. I was pretty pissed, but I knew that I’d been putting really well all week. I had been reading — at that point I had been reading the greens great. We’d been putting a lot of good rolls on it. It’s just one of those things where when the greens get as fast as they are here, it gets windy, you’re going to have some misses. So you do have to kind of try to get over it and try to make the next one.
At what point did you feel that you had a legitimate shot to win the tournament?
Straka: I knew going into the round that I had a chance. This course is crazy. There’s no gimme holes at all. You’ve got to be on it. And there was only one guy I thought ahead of me, so I knew if I just kept my head down and just tried to score maybe the best score I could on every hole, just try to make the best swing I could, in the end there was a good chance of being there.
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I heard a story that when you were young you chose golf over soccer because it didn’t require as much moving around. (Laughter) Do you care to comment on that?
Straka: Well, I was a goalie so there wasn’t that much going on anyways. But, yeah, my brother and I kind of made that move together. We did a summer camp, and he really decided that we were going to start playing a little more golf. That’s kind of how we got into it.
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