What they said: Mark Calcavecchia

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Q. Well played. Top of the leaderboard, sharing the lead after the first round. Happy with that?

MARK CALCAVECCHIA: Definitely. Especially when the weather moved in on 11. It wasn't horrible. But it made it tougher, for sure. And other than that, it was a great day for scoring. So I think not making any bogeys today was nice. So, yes, it was a good score. Good start.

Q. After last week, you don't feel that the weather is following you around, do you?

MARK CALCAVECCHIA: Not really. That place is entirely different. We haven't had hardly any wind here since I've been here. So that's nice. But I think this course, you gotta drive it well. You gotta keep it out of the gorse, out of the fairway bunkers and the gorse. And I did a good job driving it today. I hit one bad drive on 15 and got lucky, hit it kind of in a crosswalk, I thought it was going to be in the gorse and made par. So that was a good break. But you gotta continue to drive it good here.

Q. Bearing in mind you showed a good round in the Open first round last week. You just seem to be able to flip from links golf to playing a Heathland course like Walter Heath without any trouble?

MARK CALCAVECCHIA: It's different. This is more -- the greens are soft. We've had a decent amount of rain. Your short irons are going to hit back-up, a little different for sure. But this is probably a lot more, especially hitting the irons into the greens, what we're used to playing in the states or used to doing. So the greens here are tough. Like I said, you gotta drive it good, and the greens can be tricky to make putts. You'll see some good scores this week. But it's tough to shoot a good score here every day I think.

Q. You're in great shape with three rounds to go?

MARK CALCAVECCHIA: I'll do better on Friday than I did last week. I just got off to a horrible start. And I pretty much was finished by the time I got to the fifth tee. I was 6-over through 4. I played a couple over through the rest of the day, which wasn't that bad. But just a couple of bad breaks early and a bad drive and the next thing you know it's the end of the tournament for me. So that's the kind of stuff that can happen in weather like that on a course like that.

Q. You had only five practices holes at the Open. How many --

MARK CALCAVECCHIA: 18. I played Tuesday. We didn't know what to do. When you miss the cut over there, you've got six days until this tournament starts. That's a long time. And we sat around Saturday trying to figure out what we were going to do. And opted to just come over here and then go hop on a Euro Star and we went over to Paris for a day and a half to waste a little bit of time and money.

Transcripts courtesy of ASAP Sports.