Goydos finds zone on decidedly atypical day July 9th, 2010
Even before this season, when perfect games began falling out of baseballs clouds like hail, it ranked right up there with the rarest feat Goydos needed only 22 putts for 18 holes. (Getty Images) Over the past decade, there have been huge leaps in golf equipment and driving distance, the global talent pool has never been deeper, course conditions and PGA Tour sites continue, and more players than ever are beating a daily trail to the fitness center.
Yet it had been 11 years since somebody shot 59 on the PGA Tour.
The fourth man to hit the milestone figure, Paul Goydos, was as much at a loss to explain the drought as he was to explain why he was the man who accomplished what he rightly characterized as “an iconic figure.”
“Golfs hard,” he said Thursday. “Hard for everybody. Eventually, it gets to everybody.”
Almost everybody.
Goydos became the first tour player to shoot a 59 on a par-71 course Thursday at the John Deere Classic, and chalked up the feat as much to divinity as affinity.
“Someone was smiling on me,” he said. “Today, all the bad bounces, three-putts and balls buried in [bunker] lips evened out. Every good thing that could happen happened.”
Pardon the redundancy, but these levels of happenstance dont happen often.
Roughly 150 players each week tee it up at around 45 events per season. Yet the last guy to post a 59 was David Duval in 1999, when he eagled the last hole at the Bob Hope Classic. Myriad players have fired 60s in the span since, but nobody has scaled what appears to be a significant psychological mountain.
For last of a better explanation, Goydos guessed that theres a Roger Bannister issue on tour, though once the British distance runner cracked the 4-minute mile, it became downright commonplace. That hasnt been the case since Al Geiberger fired the first 59 in 1977, though the professional talent ranks are probably two or three times stronger than a mere 20 or 30 years ago.
“Theres a little bit of a barrier there, a slight psychological barrier,” Goydos said.
He pretty much embraced it this time around. Goydos had three holes left and knew he needed birdies on all of them to deliver the goods. He said he never talked about his score with his playing partners Jonathan Byrd or Cliff Kresge, or caddie Chris Mazziotti.
“They talk about being in the zone, but its a chicken-and-the-egg issue,” he said. “My game got better and better as the day went on. So, 16 and 17 are not the hardest holes …
“Everything was good and I got on auto-pilot a little bit.”
He knocked a 7-iron from the 18th fairway to 7 feet above the hole and curled in a left-to-right slider to match the tour record. Goydos, who has career wins at Bay Hill and the Sony Open, said he was never more nervous in his career. He finished with birdies on eight of the last nine holes.
His best score on tour had been a 62, recorded twice, including a round in Texas while playing alongside Tiger Woods, who shot 61 that day. The talkative Goydos had never posted a 59 in a casual round on lesser courses with friends. He has 10 career aces and three double-eagles and remembers them all vividly, he said. This trumps it all.
“Its like a bucket list for a tour player,” he said. “This is just the cream on top.”
That Goydos holed the last putt was hardly shocking. For the day, he canned putts totaling 187 feet 7 inches, according to the tours laser-guided measuring system. He had five putts between 10 and 20 feet and made them all. He had 22 putts in all, hit 16 of 18 greens and missed one fairway.
This from a guy who had one top 10 finish all season, back in February, and started the day ranked 99th in putts per round.
“Theres something going on thats maybe a little unexplainable,” he said.
Funny enough. but inexplicable is the only word that describes the head-scratching rarity of it all, too.