Player Blog: Patrick Reed

Ahead of his appearance in this week’s UBS Hong Kong Open, Patrick Reed talks European Tour membership, cowboy boots, Ryder Cup and more…

I’ve loved playing on the European Tour these last years.It definitely teaches you how to manage your golf game and your schedule. If you only play on the PGA Tour, the longest flight you'll have is three and a half hours and you can over work while you're at events because of it. Every time I've played on The European Tour, I've gone overseas and that teaches you to really get the most out of your practices, because you only have three or four hours to practice rather than six, but you're getting the most out of all those hours. It's taught me how to handle different time zones and getting your body adjusted quicker, because there's nothing more difficult than traveling and having huge time zone changes and also having short weeks. Coming straight from the Bahamas, this week is going to be the biggest time zone change I've ever had with such short week, not touching a club until Wednesday, not seeing the golf course at all. Luckily I played it last year but to be on a 13 hour time change is going to be interesting. We've definitely worked hard enough and played enough overseas to know how to handle it, though, so now is the time to put it into play.

Travelling a lot you need to have your flight game down.I don’t really sleep well on planes and I’ve never been big into reading. My excuse for that is I don’t like to read because if I’m doing my job on the golf course, I read enough putts that I don’t need to read books too! So the travel necessities for me: I have to have my backup battery for my phone, because it's going to die on every flight, watch a lot of movies and also, I absolutely need to make sure I have my head phones. I love to listen to music. Mainstream, rock, rap, country, I mean, everything. There's literally not a genre that I don't listen to. I just have a melting pot of different things on my phone. That’s nice because you can always find something that will calm you down or find something to pick you up if you need a pick-me-up.

This week’s course is one of the shortest but probably the tightest we will playall year. And for me that means a change to my normal approach is needed. Last year I felt like I was a little too aggressive on a lot of holes that I could just hit iron or three wood off the tee to keep myself in the fairway. Really, I felt like that is what cost me a chance of winning the golf tournament. For example, I tried to go for the fourth green every day, hitting driver, and I think I played that hole in about five over par. So I need to be smarter on this great little course at Hong Kong Golf Club. It just gives you all those kind of variables to consider: Do I play aggressive or do I not? Me, being the type of person that I am, I'm always a really aggressive golfer. I love to go for things and I love to take those unnecessary risks, and just this is one of those weeks that it teaches me to kind of scale back and try to play position golf rather than power golf.

The Ryder Cup was beyond awesome and that match with Rory was Hollywood stuff. It was such an amazing event. In my first Ryder Cup in 2014, I didn’t lose a match and I was so excited with how I played but I felt so empty because the team didn't win. All you want is that cup to come home so that first experience was a little bittersweet. So when we finally got it back home this year, oh man. The way I was playing, the captain trusting in me to lead the team out on singles, knowing how important that first match is, was a momentum swinger. To go out there and to play the way Rory and I did, was just unbelievable. You couldn't write it up any better. It got so exciting and we had a lot of fun bantering back and forth with each other but the amount of respect that we have for each other, it was just awesome. What a great experience; hopefully we can have a lot more of those sort of rounds of golf in the future because there’s nothing else like it.

I played with Tiger last weekin the Bahamas which was awesome. And let me tell you, he’s not far off. Golfers beware…

When I’m away from the golf course I usually just hang out with family at my house. Since we travel so much and we're on the road over 33 weeks a year, when we're at home, we cherish those moments to stay at the house, hang out with the baby and just have some fun. Be a dad and just be a goofball. Go swimming, cook, and do some fun things.

I’m going to be back home in Texas over Christmas which will be great. It's going to be a lot of fun to spend the holidays at home and spend it with the little one, as well. She's now getting old enough that she kind of understands Christmas, knows Santa Claus and likes the lights. Each year that goes by, it's going to get more and more fun and interesting.

I’m a Texan but I’m not a cowboy really.However, I do love my cowboy boots – I have more pairs of those than I do tennis shoes…

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