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THE PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIPMay 6, 2009Paul GoydosPONTE VEDRA BEACH, FLORIDA JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Paul Goydos, thank you for joining us, the runner-up from the 2008 PLAYERS Championship. If you could start with a few opening comments about coming back to a very memorable tournament I'm sure for you. While you didn't win, you certainly gained a lot of fans and a lot of notoriety, and I'm sure you enjoyed the week. Maybe some opening comments. PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, it's good to come back. 99 percent of last year was very positive. The golf course, I like it here in May, the weather is good, hot, which is good. My game is probably in about the same place it was coming into last year, which isn't very good. My game tends to show up unannounced, and hopefully it will show up unannounced again this week. Q. You did PTI afterwards, after last year. What were some of the other fun media opportunities you did? PAUL GOYDOS: The media is always fun, no matter what event it might be. Off the top of my head I couldn't tell you how many things I did; it was a lot. But compared to winning at Bay Hill or winning at Sony, the notoriety might be five or ten times more and it lasted a lot longer, most notably more with the fans than anything else. I still had, last week, every day probably when I'm on the course walking from a green to a tee or something, somebody said, hey, great playing last year, really enjoyed watching you at The PLAYERS. From a notoriety standpoint it's almost incomparable the difference between finishing second at that event as opposed to winning at Bay Hill or Sony. Q. You haven't seen Kenny Perry at all. Did you see any parallels between -- PAUL GOYDOS: No. Kenny's played great. He does this. He did it a few years back where he played great a whole summer. I think he won three or four times. I don't know what year it was, maybe '03 or something. Kenny is a great player, and if you'd get yourself into so many opportunities to win, and Kenny has had tons of opportunities to win these last -- the last year, that you're going to -- obviously you're not going to win every time. Kenny's played great golf, and sometimes, again, when you're in contention that often we tend to dwell on the fact that you don't win more, because we have to deal with the Tiger factor; when he's in contention he wins every time, I think probably an unfair comparison to other players. Q. Would you have thought on Wednesday last year that you would be there on Sunday? PAUL GOYDOS: No. Again, Thursday was the first time I ever broke 70 on the golf course in 20-odd tries. I thought I had a good week practicing. I thought I had a decent week the week before, so I thought things were perking up, for sure. Again, in '07, the first year we played in May, the weather was colder than this year. Last year it was much warmer like it's going to be this year. In '07 all I remember is hitting driver, 4-iron this year. And this year we're hitting wedges and 9-irons into the winds into it, getting the warmer south winds. But I thought my game was moving in the right direction, again, just all the good things that could happen in a week happened last year this week. Q. All the fans and the responses you've gotten coming back here, do you expect that it will be a different kind of experience for you out on the course with the fans who are here and a lot of them who weren't here last year? PAUL GOYDOS: I think last year I wasn't paying as much attention. You could sense it to some extent that there was a lot of crowd excitement around my playing well, but at the time I would assume, I just assumed that was part of the event. I hadn't competed in -- hadn't been in that position, obviously, ever, since it was my first Saturday lead. So I don't know that I knew what to expect last year. We'll see, again, the people have been great. This has been -- I've been here since Sunday and, yeah, I'm getting a lot more interest, for sure, from autographs and whatnot. And you're driving, I was just driving out to The Golf Channel and heard my name whispered by people driving by in the cart. That never happened before. Q. How did you sleep last night? PAUL GOYDOS: Just fine. Fetal position (laughter). Q. Looking for something there? PAUL GOYDOS: There you go. Just fine. Q. You also have the hat from last year? PAUL GOYDOS: Yes. Actually the hat that I wore last year, which I had purchased in the airport the Sunday before the event, last year after the third round that Saturday night, and again, they're having it this year on Saturday night, I think, they have a fundraiser at Long Beach State called the Jewels of the Night. They auctioned the hat off before the fourth round last year for $4,000. There's a sports bar in Long Beach called Legends and it's sitting in a glass-encased little -- I don't know what you call it, on the wall, and it's got a hat and it's got a program, it's got one of the golf balls from Sunday, I think a glove, things like that in there. Just a weird coincidence that the hat almost took on a life of its own. I guess people out here are used to seeing Taylor Made on somebody's hat and not Long Beach State. And that's just one of the