|
Goydos Enjoys Grand Opening
by Randy Youngman, Orange County Register
January 17, 2007
PALM DESERT In the span of about one hour this past Sunday, Paul
Goydos of Dove Canyon enjoyed the best season of his 15-year career on
the PGA Tour.
Think about that.
By winning the Sony Open in Hawaii to end an 11-year victory drought
on tour, Goydos earned by far the biggest paycheck of his career
($936,000), skyrocketed from No. 133 to No. 39 in the official world
rankings and passed some guy named Jack Nicklaus on the tour's career
money list.
That's quite a trifecta.
No wonder Goydos said he was "stunned" and "numb"
after making birdies
on three of the final four holes at Waialae Country Club to beat
Charles Howell III and Luke Donald, the prohibitive final- group
favorites, by one stroke.
Nobody expected Goydos to win Sunday, including himself. Why would he?
The first and only other time he had won a tour event -- the 1996 Bay
Hill Invitational in Orlando -- Bill Clinton was serving his first
term, Greg Norman was ranked No. 1 in the world and a Stanford
student-athlete named Eldrick Woods was getting ready for the Pac- 10
Championships at Big Canyon Country Club in Newport Beach.
"Yeah, Tiger has won only about 50 (PGA) tournaments since my last
one," a smirking Goydos said in a private moment early Tuesday
morning, reading congratulatory e-mails on his laptop while waiting
out a frost delay at the Classic Club, host course of the Bob Hope
Chrysler Classic beginning today.
To be exact, Tiger has won 54 PGA Tour events since Goydos' maiden
victory, but who's counting?
It's easy to understand why Goydos, 42, was surprised by Sunday's
developments in Honolulu. He said he got off to a slow start and, by
the time he reached the 11th teebox, saw on a leaderboard that he was
in third place, four shots back of Howell and two behind Donald.
"So it didn't really cross my mind that maybe I had a chance to win,"
he said. "When I said I was stunned when I won, I (meant I) really
didn't think about winning the golf tournament until (No.) 16 or (No.)
17 -- and maybe that's a good thing."
The Golf Channel, providing coverage of the first full-field event in
the inaugural FedEx Cup season, obviously concurred with Goydos'
self-assessment of his chances. Anticipating a match-play duel to the
finish, the network focused on Howell and Donald, shot by shot down
the stretch, with occasional look-ins on Hawaiian-born Tadd Fujikawa,
who at 16 became the youngest player in 50 years to make the cut on
the PGA Tour.
The Golf Channel didn't start showing all of Goydos' shots live until
the 15th hole, when he birdied to tie Howell for the lead.
"That's OK with me," Goydos said. "Tadd was the story of
the week, and
deservedly so. He'll probably be on the cover of the (weekly) golf
magazines, too."
Goydos also birdied No. 16, to take the outright lead briefly, gave
that shot back with a bogey on No. 17 and finished with a birdie on
the par-5 18th, when his third-shot chip hit the flagstick, setting up
a tap-in birdie.
Howell had a chance to force a playoff with a birdie on No. 18, but
his third-shot chip raced 15 feet past the pin. He missed the putt,
making Goydos a winner for the first time after 257 tournaments.
"I caught a pretty good break, hitting the flagstick on 18,"
Goydos
said. "But I'm sticking with (the possibility) that ball was just
about to grab and stop."
Yes, he was kidding. Goydos, a Long Beach State grad and a "diehard
Angels fan," has a very dry -- and wry -- sense of humor, but you
have
to listen closely. He has a deadpan delivery.
When someone asked about the 11 years between tour victories, a
straight-faced Goydos said, "I try to win every decade."
So, naturally, I asked if that means his next victory will come on the
50-and-over Champions Tour.
"Maybe," he said, smiling.
What most surprised Goydos was how far he jumped in the world
rankings, all the way up to 39th, ahead of such big names as Mike
Weir, Darren Clarke, Lee Westwood, Tom Lehman, Fred Couples and Scott
Verplank.
"As stunned as I was about winning, I was even more stunned about
that," he said.
When I asked if thinks of himself as a top-40 player, he paused before
answering. He's excited about the possibility of playing in the Match
Play Championship in March (if he stays in the top 64) and in the
Masters in April (if he stays in the top 50), but he's not certain
that his past two tournaments should have so much weight in the
rankings.
He finished the 2006 season with a second-place finish at the Chrysler
Championship in Florida, which enabled him to keep his tour card, and
now he has started 2007 with a victory. Those two paychecks totaled
$1.4 million, or roughly 20 percent of his $6.6 million career
winnings.
"Should a 40 world ranking be based on two weeks out of 50?"
he asked
rhetorically. "I would say the the 40th-ranked player should be more
consistent than I've been. ...
"I will say they got the No. 1 player in the world right. After that,
it's a crapshoot."
Mickelson checks in: Nearly four months after his last competitive
golf, during the Ryder Cup Matches in Ireland, an invigorated and
slimmed-down Phil Mickelson is returning to action in the Bob Hope
Classic.
Because of his disappointing performances at the U.S. Open at Winged
Foot (he double-bogeyed the final hole to finish second) and at the
Ryder Cup (0-4-1 record), Mickelson said he addressed his physical
conditioning and his erratic driving during the offseason.
"Those two events were what made 2006 a disappointing year,"
said
Mickelson, who did win the 2006 Masters.
He says he lost 20-25 pounds, and then put on 15 pounds of muscle
through weight training, to try to improve his late-season endurance.
And he says he has been working with swing coach Rick Smith, and
experimenting with a new Callaway driver, to try to eliminate the
blocked tee shots to the left that plagued him throughout the season.
|
