#25 Paul Goydos

By John Strege
Illustrations By Dale Stephanos November 28, 2008

His is an intellect that suggest a learned man, one whose literary tastes run to what, Voltaire? Proust? "USA Today," Paul Goydos says, no kidding, calling it the best newspaper out there. Out there, as in out there in the hallway outside his hotel-room door?

"They have stuff they wouldn't put in The New York Times," he says. "I saw a headline, 'Man kills four involved in a love triangle.' The Times wouldn't write that. First of all, a love triangle is three people. How can you kill four people in a love triangle?"

The cookie cutter went missing the day golf turned out Goydos. Does he fit anyone's notion of a PGA Tour player -- visually, artistically or otherwise? Golf Digest fashion director Marty Hackel once called him the worst dressed player on tour, but when you're 5-foot-9 and 190 pounds and your shoulders slope like a black diamond ski run, is Giorgio Armani really the answer?

Goydos is bound to clash no matter what he wears. He is a singles hitter in a game that has evolved into Home Run Derby, and he favors the left side of the political fairway on a tour that overwhelmingly finds that route too taxing. Then there's this (brace yourself): He even had a job once. He was a substitute teacher long before Hank Haney standing in for Butch Harmon annexed its definition.

Yet what sets Goydos apart from his tour brethren has more to do with his brain than his biography. "He's one of the most sarcastic, quick-witted, intelligent people you've ever met," his friend and fellow PGA Tour player Steve Flesch says.

Goydos' mind comes with an extra gear that spontaneously enables him to turn what otherwise would be a mundane observation into high comedy. Playing Oakland Hills isn't just difficult, by his reckoning, it's like "playing Scrabble without the vowels."

If only repartee was redeemable for FedEx Cup points. Without a proper stage, its value is negligible beyond evoking laughter from friends at dinner. Goydos' wit always has begged for a wider audience, which for a journeyman who has produced two victories 11 years apart mostly had eluded him. Then in May fate provided him a forum commensurate to his skill. Three rounds into the Players, Goydos was its leader, earning him a sit-down interview with NBC's Bob Costas, who asked him whether he had ever held a 54-hole lead before.

"No," Goydos replied in his best deadpan, "but I've only been out here 16 years." The following morning, Costas put him on the air again and asked how he had slept. "On my back," Goydos said.

Goydos later wondered whether on the latter question his impulsive irreverence had been the wrong tone for the occasion. "If I'd wanted to be funny," he explains, "I'd have said, 'In the fetal position.' "

It was in fact the perfect pitch, resonating with the audience, the equivalent of a "Tonight Show" moment for a comic used to performing only for his peers. Goydos eventually lost to Sergio Garcia on the first playoff hole, but the grace with which he handled his defeat (a role he had been practicing for his whole career, he might have noted wryly) served only to burnish his newfound image as a player worth watching. Or hearing.

At that, there is more to Goydos than meets the ear, a sobering side born of real-world issues that mute the laughter. Even as the Players has generated new opportunities (he will play in the Australian PGA and Australian Open for the first time), he is disinclined to accept many of them. He doesn't like to commit, he says, because, well, then he's committed.

It makes sense only when you consider that he is a single father of two teenage daughters -- Chelsea, 18, and Courtney, 16 -- who might require his attention at home. "I'm still a parent first and a professional golfer second," he says, and his credentials in that regard will withstand any challenge.

When he and his wife divorced, he was awarded custody of the girls, whose mother, Goydos says, "has a substance abuse problem that she's fighting through." Goydos' first act was to take a year off from tournament golf (2004), aware the decision potentially could jeopardize his career. "That wasn't in the forefront of my mind," he says. "It was time for me to step up as a parent and show my kids that they are the most important thing on the face of this earth."