freaks of the things that have happened, or happened that week. I wasn't really paying much attention to what hat I was wearing, I'll be honest with you, until Saturday, that's when they really made a big deal about it. I want to say even Costas asked me a question about it in the booth. What hat? Okay, it's what I'm wearing, I'd kind of forgotten. Q. Do you remember what the charity was that the money went to? PAUL GOYDOS: Long Beach State Athletic Foundation. Q. Did -- PAUL GOYDOS: They're in dire straits for money, so I'm sure they used it. Q. For the golf program? PAUL GOYDOS: No. Q. Just in the general fund? PAUL GOYDOS: General fund, as far as I know. Q. Outside of the putter, what's the most important club out here playing this course? PAUL GOYDOS: I think it depends on the player. For me it's the driver. I think I have to drive the ball in play. The TOUR has, with my full blessing, gone to maybe having different types of setups, less rough and firmer conditions, which again -- last week, for example, at Quail Hollow. They had what looked to be very little rough, but then the golf course was firm. And the scores really weren't that good. In fact I think 11-under might have been one of higher scores to win that event. And this golf course has gone that direction, too, with Bermudagrass. Even with 2009 groove technology, if you hit the ball in the rough here, it's really hard to control the distance the ball goes. If I drive it in the rough on 18, in the right rough, I can hit it to 200 yards needed to get to the green, whereas when you have the rough five inches, I can't. The problem is I don't know if it's going to go 170 or 215. I think that makes it much more challenging in the rough when you're not sure exactly how the ball is going to react, and you see shots now out of the rough when it's lower and when we get the V-grooves next year it will be more dramatic, where the guy will make a good swing and the ball will be 10 or 15 yards, give or take, from the distance they were trying to hit it because if you hit the ball in the fairway you don't have that issue. You get that in this event. You get that with Bermudagrass, which I like. There's definitely a penalty for driving the ball in the rough, even though it may not be having to chip out sideways. Q. If you had to describe this course in one word, what would it be and why? PAUL GOYDOS: One word? I'm not good with the one-word answer. I would say surprising. The golf course when you look at each individual hole there's a lot of short irons. There's reachable par-5s. I want to say three of the four par-5s are even reachable by me. And it's a par-72, not par-70, which we're getting used to in major championships, yet double digits under par is going to be really, really good, depending on the weather. Last year we had 5-under. I don't know what Mickelson shot when he won in '07, but I don't think it was 22-under par. But when you look at each hole individually it doesn't -- it really shouldn't be that difficult. Again, there's not a bunch of driver, 3-wood par-4s. It's just that each hole is designed to the point where if you kind of make a mistake or get out of position and, again, in trying to get back into position and trying to be aggressive from that point you tend to kind of snowball away from you, and this golf course is going to have a lot of birdies and eagles, but it's going to have a lot more doubles or triples than your average TOUR event, too. To me, if I look at each hole individually it doesn't seem like 5-under should have won, but each one of those holes with a mistake can jump up and grab you. Q. I think you could argue, or at least I would, that this is one of the few stops where the star is actually the golf course. PAUL GOYDOS: I think that's just a function of the last three holes. I think the last three holes -- this is an event, and I made that point, and I wish I never had last year, that really the event doesn't send until somebody gets through 17. If you have a three-shot lead playing 18, you probably can work your way around that hole and make 6. Until you hit it on land on 17, the tournament is not over. And then the opposite of that is, in my opinion, if you're four back standing on the 16th tee, going 3-2-3 is not out of the question. I think, again, the pin on 17 on Sunday historically is on the right side of the green. I think if I had to make a 2, that's where I'd want the pin to be. 16 historically is in the valley, so you can hit a shot that will feed in and you can make 3. This golf course can produce big swings á la Augusta National can through Amen Corner to where the tournament is always going to be exciting, regardless of -- the media can do a good enough job when somebody has a five-shot lead standing on the 14th hole saying, hey, this tournament is nowhere near being over. Q. Can you just kind of give us an overview on how things are going at home? PAUL GOYDOS: Things are going as one would expect, we're just moving forward. Obviously it's been a tough year on my kids and they're handling it with -- I'm proud of the way they've handled it, for lack of a better word. They're enjoying and appreciating the time they had with their mother, and not dwelling with the time they don't have. And I think that's -- a sign of the parenting that their mother did