|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
JOHN DEERE CLASSICJuly 11, 2010Paul GoydosSILVIS, ILLINOIS DOUG MILNE: Okay. Paul, thanks for joining us again. You've become quite a familiar face in the media center here this week. Started off with a historical 59. PAUL GOYDOS: Historical or historic? DOUG MILNE: You are the teacher, not me. A historic 59 in Round 1 here at the John Deere Classic, and you ended the week with a trip now over to Scotland for the British Open. You didn't come away the winner of the tournament, but there were certainly a lot of victories for you this week. If you could just kind of recap the week for us. PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah. Just got off to a good start and kind of hung around all week really. Just played really, really well, especially tee to green, until the last hole. Missed two greens today, both 4-irons, both kind of chunk hooked. I'll have to look at that 4-iron, I guess. But all in all a good week. I mean Stricks was hard to catch. I mean I tried and kept pushing and chipping and grinding and biting at him and doing whatever I could, but in the end, you know, the putt he made on 17 was a world-class putt, and that's what Top 5 players in the world do, and that's what Ryder Cup players do. I'm sure that's exactly what Corey is looking for. You know, here's a guy -- didn't have his best game today. It's tough to play with a seven-shot lead, I'm sure. But when it really mattered, when it really got down to the nitty gritty, the guy hit as good a putt as you could get and that's what champions do. DOUG MILNE: Obviously your first goal was to win the golf tournament, but how much was a factor was playing for that British Open spot? PAUL GOYDOS: It's a factor. I mean you're trying to win a golf tournament. I look at something like that as a perk more than a goal. It's something that happens if you play well -- I'm much happier that I played well and finished second than I am that I'm getting in the British because of finishing second. It's about competing. I competed reasonably well today. And you know, dozens of things that I'm excited about, and again, the perk is I get to go over and play St. Andrews. Hopefully the weather men are wrong. DOUG MILNE: Okay. We'll go ahead and open it up for some questions. We know you got a lot to get ready for. Q. Paul, 59 is always going to be attached to you now. PAUL GOYDOS: We'll see. Q. Can you even guess how maybe that's going to affect you? PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, I think it is going to be -- when people look back, they're not going to look back at the two wins right now or whatever. Before they didn't actually look at the wins before. They looked at my playoff loss against Sergio and now they got something else to look at. But again, it's starting to sink in, the historical significance, but the reality is we have a good champion. He's won twice in a row. I think 59 is an iconic number. Me, personally, it's still only two wins. But it's been a fun week, and I'm just going to have to find out. I really don't have an answer yet, but it's definitely been a bigger deal than I thought it would be. I guess I'll find out if it's a big deal when I get to Scotland tomorrow. Q. (Indiscernible)? PAUL GOYDOS: Just there's been so much national exposure. I didn't expect that, I think. I expected my friends and whatnot and me. I was very excited for myself, but I wasn't expecting the eight-hour onslaught of media, and just, you know, I guess it didn't even make Play of the Day, by the way. (Laughs). But you know, in a sense, too, you look back and you can compare it to like a perfect game. There's been 15 or so of those over the 120 years they've been playing baseball. It's a tremendous feat. I'm just starting to kind of realize it, I think. Q. You were joking today that you didn't know how to respond to the 59. You follow up that lead by being 24-under par for the tournament. Is that successful? PAUL GOYDOS: Success is winning. I think the worst position I was all week was I was third place for about 13 seconds. You know, winning would have been obviously was the ultimate goal. Again, it's a great individual achievement. I guess, like you said, something that's going to stick with me for a while. Something that, again, I'm very proud of, without question. But I think, you know, if it's a bright star, I think it's only shining 98 percent now because I didn't win. Q. I guess what I asked before, did you compete as well as you wanted to? PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah. I wasn't unhappy. You know, again, if my