This is going to sound positively awful, especially in a sport that has seen its share of stage dads. But it’s not.
“I’m burning inside, wanting to kick everybody’s butt,” Kenny Perry said. “I’ve got a will inside of me. My dad … any kind of game, sport, whatever, he beat me so bad. I cried all the time because he just beat on me. And then he would laugh in my face as he was doing it.”
And …
“He must have been 12 or 13,” Ken Perry said of Kenny. “We were playing, and he was down three strokes going into the last hole. He had never beaten me. I remember looking at him and saying, ‘I don’t care if I’m 95 years old, you’ll never beat me.'”
Seeing as how Kenny Perry is tied for the Masters lead after three rounds, it’s fairly obvious Ken’s prediction didn’t come close to being true.
The father is 85 now and the son is 48, but attitudes and motivation and feelings — bad, good and otherwise — are ingrained. For some kids, parental goading works. For others, it doesn’t. Some kids carry a lifetime of scar tissue around with them. Others look on a demanding past as a badge of honor.
Ken Perry said he pushed his son because it was apparent from a young age that the boy was both talented and driven.
“I saw something special in him,” the elder Perry said Saturday in a telephone interview from Elizabethtown, Ky. “When he was little, I used to sit there and watch him hit balls. He’d get blisters on his fingers, tape ’em up and hit some more. He’d do it for hours. He loved it.”
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Kenny Perry remembers everything about those days.
“He would smoke this big cigar, smoke would be flying and he would be sitting on a towel on the ground and he would be teeing them up one right after another,” he said. ” … I still smell the cigar, the grass. Anytime I catch a whiff of any of that, my dad instantly comes to me.”
Ken Perry, a retired insurance salesman, will watch Sunday’s final round at home with his wife, who is battling cancer. What he will see on TV is a ferocious golfer in sheep’s clothing. Perry is considered one of the nicest guys on the PGA Tour. He would like to show the golf world that a killer lurks beneath the surface.
You win a Masters, and you’re special. It’s just the way it is. Tack it on to the 13 PGA Tour victories Perry has, his $28 million in earnings and his standout performance in last year’s Ryder Cup near Louisville, and then you’re talking about someone who won’t be a footnote in golf history.
“Dad has always said, ‘You need to win that green jacket,'” Perry said. “He always calls me and tells me.”
Father planned to talk with son Saturday night. What would he say to him?
“I’m going to say, ‘You’ve got one more day, and you’ll have your green coat,'” Ken said.
Oh, they’ll talk all right, said Kenny Perry, who is tied at 11 under with Angel Cabrera.
“We talk every night,” he said, laughing. “He calls me up and critiques every shot on every hole: ‘What are you thinking about on that hole? What’s going on? I know you can hit it better than that.'”
You don’t ever escape your parents. You might try to in your teens, but escape is futile. And then you reach a point where you don’t want to get away. You start to realize that maybe, just maybe, there’s a method to their raging, overt madness.
“He was relentless,” Kenny Perry said. “He was ruthless. He was a smart man. He knew it was going to make me tough. That’s all he was trying to do.”
And here is the important part.
“I still loved him,” he said. “It wasn’t like some of these demanding dads. It was a very loving household. So that was the difference, I think.”
If Perry wins Sunday, he will be the oldest champion in Masters history. It will be quite a story. He has played just one round in a major tournament since 2007.
There’s a fire underneath this guy. The spark was probably inside him from the beginning. But his father was an accelerant.
When Kenny Perry was 14, he finally beat his dad in a round of golf, on the nine-hole course in their town.
“You know how I did it?” he said. ” … The ninth hole at our course was a par-3, and he’s one up on me. He says, ‘I’ve got you again.’
“I hit a 4-iron in the hole for a 1. He made par.”
It’s not hard to imagine the trash-talking.
“Oh, yeah,” Kenny Perry said. “I let him have it.”
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