for them. Q. Watching you guys play, that's the big X factor. We never know what's happening in a person's life. How does that impact a person's golf game? How does that affect your concentration, worrying about your children? PAUL GOYDOS: I think everybody out here has their own set of worries. Some may be greater at times than others, but everyone deals with that. It doesn't matter if you're a professional golfer or writer or a lawyer or what have you, we all have to deal with things that happen in our lives and take that into effect. It's who you are and how you deal with things. I think one of the things, good or bad, to be successful on TOUR, you need to be able to compartmentalize yourself a little bit. I don't know that I'm good at that necessarily or not. But I think being able to separate your work and what you need to do, because I can make the argument that the best thing I can do as a parent is play good golf and provide food, shelter and all the things that traditionally a father is supposed to do. And that's by playing the best I can out here. Obviously those things bother you, but you need to -- again, for me to say I've played poorly because of what's happened, that's not really fair to the other people who have beat me every single week, because they have problems, too. We all have our level of problems, and certain people it may be more difficult from year to year, but the reality is we all go through the same thing eventually. Q. When word first started getting out a little bit more about taking the year off and the things you did with the kids, does it bother you when people try to raise you up as a great father? PAUL GOYDOS: Well, I'm a firm believer in no matter how good a single parent is going to be, he's not going to be as good as two, first of all. You need two perspectives. I think that's an important part of parenting. And I had that to an extent, anyways, even though the kids were living with me. Two, I'm a professional golfer. I think there's a lot of people who would love to have that job. I've got two wonderful kids who I'm more proud of every day. The person who had it rough I would say is my ex-wife. I haven't had it rough. Again, I play golf for a living, I've got great kids, I've got great friends, I've got a great family, I've got a great support system. I told Jimmy Roberts earlier today, my wife had an addiction problem, but the hardest thing to do is not to be an addict; the hardest thing to do is trying not to be an addict. She spent the last years of her life trying not to be an addict. That's difficult. It's a lot easier standing on the 17th hole at TPC in a playoff. You can't compare the two. I'm playing golf for a living; she was battling a very serious health problem. To equate the troubles and dealings that I've had to the dealings that she had to deal with is completely unfair to her and to some extent ridiculous. Q. I'm just wondering how you work it out now when you're on the road and whether you do your schedules differently? PAUL GOYDOS: My kids are older. I'm luckier, my kids are 16 and 18. Actually I have one in college with a job and the other one looking. I've got a good support group of family. They're staying with their grandmother -- they're at my house, their grandmother at the house with them, my ex-wife's mother. My ex-wife's sister and husband live a mile away. And they're at the age where they're not looking for me to do things for them. They're looking for me -- they're looking for somebody just to kind of be there in case something happens. My kids are responsible. They're good at doing what they need to do, their homework, and getting up and doing all the things -- they're little adults, without question. And my role is more of a guiding than a telling role, in my opinion. The 18 year old is 18; if she wants to get up and move to Florida, she has every right to do so. And they kind of guide their own lives. They're little adults and they're doing quite good at it, in my opinion. They don't -- parenting at this point isn't being on top of them, it's more, again, it's a supervisory role, it's do you have a question, come up and ask. Whether that's good or bad, you can do that some on the phone. Again, they've got their grandmother and they've got other people to help them through, and I think that's part of the reason why they've been as good as they are, because they have this large, in a sense, extended family that helps. Q. How old is Courtney? PAUL GOYDOS: 16. Q. What college? PAUL GOYDOS: Junior in high school and Saddleback Community College, a freshman. Q. Courtney went with you last year? PAUL GOYDOS: Courtney went to The British Open last year. Q. How was that, except for your play? PAUL GOYDOS: The golf course was wonderful. She had a good time. She got to see some things she hadn't seen before. We grew up playing the Hogan Tour with the Lehmans, and they have two daughters similar age as mine, so she got a chance to spend some time with them. They got to go to Liverpool, and they went into London for a day. She got a chance to experience some things my job luckily gives them a chance to offer. She had a good time. Q. Your first big father/daughter trip? PAUL GOYDOS: We went on some vacations. Being on at a golf tournament with me isn't probably that fun. We've gone to the