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JOHN DEERE CLASSICJuly 5, 2011Paul GoydosSILVIS, ILLINOIS THE MODERATOR: We welcome Paul Goydos to the media center here at the John Deere Classic. Paul, give us some thoughts coming into this week. PAUL GOYDOS: I've always liked playing here, and obviously last year I liked it a little bit more than the previous 10 or 15 times I've played John Deere. I think this is one of our best events, regardless of how I played. I think this is a great event, and I think John Deere is one of our best sponsors. I think this town is kind of more old school. It's almost like a community event and less of a corporate event. When you think of Moline you're thinking of Whitey's and pork shop sandwiches and a really fun place to come, the "Big Dig" they do. It's just a fun place to come and play golf. Again, it's more of a community here in the Quad Cities than some of the other events which tend to be a little more corporate. It's one of the best ones we have in my opinion. Q. Everyone has at least 15 minutes of fame. Looking back, for about 48 hours were yours. What kind of lesson did you learn and what kind of humorous anecdotes looking back? PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, I thought it was a big deal individually for me; wow, cool thing I did. I was not ready for the national story that it became quite frankly. I thought it was a cool thing to accomplish again personally, but I really didn't think it would be that big of a deal. I was wrong. Yeah, I don't know. I've got a lot to learn. I guess that's an iconic number. Until you do it, only five of us can talk about it, how big a deal it is to do it on the PGA TOUR. I don't know if I learned anything. I learned that I need to find a way to play better more often. I learned that -- my game has gotten unbelievably streaky. If you look at three weeks leading up, I played very poorly and had basically three missed cuts and even the three weeks after that event I had three missed cuts. But it was a day that -- again, I look back at my final round of Bay Hill when I won, the final round at Sony when I won, and it's starting to dissipate. I can remember pretty much what I did on every hole but not as clearly. The 59 I can remember my mood on the third tee. It definitely is a clearer day, and I think that's also surprising. I really thought that winning is really everything out here, and right now, even though -- I know it's closer, but right now that round is much clearer in my head. Q. Is there any unifying theme from those three rounds? PAUL GOYDOS: Absolutely. I think those three weeks, tee to green, was probably the best three weeks I've had in my career. The five best career weeks I've had, which would be obviously the two wins, here last year, and maybe THE PLAYERS this year and '08, I look back and said, tee to green those were the best weeks I've had in my career. I know I need to practice. Q. When you shoot a 59 and you only had a one-shot lead, was that -- PAUL GOYDOS: Obviously I played in the morning and I wasn't paying attention. I was so busy after the round I really wasn't paying attention to anybody. I didn't have time to look and see what anybody else was doing. I really didn't find out Stricker had shot 60 until later on that evening. Okay, the great thing was I woke up, played late the next day, I went to Starbucks and got a hot chocolate and a pastry of some sort and came back to my room and flipped on the computer and I was three back. That was more of like, what? I'm not even leading or even part of the story anymore. (Laughter.) I was very proud about that. I came out the next day and I birdied five of the first 10 holes or five of the first 11 holes. I birdied 17 out of the first 28 for the tournament, which is just crazy. And then I reverted to the norm for a while. Q. Is that kind of the nature of this game, how quickly it can humble you? PAUL GOYDOS: Absolutely. I think -- well, most people, yeah, it does. Watching Watney and Kuchar this year and Kuchar last year, to play that well every week -- Luke Donald had ten straight top 10s or some crazy number. They haven't found that humbling part yet. But the game is very fickle, and that's what kind of beats you up a little bit. You lose patience, tend to get down on yourself when things aren't well, and then all of a sudden -- I missed three straight cuts, really frustrated with my game, really hadn't played well since my nine at Pebble Beach early last year and then all of a sudden shoot 59 out of nowhere. I mean, you look at my record, there's no 59 coming out of what I had done coming in, so the game does have a little bit of fickleness to it. And I crashed right after that, too. I didn't play well the rest of the year. Q. Calvin Peete said this once, is there a need to forgive yourself immediately after a bad shot or completely forget a good shot? Do golfers need to stay so focused on the next shot? What he said was he tried to delay any emotional reaction until after the round. PAUL GOYDOS: That would be nice. I don't have that skill. One thing I've started on my own regarding that is you have to evaluate yourself. You have to be honest with your evaluation. I don't care what you do for a living. You have to do an honest evaluation of what you've done. One thing that stands out in my