expectations for Friday through Sunday are going to be coming off of Thursday, there's just no way to meet that. And I thought I stayed patient. I thought I dealt with it pretty well. I made 28 birdies for the week. I played very well. I thought I hung in there. It would have been pretty easy to, you know, Steve got the big lead, to maybe just lose a touch of focus, and I didn't. I'm really happy with the way I competed all week. I just came up a little short; and quite frankly, someone said I broke the tournament record by two shots. If you'd have told me on Thursday that I was going to have a 59 and I'm going to finish 24-under par, I might not have even played all week. I might have just sat in the room and watched and would have been shocked that I didn't win. Part of the difficulty in dealing with that is that I thought I played pretty good. I thought I competed well. I thought I did all the things I needed to do to win and didn't win. At some point in time you just gotta tip your hat to Steve and say job well done. Q. Down two shots on No. 18, what was your thought process from tee to green? PAUL GOYDOS: You know, same thing, I'd been driving the ball, especially on the Back 9 just nuts, good. I mean I had been hammering every one right down the middle, and I hammered it on 18 right where I was looking. Steve didn't look like -- I didn't think he really hit that poor of a tee shot, and it must have hit a tree or hit somebody. I don't know what happened there, to be honest with you. And he had to chip out. I thought, hey, my goal there -- this is not exactly stupid because you're hitting 4-iron 202 yards, but I hit a good solid shot at that right bunker, and the slope's going to kick it to the left and give yourself an opportunity to have a putt where, who knows, make him make a par, if you can give yourself a look at it. To stand there 202 yards with your intention to knock it stiff, I think that's kind of the wrong look at it. Give yourself chances is really what I did, and I just didn't make a good swing, probably as bad a swing as I made all week. Q. Can you go over how many people you've heard from Thursday? Are you surprised with the volume of interest? Did anything in particular surprise you? PAUL GOYDOS: No, most of my friends, people that know me. I'm a little surprised by GQ, quite frankly. I don't know that I'm really their ideal guy. But no, again, it's more of the aura around it than it is -- you know, doing National Sports Radio and doing ESPN and doing all the different things. They mentioned it on PTI that day. Did NPR, didn't even though they had -- they asked me a question about politics, too, like I'm smarter now. So you get complex, too, from the Enterprise. But you know, just more of the overall kind of circus atmosphere of it more than necessarily who contacted me. But to be honest with you, I'm not an easy person to get ahold of. Like Fred Couples, I don't answer the phone because I don't know who might be on the other end. Q. Paul, after Steve went down birdie, birdie, what's going through your head? Is there any thought that he could run away with this? I know you birdied one. PAUL GOYDOS: I can't do anything about it. You know, if he goes out and shoots 62, what am I going to do? You know, just gotta keep playing. And I'm playing good. This is an opportunity, the golf course, again, is reasonably soft. The weather just has affected this event tremendously. You can't control him. Just shoot how good a round you can play. Honestly, if you go look at my scoring, I shot 65 at Riviera and go look at what I've shot since then on Sunday, it's been abysmal. Abysmal as unbelievably nice. It's been horrible. So I had some things to deal with, too. I wanted to go out and play good, this is another time to shoot a good score, do the best you can and play well on Sunday, and if Steve shoots 65 or 4 or something silly, at least you know you played well on Sunday and competed and you can use that in the future. So what he did was really irrelevant, per se. I got it to two, I guess, on I don't know, whatever hole it was. But the shot that really didn't change how you really played any of those holes. Q. Last days you played with him, how difficult is it to shut it out? (Indiscernible) PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, a little bit after he birdied the first two holes, I was kind of looking forward to the guy shooting in the mid 30s or somewhere under par. It would be kind of cool to watch. That would be history, too. It wouldn't have surprised me if he shot 32 or 3 under par the way he was playing. Having said that, the pins were a little