A conversation with 2016 DICK’S Sporting Goods Champion Paul Goydos
ENDICOTT (WBNG) – With the 2022 DICK’S Sporting Goods Open underway, 12 News caught up with 2016 Champion Paul Goydos to discuss preparations for this year’s event, winning 2016 and his life on the road .
Jack Cooper: “Do you have a favorite club?”
Paul Goydos: “No, they’re all the same, they’re all the same. You have a love-hate relationship like anyone has with their putter, but everything else is mostly the same.”
Cooper: “We haven’t had enough rain here in the Southern Tier this year, what’s the track like?”
Goydos: “This course is in the best shape I have ever seen. We don’t understand how they get a public place that gets played a lot in this good form. This is in as good condition as any course we will be playing all year. Fairways are perfect, greens are perfect. This is kind of a week where you make sure you drive well and then you have to putt well, so you spend a third of my time figuring out where to hit it, a third of the time putting and a third the time the rest period. I’ve been here enough, this is my sixth or seventh DICK’S [Open] and I’ve also played the BC Open here half a dozen times so you know what this course requires. So if you do these things and prepare for them, you should be fine.
Cooper: “You won back 2016, walk me through it.”
Goydos: “I won here in 2016. I think I finished second in 2015 and won in 2016, and if you look back at my stats, I guarantee you again that this week I’m probably in the top five or ten for driving accuracy and top five or ten for putting was, if you do those two things out here, you’re going to do well this week.”
Cooper: “We have a plane taking off behind you, what’s it like playing here with this kind of setting?”
Goydos: “We have an airport right here, earlier some of the players swarmed back the range when it was the BC Open. That’s one of the quirks of this tournament and the people who complain about it probably aren’t playing well here. It’s part of your preparation.”
cooper: “A lot of people say you have a very mild temper, you can birdie and then bogey on the next hole and we’d get exactly the same reaction, so really, what’s upsetting you?”
Goydos: “In general, I don’t show a lot of positive emotions. But I will say that I show enough negative emotions. I think that’s because I once said to someone, ‘I hate bad golf a million times more than good golf.’ My emotions are probably 85% negative and 15% positive, but you try not to show that too much, you just try to go out there and do your thing.”
Cooper: “What do you do when you don’t have a day like this? When you have time to kill, do you sometimes go out and do anything?”
Goydos: “Well, unfortunately I have to do the worst thing I have to do on the road, do the laundry. It’s a long trip for me, I usually go home, but as a West Coast guy, I’m away four weeks in a row and I can’t pack that many clothes. Doing laundry on the go is just drudgery, it’s drudgery.