Praise for Paul Goydos, Garcia

By the way, before we get outta here, I have to say something. Those of you that watched the Players Championship yesterday and throughout the weekend — the final round yesterday with the playoff between Paul Goydos and Sergio Garcia on the 17th hole. Starting Saturday afternoon, I was watching this, and I was pulling for Goydos, because I’ve met him one time. I played with Paul Goydos. He was in my foursome at the AT&T National Pro-Am some years ago. I’m thinking three or four, but these years run together, and I haven’t been able to play the last two years; so it might have been three years ago. If you paid attention to this tournament yesterday, you heard all this talks about ‘Goydosisms’ that his self-deprecating humor was just classic, and he had a perfect perspective on where he was. He’s 43 years old, and never won a tournament. Well, he has won one. He’s never had a 54-hole lead.

He became the sentimental favorite for all of these people that Hillary Clinton says don’t like Barack Obama, the white middle class. Because he was one of them. He was one of these journeymen. He’s worked at it for 30 years. He’s had some family problems; he took time off from the tour to put the family problems back together. He’d been working very, very hard. He won more money in one day yesterday — well, four days — then he has ever won in an entire year, maybe in his whole career. Thirty years in the PGA Tour, something like that or 16 years. I’m not sure what it was. So he was everybody’s sentimental favorite and I sort of felt bad for Sergio Garcia, because everybody was pulling for Goydos to win. Garcia was not… Even when he won, it was, ‘Okay, great, yeah. You played well today. You played better than anybody else, but gee! We really wanted to see this other guy win: Goydos.’

He was just as friendly and nice as he could be. He was not having, like I was… He’d had a couple of ‘bad rounds’ — for him. I mean, I would have taken it in a day. I would have taken them any day. But he kept cracking jokes at me, and I couldn’t hear half of what he was saying, and he was getting real frustrated — ’cause he was cracking political jokes. He was trying to get my goat with Hillary jokes and this kind of thing. He even commented to a reporter some months ago that when we played together he thought he had this great line, and he shouted it at me when the crowd was going nuts, and I couldn’t hear what he said. He said, ‘Hell, this is going to be no fun! This guy can’t even hear,’ but he was just as good as he could be. He’s a nice guy; and I was just pulling for him so much yesterday. He was a very class act, the way it all… Do you know what he said when he lost? He said, ‘The right thing happened here. Sergio Garcia played better than I did today. The guy who made the better shots, made the shots and played the course better won, and that’s the way it ought to be.’ So he was just a class act all the way around. So congratulations, Paul. Everybody was pulling for you and will continue to do so.