Bahamas and Turks & Caicos with big groups. No, it was just more -- being around me and golf can be a little bit trying at times, especially if I'm missing the cut by ten. But that was more of an experience for her than it was an experience for us. Q. Is it true that Chelsea didn't go because there was no cellphone service, or are you making that up? PAUL GOYDOS: She now is regretting that decision every day and asking me when The British Open qualifier is every week (laughter). But she was at that age where her friends were really important to her. She had a chance to go to the beach, and hanging out was more important than going to Liverpool, England, which in Manchester, I guess I can understand that. Going to Newport Beach and Laguna Beach and hanging out with your friends, I probably would do that, too, if I could. Q. I'll send you off with a golf question. How do you make the transformation in your head from 72 holes of stroke play to a playoff, and is sudden death the best way to settle it? PAUL GOYDOS: Obviously I'm not the person to ask that question (laughter). Sudden death is an interesting term, but really what is was is the 73rd hole and then the 74th hole, depending on what you need. We use the term sudden death, but we don't -- baseball they go to an extra inning, they don't go to an extra nine innings or an extra three innings. If I were to pick a hole, we talked about -- everybody talks about using 16, 17 and 18 and doing a three-hole playoff. That's fine. I think you have to work that out with television; we are in that world and we have to make sure our partners are happy. If I were pick one hole to play in a playoff, I'd pick 17. That's a hole in my opinion that's the epitome of sudden death; and two, there's no advantage to any one player. All TOUR players pretty much are standing on that tee equal. You can look at a hole like 16 or 18 and you say there's an advantage to a guy who hooks the ball. Even you look at Augusta National, they used to start on 10, if I remember correctly. This year they did 18. They used to start on 10, another hole that favors a guy that hooks the golf ball. 17 here doesn't favor anybody. I could probably work with any of you for a couple of weeks and you guys could probably make it on that green (laughter). Q. Don't get that ambitious. I was going to ask you one more thing -- anything we should know about her or you'd like us to know about her, because I'm sure she wasn't just one-dimensional? PAUL GOYDOS: I think that's the problem, is everyone is dwelling -- John Feinstein wrote a column about it in Golf Digest, and I respect John to the nth degree, and explained to him that my problem is everyone is dwelling on the last seven years of her life and not talking about the whole 44 years. And he even had trouble not -- everything was like a magnet to that seven years. I mentioned in the article, she got in her position through a very legitimate health problem. She was a migraine sufferer. She was having headaches that would be 10 to 15 days a month. She had debilitating pain, and it got away from her. When she passed away that morning, obviously after talking to my kids and a few family members, the first thing that came to my mind was there but for the grace of God go I. I get headaches, too; not to that level, but at times, it's no good. We want to look down at people who are in that position, who have a drug problem, without knowing the whole story. Myself included; I knew the whole story, and I was not very good at not looking down at the situation. Unfortunately it took her death, in my opinion, for me to kind of open my -- see what she had really been through. Again, I think -- don't take this wrong, I think being an addict wouldn't have been a big deal. Trying to be a recovering addict is a very big deal, a very hard thing to do. Now you're dealing with the emotions and highs and lows of getting better and then having setbacks, and getting better and having setbacks, that eventually are going to tear you apart, I think, and it did with her. My answer to those people who want to make judgments -- not just Wendy, anybody in those shoes, we don't want to dwell on her, but walk a day in their shoes and then formulate your opinion. But she was a wonderful person, without question. I wouldn't have married her if I didn't think that. She was a great parent. She was a great daughter. She was a great sister to her siblings. It's an unfortunate tragedy. Q. What was the year like going back and being a civilian again? Were you financially set enough there that that wasn't going to be -- PAUL GOYDOS: Financially I was decent. Q. You weren't in danger of running out of money? PAUL GOYDOS: For one year, no. That's the advantage of the perks of one of our jobs is, we are compensated rather well for what we do. It was probably the best year I've had in those 16, 17 years on TOUR. I got to spend time at home with my kids. I worked in their classrooms. I played golf and practiced and kept my game what I thought was okay. I did play two events at the end of the year. It was a very rewarding year, and one I wouldn't give up for anything. JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Paul Goydos, thank you very much. Good luck this week. End of FastScripts |
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