In no other major sport can a 48 year old (soon to be 49) beat up on twenty- and thirty-somethings with humiliating regularity but that’s exactly what Kenny Perry is doing on the PGA Tour right now. He’s got kids older than some of the players choking on his dust.
This past Sunday he won for the fifth time in the last 13 months (could have been his sixth win if he just made par on one of the final two holes at the Masters), putting him atop the money list and FedExCup standings. What’s amazing isn’t the fact that he still hits it a mile (he’s sixth in total driving); it's his putting at an age when most players have long lost their nerve and touch.He put on a clinic at the Travelers Championship, needing just 25 waves of the wand in the first-round 61 and his fourth-round 63.
He attributes his great play on the greens to a putter he picked up at his club in Florida before the start of the 2008 season. If you look really closely at the putter, there’s one of those name bands around the shaft, but it doesn’t say Kenny Perry. It says Paul Hargarten.
During the winter months, Kenny will spend a couple of weeks practicing at Bent Pine Golf Club in Vero Beach, where he was an assistant pro in the ‘80s. One day before the start of the 2008 season, the 83-year-old Hargarten approached him with a Ping Craz-E putter in his hand and out of nowhere said, “You need to play with this. You’ll put good with it.’”
Always the gracious Southerner, Kenny politely accepted the gift while thinking Hargarten's gesture was a bit odd. "But next thing you know I ended up using it and had a great year with it,” he told me recently. “I never really asked why he did it, but he truly believed I needed to use it. I just love the way the ball comes off the face. It just has the greatest feel.”
For every tournament victory with one of its putter, Ping gold-plates two models, storing one in a vault at the company headquarters in Phoenix and sending the other to the player. After his first win last year at the Memorial, Perry sent his to Hargarten with a nice thank-you note.
The term “one of the nicest guys on tour” is overused, but in Perry’s case it’s really true—at least off the course when he’s not stomping on his competition. Just imagine the hurt he’s going to put on the older guys on the Champions Tour next year. It is indeed a Craz-E game.
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