Absent fans insult Kenny Perry

THERE was a moment so sad in last Sunday’s final round of the Masters. Long after Kenny Perry’s over-hit chip on the 71st hole and his under-hit putt on the 72nd are forgotten, the scene as he raised his right arm after making a two on the 12th green will be in the memory. If you watched closely or were one of the few following the final pair at Augusta National, it was not Perry for whom you wanted to weep but the game.
Consider the context: Perry and Angel Cabrera were the final pairing, 17 of the previous 18 Masters winners had come from the last two to tee off and, four months short of his 49th birthday, Perry had his chance to become the oldest major champion.
Not interested? Well, consider, too, that when Perry accepted a $5,000 gift from his friend Ronnie Ferguson to get to Q-school about 232 years ago, he agreed to pay 5% of his career earnings to his church community. So far, that’s raised $1.4m and a lot of teenagers from poor backgrounds in Simpson County, Kentucky, have university scholarships.
Maybe these things don’t much matter but it’s hard not to warm to a professional golfer who borrows the money and builds a golf course that is affordable for ordinary people. Perry did that in Franklin, his home town. Green fees range from $20 to $30 at Kenny Perry’s Country Creek GC. Mostly when a top pro “designs” a golf course, his fee is part of the reason why you and I will never play it.
Then, as soon as the man speaks, the way he gently raises his right hand, open palm, after a birdie, you know you’re going to like him. Perry reminds us why some men deserve to be called gentlemen. Part of the reason he didn’t win much until his mid-40s was that he needed his three children to fly the nest before he could concentrate on golf.
Thirteen PGA Tour victories isn’t bad, he had a central role in the US’s Ryder Cup victory last year and for three days at the Masters, he played better golf than any other player. Rather than share the lead with Cabrera after 54 holes, he would have led by four or five shots had he holed a third of the birdie chances he created.
All the time it happens at Augusta, two caddies look at a putt and one says, “right edge”, the other, “an inch on the left” and both are wrong. On Augusta’s greens Perry was illiterate, a murderous handicap in an exam that lists putting as a compulsory subject.
He made plenty of good putts but sent them on errant lines. So how well did he do to be the last man to hit a tee shot on the first hole on Masters’ Sunday?
But even at that point, you could have foretold the disappointment one would feel at the 12th hole two and a half hours later. For the gallery that followed Perry and Cabrera was no more than a few hundred. You could, on the last day of the Masters, watch the leaders play their approach shots, amble up to the green and see them stroke their putts. It was like the gallery you might get for two decent players in the middle of the pack. Augusta’s patrons had eyes for only Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, even though the numbers watching meant you could barely see them.
Perry played beautifully for 11 holes. Could have made birdies at two, four, five, eight and 10, should have had birdie on seven but he made good putts on wrong lines.
Then, on the 12th, he holed a birdie putt tougher than the six he’d missed to get back into the tournament lead and the tide seemed to turn his way. He seemed to believe that and instead of the understated open-palm salute, he put his arm higher into the air and clenched his fist. As he did, he turned towards the crowd, except there was no crowd. The big stand behind the 12th tee that looks across on to the green holds maybe a thousand people. About 100 seats were occupied. It wasn’t a question of where they had all gone but why they hadn’t turned up.
At Augusta, there is a premium on good manners and old style southern civility that is charming; fans are called patrons, fans with tickets are accredited patrons, and it is routinely claimed that they are the best in the game. Nothing could be further from the reality. The empty spaces around Perry and Cabrera spoke of a tournament, however brilliant the final round, that had taken on something of the circus.
Would a vast majority of fans at the Open Championship abandon the tournament leaders to follow two players starting the day seven shots behind? Not a hope in hell.
Source:The times