ON THE PGA Tour, in a brief burst of uncharacteristic irony, he's known amongst his peers as "Sunshine". Not because of his dashing good looks – one glance at Paul Goydos and his pudding bowl haircut is enough to dispel that romantic notion – but because this 44-year-old self-confessed journeyman owns professional golf's nattiest line in deadpan and self-deprecating humour.
One year ago this week, thrust into a wholly unexpected limelight by stellar play that saw him take a one-shot lead into the final round of the Players Championship – the so-called "fifth major" – Goydos was asked if he had ever before been in a si
milar position.
"No," he said, "but I've only been out here 16 years."
The next morning he was at it again.
"How did you sleep?" enquired the interviewer. "On my back," replied Goydos.
"And why is it that you wear your shirt buttoned to the top?"
"I don't have any shoulders."
One round later, actually 19 holes later, Goydos didn't claim what would have been only his third PGA Tour victory. All the while wearing a Long Beach State University (his alma mater) baseball cap with the legend "Dirtbags" on the side, he went down fighting in what were fiercely difficult conditions. Only at the first extra hole did Sergio Garcia see off the Californian's brave challenge.
"It was unfortunate it got so windy on the last day," reflects the runner-up. "But you have to tip your hat to Sergio. If you'd told me that I'd play the last 15 holes in level par and not win I'd have said you were crazy. Standing on the 4th tee – I made bogeys at two and three – I was thinking that I might still win if I broke 80. So I tried to stay patient, ended up playing really well and just got beat. That's how well he played."
As for his own form, Goydos' explanation is typically down-to-earth. "It was a combination of things," he shrugs. "I was due to play well. Changing the course to Bermuda grass made a huge difference to me; I love putting on Bermuda greens. The weather worked out; it was hot and windy as opposed to cold and windy. And the wind blew the right direction for me. On holes like the tough par-4 14th I could reach the green with two good shots. The year before I could barely reach the fairway. All of those things added up. And I putted great."
Of course, winning and losing on the golf course has never been close to representing all that Goydos is about. A few years ago, when his ex-wife Wendy – who died suddenly this past January – was at the lowest point in her battle with addiction to prescribed painkillers, Goydos, who was awarded custody in the wake of the divorce, took a year off the tour to look after his two teenage daughters, Chelsea and Courtney. During that time, he also taught in a local high school, an experience that gave him a perspective rarely seen or heard on the preening and pampered PGA Tour.
"It was the best year of my life," he says now. "I loved it."
Not surprisingly, Goydos is, in a sea of "country club brats" on the PGA Tour, hardly your typical American professional golfer. For one thing, he doesn't automatically vote Republican.
"Left-leaning in the UK or in Australia is a bit different from left-leaning in the US," he says. "So I'm not sure that I really do 'lean left' to any great extent. The biggest problem with our politics is that you are not allowed to have diverse feelings; you really have to toe the line. You're not really allowed to think. Once you are either a Republican or a Democrat, you're not really allowed to do your job. If you don't vote the way everyone else in the party does, you're out."
Those restrictions hardly apply to Goydos himself. At dinner one evening he famously called out Tom Watson after hearing what he viewed as the five-time Open champion's uninformed rhetoric.
"We got talking about gangs in our major cities and how they were getting out of control," recalls Goydos. "Tom's take was that they were all just bad kids and we needed to do something about it.
"My reaction was that 'this guy went to Stanford? Are you kidding me?' So I told him what I thought. First of all, there aren't any bad kids. They are simply living in tough neighbourhoods. But their parents are often great citizens working two jobs, 60 hours a week so that they can stay in a two-bedroom apartment. They do whatever they can do just to keep going.
"Now, that is obviously commendable. But if you're 16 years old and there is a drug dealer down the street driving a BMW, he's going to look like the king of the neighbourhood. Then he comes up to you and asks you to stand on the corner and raise your arm if you see a police car. If you do that for 20 minutes, you get $500, more than your dad gets in two days. And now you're in a gang.
"So I asked Tom what decision he would make in that situation. He'd be out there raising his hand. And that makes them bad kids? I don't think so. They are products of their environments. I taught school in an area just like that. These are generally good kids, but they live in America's version of Lebanon."
In a right-wing PGA Tour world not exactly overflowing with tolerance for the less fortunate in society, such views are unusual to say the least. But, in all aspects of his life, Goydos has always been different. Just last year he took himself off to Australia to play in the Australian PGA and Open, travel almost unheard of amongst his compatriots. And, as you'd expect, he went there with his eyes and ears open.
"It would do wonders for American golf in general to go to Australia to take a look at the courses," he says. "The greens there are the best in the world. So are the fairways. But they don't spend a lot of money on the rough. At my home course in California, they spend thousands of dollars over-seeding the rough. All that does is make the fairways too wet. It's completely backwards. Golf in America looks like a park. But it shouldn't. Courses are places where people go to play a sport and have fun; they are not places that should look good on a postcard.
"I didn't see many courses in Australia worrying too much about what they look like from above. But they really care about how they play; in America it is the other way round, they don't care how it plays as long as it looks good. As a country, we need to get back to playing golf the way it is supposed to be played."
Still, for all that he has such strong opinions, golf will never be the biggest thing in this intriguing man's life.
"Being a father is who I am," he says with pride. "It's why I'm here."
The full article contains 1245 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
