Q+a Lee Westwood

SI: You were only 25 when you won here, the start of a four-year run that shot you to fourth in the World Ranking. Now you haven't won in 31 months and you're ranked 246th. Are you trying to recover some good karma here?

LW: It is nice to come back to a place where I have good memories. I'd like to play more events over here, but since my World Ranking has dropped, it's difficult to get invites.

SI: At your last event, in Portugal, you shot an 81 in the first round and said you were lucky to have broken 90. Did you mean it?

LW: Yeah, I guess I did. It's funny what comes out of your mouth when you're in that frame of mind. SI: Has it been hard to keep your English sense of humor during your slump?

LW: You're asked the same question all the time about not playing well, and you say things like that to keep yourself entertained. I'm not going to walk around being miserable about things.

SI: For those who don't get to see you play very often, what's wrong with your game?

LW: I still hit some good shots, but the bad shots have been really bad. My distance control has been poor because the strike's been poor. Then, I started working so much on the range on the long game that the short game started to suffer.

SI: How did things start falling apart in the first place?

LW: I felt my swing starting to get away from me toward the end of 2000, even though I won the Order of Merit At the start of the following year I took off three months to be with [wife] Laurae for the birth of our little boy, Sam. I'd been playing so much for so long, I wanted a break.

SI: Do you regret that time off?