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VALERO TEXAS OPEN

May 14, 2009

Paul Goydos

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

MARK STEVENS: I'd like to welcome Paul Goydos to the interview room. Paul is currently in the lead after the morning wave, and turned in a 29 on the front side today. If you can talk about that front side and how you got off to such a good start today.
PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, I mean I think we got a pretty good break in the weather. I played yesterday morning and it wasn't this nice.
Today it was nice and blew from the normal direction, which is a good start. I made a good birdie on one. Actually, two was probably the thing that kind of got the round going. Drove it bad in the bunker and didn't have much and ended up 20 yards short of the green and difficult up-and-down. Pitched it, hit a pretty good shot in there about 10 feet, made it for par.
So I've gotten three good shots on the first hole and nice little putt and had a good save to kind of say, hey, you know. And from that point on everything went pretty smoothly.
Made a solid par on three. Made a driver and 8-iron to 12 feet, birdied four. Five, hit a 4-iron left of the green and chipped it in. Now really things are going good. And made a good solid birdie on the next hole, 8-iron four, five, six feet from the hole.
Eight, hit a good drive and little pitch shot in there about three feet, and nine hit a good driver in there about 15 feet. Made that. Shoot 29. It's always fun to shoot 29. Shoot in the 20s, that's just to me one of the coolest things you can do as a Tour player in golf.
If you get the opportunity to do it, it's kind of cool. Made a couple solid pars on 10 and 11 and birdied 12 and 13. Good putt on 12 for about 15 feet, hit six inches from the hole on 13 to get to 8-under.
From there I didn't play particularly as well, but I think that's normal. I mean you can't have everything good happen for every moment of your life. I settled down and made solid pars, which was fine, and kind of made a mess out of the last hole, made bogey.
But all in all, good day, good scoring day, and again, everything kind of went my way today more so than I played great golf as much as I had a lot of good breaks and made a lot of putts when you kind of needed to make putts to keep things going.
MARK STEVENS: Okay. Thank you. Questions?

Q. You're as familiar with this course as just about anybody, and you've had some really impressive appearances here, and I know you know coming into this, last year you shot three rounds of 66 and tied for 19th, and I'm not sure there's another tournament where you have to do that.
PAUL GOYDOS: I did have kind of a mediocre third round, though. I shot 73 on the third round.
I've had a lot of good rounds on this golf course. I think I've broken 30 maybe three times. Been on either nine, too. I've kind of struggled to play four good rounds here. I've had a boat load of finishes probably between 15th and 30th.
Just I like the golf course. It's a different golf course right now than it is in the fall. I think if the wind doesn't blow, I think we'll see some pretty low scoring, because it's softer. They have to keep the golf course a little softer because they're in a transition period, while in the fall it's full-blown Bermuda. You can make it as firm and hard as you want, and they really can't do that with the greens right now. We'll be here one more year. We'll see next year how the golf course is.

Q. My extension of that question was going 7-under you probably don't have a whole lot of confidence that that's going to hold up?
PAUL GOYDOS: No. I'm happy I'm playing well. This is a golf course where you know you gotta keep digging, making birdies, and I like that. We want that every single week.
But I think this is a good golf course. It rewards good play and penalizes poor play. I think that's a good thing. You see a range of scores on this golf course. If you play good and make putts like I did, you can shoot 62, 3, whatever. If you don't make putts and don't play good, you can shoot 73 here pretty quick, and I think that range is what I like about the golf course is it rewards good play and penalizes bad play.

Q. This has been a little bit of an imperial year for you, up and down, a lot of stuff going on. Do you look at this on the schedule, I think six of the nine tournaments you've played here you've finished in the Top-25?
PAUL GOYDOS: I like it here. I liked it at Oak Hill, played there a couple times. And this golf course, I enjoy playing. Had a lot of good things happen here. I shot 63 today, another good thing. San Antonio and I agree. We seem to get along pretty well.

Q. Paul, there's been a lot of stuff about your personal situation recently. Not to rehash that, but just having that out there, though, has that affected your mindset at all?
PAUL GOYDOS: I think it's good. I think that, fortunately, I have to make decisions on how I'm going to handle those situations and the media is going to ask questions, and I made a conscious decision to tell the story, and I think everything we said, through John and Golf Digest, and we did some other things through other people, it kind of speaks for itself.
I really can't add anything to that, but I think it is what it is, and we're all going to go through difficult times. I've been on Tour for 17 years. I'm sure there's plenty of other people been on Tour for 17 years who have had difficult times. It's just something you have to deal with in life, and it's part of the growing and maturing process, not only for me but for my girls, too.

Q. Did the wind pick up a little late in the round as compared to the morning?
PAUL GOYDOS: Maybe a little bit. I think that's typical of here. As the day goes on, the wind gets a little stronger. I'm sure it's stronger at noon than it is now and it'll be stronger at 2 than it is at noon. That seems to be a common threat here on Earth, and I think it's one of those courses where you're going to see a pretty good disparity in scoring a little bit maybe in the morning and the afternoon where you really don't get a good feel of where the tournament's going to be this weekend till everybody gets through tomorrow.
Again, I'm happy with my start, but I'm going to have to battle the golf course a little bit tomorrow.

Q. You're not going to go outside for lunch and the wind's really howling this afternoon?
PAUL GOYDOS: It is what it is. I tend to check the forecast, and it's supposed to blow 15 this afternoon. It's going to blow 15 tomorrow afternoon. It blew pretty hard yesterday.
I think that I would be shocked that it would be nicer tomorrow morning than it was this morning. It was beautiful this morning, and I definitely think it was a good morning to get a get start, and I did and it's what it is.

Q. Did you find the greens a little slower than the last time you were here?
PAUL GOYDOS: Yeah, again, they're in that transition time. This is a resort golf course. It isn't owned by the Tour. It's built to, my understanding, most likely, to make money, and I think they need to make sure the golf course is playable the other 51 weeks of the year. And I don't think they should be sacrificing the month prior to and the month after this event just for us.
The golf course is in good shape, the greens obviously, I putted well. The greens are all fine, a little slower than what we're used to, but again, that's a function of the dates, and this is a privately owned -- it's not here for us.
It's here for them to make money and people to enjoy, and I think sometimes we get carried away. Last week the golf course was in fantastic shape, but we own that golf course and we can do more with it and get it firm and put it on the edge.
If they were to do that here and the golf course were to die or something terrible would happen, it would be terrible for the revenue. I actually think we need to play more golf courses, in my opinion, like the members do. I think we do too much to change the game for Tour players.
I would like to see us go back to playing golf courses more like in Augusta, we basically speed up the greens. There's no rough there. This year at Charlotte, at Quail Hollow, again, we didn't have this knee-high rough. It was more set up for member play. I would like to see more on this Tour, personally, and that's what this week is.

Q. Have you taken advantage of that shuttle over to the TPC?
PAUL GOYDOS: I haven't gone over there and taken a look. It is what it is.
I have faith in Greg Norman. He knows what he's doing. I think he's one of the better modern architects. We played a course of his in Mexico was pretty good. Sugarloaf was fine. Guarantee you the golf course they play next year is going to be very good. I like playing here. Don't get me wrong, but it's going to be good next year, too.
MARK STEVENS: Any other questions? Okay. Thank you, Paul. Good luck the rest of the weekend.
PAUL GOYDOS: Thanks.

End of FastScripts

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