Perry, top-gun rallies to tie for lead
DUBLIN, Ohio - What you had here was John Wayne, getting down off his horse, bandana tied off to one side, 10-gallon hat at a jaunty angle, and swaggering along with six-guns blazing, shooting up the place to a faretheewell, shooting up the back nine something awful. Take that, evil-doers. And that's what golf holes are - evil-doers. Treacherous and mean and devious, and they deal from the bottom of the deck and rustle cattle. Until along comes a guy who can make them knuckle under.Well, OK, it wasn't exactly a swagger. Maybe just a hint of a gimp left over from that knee surgery. And not a 10-gallon hat, but a golf visor. “My head's too big for a golf cap,” the guy explained. “It sticks out here,” he added, holding both hands up at the sides, “and they just don't have a hat that fits me right.” So he makes do with a visor, to ward off the sun. And it sits straightaway on his head. He couldn't do jaunty if he tried.
OK, so this wasn't Duke Wayne, saving the world from some villainous golf holes. More to the amazing point, the guy who was doing this is one of the most down-home, folksy guys ever to ply the trade of golf - Kenny Perry, one of the few modern tour golfers not to call Tahoe or Palm Beach Gardens or Rancho Glitzo home. Try Franklin -- Kentucky born-and-bred. Or is it bred-and-born.
And after slapping it around early Friday and threatening to slide off the leaderboard, he came bouncing back for a 71 to tie Mathew Goggin for the lead at 7-under 137 at Muirfield Village, which played quite frisky in the shifting winds.
Perry, at age 47, was a playoff runnerup to Ryuji Imada in the AT&T Classic a few weeks ago, thanks to his own fatally errant play, but he suffers such things if not gladly, then at least stoically. He can still smile and tell himself better luck next time, and mean it. Even after he more or less blew a chance at the 1996 PGA Championship by basking in the TV booth rather than warm up for the playoff that was coming with Mark Brooks. But he has won nine times, including two Memorials, in 1991 and 2003.
And so it was Friday that after skidding off the leaderboard at the Memorial Tournament, with bogeys on three of his first five holes.
“Then I hit the shot of my life, to keep the ship from sinking,” he said. (It's OK. The Duke played seafarer a time or two.)
This was at his sixth hole, the par-5 15th, a 35-yard pitch that rolled dead into the hole for an eagle.
“Turned my round around and lifted my spirits,” Perry said. Eagles have a way of doing that.
But what had put him right up there in this Memorial to begin with was that 66 he shot in the first round, a stroke behind Goggin. His front nine was as muted and unassuming as he is, a one-under 35. Then he started home. He parred the 10th, then ripped off six straight birdies.
He had “gawww-leee” written all over him.
“I don't know if I've ever done that in my 22 years out here,” said Perry.
Those six birdies were of mixed species - an 8-foot putt at the 11th, a chip-in at the par-3 12th, and the rest from 20, 25 feet.
“I just kept pouring them in from 20 feet like they were 2-footers,” said Perry, in what for him was a burst of enthusiasm.
Come Friday, and the gentle gusts, so pleasant for the sun-baked spectators, were devil-winds for the golfers.
“It was brutal out there,” Perry said, confident that “brutal” for golfers generally means nothing of the kind for the rest of the world. “You put slick conditions with 15- and 20-mile-an-hour winds, it's hard to pick a club. And then it's hard to stop the ball from the wind just moving it all the time. It was a day where you knew the scores were going to be high.”
Indeed. Only three guys shot in the 60s, and 21 shot in the 80s. The latter is a figure Perry is not familiar with. In his19 previous Memorials, 78 was his worst score, and that was back in 1989.
So he goes into the third round tied for the lead, a shot ahead of the field, and no monsters in his path, nobody behind him that he'd be likely to lose sleep over, with Tiger Woods sitting out with his knee problem, and Ernie Els and Boo Weekley and Charles Howell III also sitting out, this time with scoring problems, on the other side of the generous cut. And so it was on a tough day heading west.
“I'm very tired,” Perry said. “I'm mentally tired right now.”
And with that, he got to his feet and wearily thumbed his visor back, but the look on his face, Pilgrim, told you he'd be reloading and be back on the street tomorrow.
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