mind about that is at Sony I birdied 15 and 16 to take the lead. I didn't even know it. I birdied 16 and the leaderboard was obscured by a tree. I wandered around to the end of the green just to take a peek at it to see who was leading, and it was me. Things happened quickly, then I proceeded to hit it in the right bunker on 17, and the first thing that popped in my mind was that at Bay Hill I hit it in the right bunker on 15. I walked in -- and Bay Hill you play 14 and there's a giant leaderboard right there, and I looked up and I had a three-shot lead. Immediately hit a bad tee shot and an iron shot in the bunker and I ended getting that one up-and-down, and the first thing I thought of when I was in the bunker on 17 was I had been in this position before. So keeping memories is a good thing, it's how you learn to get better. Learning from your mistakes, I've made the mistakes before, to learn from those mistakes so maybe you don't do them again, there's some value there. I don't know if you want to obliterate everything. Life experiences is what's going to make up what you do on the next shot, but you need to stay in the moment. You need to learn -- like I think what good players do, I'm not the guy to ask, maybe if you get somebody else in here, they hit the shot good or bad, they figure out what happened and why, and then they start and they move on to the next shot. Q. With all the low scores last year, nobody goes into a golf tournament thinking 59, but how do you approach this year and were you surprised by the amount of low scoring and how low things got last year? PAUL GOYDOS: What surprised me more than anything was how good the weather was. Wednesday I finished my pro-am round and I think I was the last group to finish, and a storm came, and it was just -- I mean, from here I went over to the pharmacy which is right down the street here, and I couldn't get to my car it was raining so hard. I stood there for about 20 minutes. I thought we were going to wash away. It rained really hard. And for a golf course, that can be very detrimental to the condition of the golf course. You have to give a lot of props to the superintendent here his staff for getting the golf course ready. And then so much of the golf course was softer, which was going to make it a little bit easier. Usually you get a big storm, you get no wind. It was like playing indoors basically the entire week, and that really affected, I think, scores more than anything. Anytime we're playing, we generally get a nice 10- or 15-mile-an-hour breeze every afternoon. I don't think we got any of that last year, and that affected scoring a lot, too. So you kind of had this perfect storm of a golf course in perfect condition, a ton of rain, but the golf course was in such good shape that it drained well and was playable, and then no wind, you're going to see good scoring. You saw it at the U.S. Open this year; everybody talked about Congressional being easy; that's just silliness. The USGA was in a position where it rained every single night and then it was calm every single day. There's nothing you can do; they're going to shoot good scores under those conditions. Q. After you did that last year, did you hear it was too easy? PAUL GOYDOS: No, that's just silly. The problem we have in our sport is that, yeah, you can make this golf course harder, but then the other 51 weeks a year everyone is going to be miserable. Golf is not played by TOUR players. That's such a small percentage of us that we almost shouldn't matter. We want to grow the game, we want to make the golf courses more playable for everybody. It's just an important part of what we do. I think this is a great golf course in that sense. Yeah, if you take the club champion from here or the club champion from your club and stuck him on the first tee with us, he's not playing the best round of his life. It's not going to happen. This golf course can play easier for us under those conditions, yes, but that doesn't mean it's an easy golf course. You have to take in who's playing the golf course. And this golf course, again, under those conditions can play very -- I don't think anybody else would find it that easy. Ball are not rolling and all this other stuff. Somebody last year, and it happened to me, under soft conditions is going to have one of those days where they shoot good scores. That's just the way it is. Q. Given the numbers that you shot last year, do you go into this week in a shootout mentality, or -- PAUL GOYDOS: Well, part of my attitude, I told you I was 9-under after 15 or whatever I was, and one, shooting 59, I had a bit of an advantage in the sense that 9-under is not going to finish in the top 50 in this tournament. You need to keep going, and we just arbitrarily stop at 18. But you need to have this mentality if you have a short iron in your hand, which I think I hit 8-iron on 16, a pitching wedge, a little wedge into 17 because I laid up, and then 18, I had 7-iron and it played the shortest it played all week because the pin was in the front of the green and whatnot. Regardless of your situation, if the shot fits your eye, and all three of those shots did, I felt I had the right clubs, I felt whatever happened, being aggressive is what you need to do, yeah. I don't think it really mattered too much what my score was. You need