Goydos is a native of Long Beach who graduated from Long Beach State and took on substitute teaching for $100 a day to help bridge the gap between tour schools. He taught high-school classes in Long Beach, some of them at schools in gang-infested areas of the inner city.
Says Goydos: "A 13-year-old kid, his parents working 60 hours a week in different jobs, barely paying for a two-bedroom apartment, good, hard-working people, and a 20-year-old on the corner has a BMW, five different girls, having the time of his life, tells the 13-year-old to raise your left hand if you see the police and for that he gives him a hundred dollars. His parents don't make that kind of money. That's a bad kid? Are you kidding me? He's a smart kid. It's a systemic problem. I'd probably make the same choice. I kind of took that out of that job."
Goydos may have learned more than he taught. "He's got a lot of intelligence about him, but he saw a lot of things," Burke says. "Our biggest struggle growing up in New Jersey was whether we could afford to go to a Rangers game. Paul was working with kids whose biggest struggle was that someone they knew just got killed. There are plenty of guys who play at being book smart. Paul has a little more real-world intelligence, some down-home intelligence."
As often as not, his intelligence manifests itself in humor, delivered expeditiously, as when he took note at the Players that he was hitting twice the club Garcia was hitting -- say, a 4-iron to Garcia's 8. "Do you think we have a problem," Goydos said to his caddie, "when his clubs are divisible my mine?"
"The best line I've ever heard," Burke says.
Who else would ponder course architect Rees Jones' impact on golf and conclude that if Jones landscaped his home the mailman wouldn't be able to find the mailbox because he would have moved it back 40 yards? "Off the top of his head," Flesch says admiringly. However his career unfolds from here, suffice it to say that Goydos won't be operating in the kind of obscurity in which he once toiled. Strangers recognize him now, as one apparently did a few weeks ago when he took Goydos' picture in an Orange County mall.
Four years ago Goydos' assignment in his daughter's classroom was to ensure the students actually had read the books they were doing reports on. One of the kids brought in Open by John Feinstein, based on the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage Black. "My picture is in the book," Goydos says. "I was player one at Bethpage, first off the first tee the first day. I open the book and point to the picture. 'Who's that?' The kid hadn't quite put two and two together. I'm in the book and I'm standing next to the picture and the kid doesn't recognize me. Now they recognize me in airports."
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