tougher, I thought, today. They were more tucked, and with a five-shot lead, I don't think he was hitting it at a lot of pins, I wouldn't think anyway. I thought, you know, he got off to that good start. I don't think he was thinking record. I think he was thinking win, and that's a maturity level that Stricker, Steve has that's pretty impressive. Q. I was going to ask, they call you sunshine. PAUL GOYDOS: Uh-huh. Because I'm a ray of sunshine in the room. Q. (Indiscernible)? PAUL GOYDOS: I don't think so, but if you want to go with it. Q. (Indiscernible)? PAUL GOYDOS: Well, I have expectations. You look at the cup as being half empty by saying I'm hard on myself. I look at the cup as being half full by saying I have high expectations. So I think you're the negative one and I'm the positive one. (Laughs). Q. (Indiscernible)? PAUL GOYDOS: No. You can't get any higher. I mean my expectations are to play as well as I can all the time. So I think part of the problem I've dealt with with winning is that it did maybe raise expectations too high at times or lose patience is maybe a better way of looking at it. But no, my goal is to play as well as I can, and you know, I don't necessarily meet that goal very often. Q. Did you this week? PAUL GOYDOS: I would say tee to green is probably the best week I've ever had on TOUR. And it was pretty high in the best week I've had putting in the middle two rounds where I've been squirrely at times. But overall it's definitely one of the best weeks I've ever had out here without question. I just need to find a way to get a little better. Q. Do you mark Deere Run as a must play in 2011? PAUL GOYDOS: Absolutely. I think they do a great job here. I think John Deere is a wonderful sponsor. I think they support the community here as well as any tournament does. It's a great, kind of a small-town event, and we're kind of losing our small-town events for more corporate type events, and this is more of a hometown kind of feel. It's just a fun week, and I love playing here. Q. Do you in any way feel like you are co-champion this week? PAUL GOYDOS: No. That's very -- no. Steve played wonderful golf. We shoot good scores. I played very well. I'm going to take a lot out of that. But I didn't, quite frankly, play as well as Steve, and I can see that. I need to get better if I'm going to be able -- if he's at his best game and I'm at my best game, it wasn't as good as his best game. Q. You talked about going to the British Open at the first of the year, but what's going through your head about actually go over there? PAUL GOYDOS: Like I said, it's a goal early in the year and this is the last opportunity to get in. And playing in a British Open at St. Andrews, I think, is about as cool a thing as you can do. Q. Paul, you talk about high expectations. Are you going to beat yourself up a little bit over the approach shot you made? PAUL GOYDOS: Probably a little bit and also try to understand it more than anything else. I'm sure I'll have to see it on TV for the next two hours or something. I'm going to talk to you about getting me a video of the four days. DOUG MILNE: Yeah. Absolutely. PAUL GOYDOS: It's more of a learning process. I bogeyed the last two holes at Texas last year and missed playoffs by a shot. I got to the 71st hole in pretty good shape this time. So I'm getting closer. And you know, all things considered, still, even if I hit the shot I was trying to hit there, I've got a 20-footer probably for birdie at best. Still a lot's gotta happen. Q. How different was the mindset between the first round trying to hit a 59 and here, trying to win? PAUL GOYDOS: It's a totally different situation. One, I had a 7-iron in my hand and one I had a 4-iron in my hand. But I kind of thought I had the same idea, let's give yourself a chance. You know, on 18 on Thursday it was, you know, try to get the ball, give yourself a putt. How many times do you get a putt at 59? And today was the same idea, let's hit a good shot, let's give yourself just a look. This is not, oh, I have to hit it a foot from the hole. This is hit a good shot, give yourself a look, and unfortunately it didn't happen this time. DOUG MILNE: All right, Paul. It's been a great week with you. We appreciate your time. PAUL GOYDOS: Thank you. End of FastScripts |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
About ASAP Sports •
FastScripts Archive •
Recent Interviews •
Captioning •
Upcoming Events •
Contact Us
FastScripts | Events Covered | Our Clients | Other Services | ASAP in the News | Site Map | Job Opportunities | Links |
|
ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297
|