to keep going, and when I was 12-under after 18 holes, like I said, when I teed off on -- Stricker had already finished his second round, I want to say four or five shots out of the lead. Q. You don't go in with a different mentality? PAUL GOYDOS: No, you're still trying to hit the shot that needs to be hit under what circumstances. Sometimes that's just not at the flag always. It's the best shot -- sometimes you just get in a spot where it just doesn't fit. I've got 180 yards and I hit my 5-iron 190 today, there's just no place to go, so sometimes you have to play safe and hit the right shot at the right time. If I have 8-iron in my hand with good yardage and the greens are holding, you're going to be seeing a lot more aggressive play. Q. Is the 59 the best thing that's happened to your career from a notoriety standpoint, more than the victories? PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, I think it's newer. You know, it's fresher for sure. I would say that before that, it wasn't the wins, it was finishing second at THE PLAYERS. I get more people talking about THE PLAYERS than I ever did about Bay Hill or Sony quite frankly, and now I do get Mr. 59 yelled from the crowd every week. It's fresher, but as of right now, absolutely. Q. The limelight for shooting 59, is that fun? PAUL GOYDOS: Sure. There's nothing I can do about it. I'm not going to say, "Shut up, I won, too." (Laughter.) Again, it's part of what we do. We all have egos, and it was a great day. I'm not going to lie, it was a wonderful day, and it's one thing that I'll remember forever. It's only been done -- like I said, I was the fourth person to do it and the oldest person to do it. I'm the only person to do it without an eagle. But no, I don't have any problem with that. We all have egos. Part of the reason we're playing for $41/2 million this week instead of $2 million is that golf is -- people are excited about our sport, and that's what comes with the territory. If we were playing for $50,000 people wouldn't be paying attention. The fact that we're a big-time sport and this is a big-time deal, that's part of the deal, and I like it. It's good for your ego. Q. How is the rib, and do you feel like -- you had three top 10s in April. PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, it didn't help, but Hartford I was probably not ready. Last week the golf course really didn't fit my game very well in my opinion, but I'm making progress. I was making progress coming into this event last year, also. I like this place. I've had a lot of good memories on this golf course. I think they've done a great job. I haven't been out on the golf course. I guarantee it's in great shape, and the superintendent here has done a fantastic job with this golf course, and it looks like the weather is going to be good, too. Looks like it's going to be a great week. Q. Is this a golf course that tests every aspect of your game? PAUL GOYDOS: The problem you have with this tournament is when it's played. If we played here in the fall when you could firm up the golf course without worrying about killing the greens -- part of what they have to do here is you've got to figure it's going to be 100 degrees almost with the heat indexes here. The golf course is going to play softer. You have to keep it alive because there are 51 other weeks in the year and we can't sacrifice a bunch of those weeks to have the golf course maybe firmer for this tournament. That's just dumb. If we played the course in the fall I think you'd see a totally different tournament. I think you'd see scores relative to par a lot higher. But yeah, you have to drive your ball in play but they're reasonably generous fairways. Again, D.A. has kind of built a golf course that's a second-shot golf course. If you're having a good week -- last year I couldn't have hit it any better, period. Best tee to green week of my career without question. And you've got small areas to hit at, and if you're feeling good, you're going to hit it close a lot. But again, if you're not -- Stricker shot, I don't know what, 26-under, 25-under, I shot 24 under, then I went to 19, and we did separate ourselves a little bit, which was good, it's just the scores seemed high, high relative to par. I think the golf course does challenge you, it just challenges you in a different way than we're used to, or what you think challenging is I guess is a better way of putting. Q. Will you at all be surprised if you see a firmer golf course out there? PAUL GOYDOS: Well, last year was -- actually the golf course was firmer Tuesday and even Wednesday when we played in the pro-am. If it was firmer last year I wouldn't have shot 59. I might shoot 53 or 62, I played good that day and I made a bunch of putts, but probably don't shoot 59. So Mother Nature is a big part of that. The forecast is for some chance of rain tonight I think and maybe even tomorrow. It didn't look like a great chance. I don't know what the weather has been like here, if you guys are in a drought or anything. Q. It's dried up for about a week now. PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, the drier the golf course gets the harder it's going to play. It may get shorter but it's going to play harder. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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