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July 28, 2005

Paul Goydos

GRAND BLANC, MICHIGAN

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Paul, thanks for joining us, good round today, 5 under, 67, a lot of players still out there on the course, but obviously you're in good position after round one. Start with some opening comments.

PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, got off to a little bit of a slow start, but overall, obviously very happy with shooting 5 under.

JOEL SCHUCHMANN: Talk about the conditions of the course.

PAUL GOYDOS: They must have done some great prep work leading up to this week the last month or two or three or four. They got a lot of rain I think Sunday. They got a lot of rain on Tuesday. The golf course was in immaculate condition this morning. First off, obviously we got some pretty good greens, but having seen all the rain we had, and it really wasn't that warm yesterday to dry things out. They did a fantastic job of getting this golf course ready for today and I think the scores are going to show that.

Like I had said out there, we like to sit and talk about why the scores are so good on the PGA TOUR and we talk about the golf ball or the driver heads and the irons and the fitness. I think the lawnmower has been a really big change on the scoring on this tour and will continue to be. We're putting on greens that there's not a blemish. The agronomy now with the lawnmower, hitting the fairways, there's not a blade of grass that's not in play. This morning it was like that. If you got your putts on line, they went in, period. The greens were perfect. That seems to be the case every week out here, and I think that really leads to the scoring.

If you really want to get the scores higher on this tour, I think you've got to make the greens slow and bumpy and you've got to grow the fairways really high. Then you're going to see some bad scores, but obviously that's not going to happen.

Q. How is the hip, is that bothering you at all?

PAUL GOYDOS: I can't even hear what you're saying through the static.

The media guide is wrong. Hard to believe the Tour could make a mistake; I think it's their first one. I didn't have hip surgery. I did have a hip injury that I just strengthened the area around it, as opposed to surgery.

I had sinus surgery and I had some hand problems, and those things are probably all as good as they are going to be. It's up to me to continue to do the exercise programs to strengthen the areas around them to take the stress off them. That's up to me. I don't think I'm going to get much better than I am right now.

Q. Is it just a matter of surgery would just put you out of action for too long and you're trying to hang in interest there?

PAUL GOYDOS: The diagnosis is a torn labrum in my hip, which is the torn cartilage in the bone. In order to get an absolute diagnosis, you actually have to have dye injected into the area and that didn't sound good to me. The more I exercised, the more I walked I took three months off from walking a lot or exercising a lot around the holidays and it would hurt for the West Coast, and it would get better as I got myself in better shape. Maybe I rode in carts too much. And since it would get better through exercise, better through those types of things, myself and the doctors decided that there's no reason to go in and do some type of invasive surgery to fix something that gets better if you show some discipline and do the exercises and do those things. That's kind of how we approached it. It was pretty bad, but we spent a lot of May through December trying to strengthen the area around it, and so far, it's worked.

Q. You were like 1 under at the turn, played better on the back nine, what was your mind set going into the back nine, because you know you have to be pretty low here.

PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, absolutely. You just keep hitting good shots and just, I think you can get caught up in that, what I like to call the "Bob Hope Syndrome" where you make a par and you feel like you lost 20 places. At some point in time, you're either going to play well or you're not. So you might as well stick to what you do, and if the putts drop, they drop; if they don't, they don't. I think if you start pressing, saying, God, I need to shoot this or I need to do this, that's where you start losing some patience. I just decided, hey, I'm not playing that bad, I got off to a slow start. I bogeyed three, but I birdied 6 and birdied 7, under par, let's see what we can do. We're playing well, but it is a bit of a marathon. If I say I need to make four birdies on the back nine today and you don't, that's kind of a negative attitude.

What you need to do is keep hitting good shots, keep hitting good putts, and eventually they are going to go in, whether it's this week, next week or the week after. At some point in time, they are going to go in, or you have to do something else. Does that make sense?

Q. What did you do better on the back? Was it just a matter of rolling some in?

PAUL GOYDOS: I think the back nine is a little easier, let's start with that. It's probably a shot easier. You've got a couple of short par 4s with 12 and 14, though I didn't birdie either one. The par 5s, 13 with the pin where it was today, it wasn't too bad.

But, you know, I made a long putt on 10, or a difficult putt, about a 20 footer. And I definitely think I hit the ball a little more crisply on the back nine than I did on the front nine which is a good thing.

Starting out at 7:00 in the morning with the dew, that's not my favorite thing, but once the weather got better, as it got warmer and it got drier, I started playing better, and that seems to be my M.O. Now I play all of my practice rounds at 7:00 in the morning because I think I need to be a better player at 7:00 in the morning; and going on four years of doing this, it has not helped, but at some point in time I'll play well.

Q. I can't imagine there are going to be too many 32s on the back without birdies on 12 or 14.

PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, absolutely. Again, that's part of staying patient. If you start worrying about whether you didn't birdie 12 or you didn't birdie 14, you've just got to play your golf and you add them up at the end and see what you come to.

I did birdie, you know, 18, which is a little tougher hole than the back nine. So you've just got to play and see where they fall.

End of FastScripts.

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