Hot Perry Stays Cool, Rolls With Potshots

The 90th PGA Championship, which begins today at Oakland Hills in Bloomfield Township, Mich., will be golf's fourth and final major championship of the season, but the first of the year for Kenny Perry, who nonetheless enters as one of the hottest players in the field. Perry might also be the most criticized player in the suburbs of Detroit after his decisions to skip the U.S. and British opens.

More amused than angered by all the attention, he insisted again this week that he absolutely has no regrets. Perry recalled tuning into the British Open from Royal Birkdale last month on the same day he was playing in the PGA Tour event in Milwaukee and watching Pat Perez do an interview after he shot 82 in the rainy and wind-whipped first round on the west coast of England.

"He said it was blowing sideways and sleet was hitting him," Perry said. "He said, 'Kenny Perry's the smartest man in the world.' I kind of chuckled. I set my goal early in the year to make that Ryder Cup team. I wasn't going to bail out. I committed in January to Milwaukee. I was 100-something in the world then. Who would ever have thought I would have won three tournaments at my age?"

Clearly, the potshots have hardly fazed a man who has won three times and had three more top 10 finishes in his last nine tournaments on the PGA Tour and is second only to injured Tiger Woods on the tour's money list.

"It amuses me," he said. "I thought it was a compliment. In 22 years, nobody cared where I played golf. Now all of a sudden everybody is worried about, 'Oh, I'm not going to the British.' And they blasted me for it, which I was laughing. I just couldn't believe it. . . . But I wasn't going to bail out on Milwaukee. I had eight top 10s there and a win, so I went there. I finished sixth, so now I've got nine top 10s and a win. It's a golf course I dearly love; it's been huge in my career in keeping me going."

Perry will turn 48 on Sunday, and hoisting the Wanamaker Trophy early that evening would obviously be the ultimate birthday gift. He already has accomplished his Ryder Cup goal, earning a berth on Captain Paul Azinger's U.S. team that will play matches next month in Perry's native Kentucky at Valhalla, where he nearly won the PGA in 1996.

Perry also weathered withering criticism for that runner-up finish, because he spent more time in the CBS broadcast booth following his final round than he did on the practice tee to prepare for a possible playoff. Mark Brooks managed to tie him for the lead after 72 holes, then won the tournament on the first hole of sudden death after Perry cranked a drive that rolled through the fairway into deep rough and couldn't recover.

Perry has maintained that chatting it up on the air with broadcasters Pat Summerall and Ken Venturi had nothing to do with his playoff loss, which spoiled a wonderful local-boy-makes-good story that memorable afternoon.

"It didn't affect the way I played," Perry said last week at the Bridgestone World Golf Championship event in Akron, Ohio, where he tied for 66th. "They think that's the reason I lost the championship. But the first drive [in the playoff], I killed it, hit it dead down the middle of the fairway and it went 20 yards too far from strictly adrenaline. It was just youth that cost me the tournament. Young, inexperienced. Not being there. Not ready to accept the challenge of winning. If I could be in that situation now, I think it would be totally different."

To get in that situation this week, Perry will have to subdue a 7,395-yard, par-70 golf course Ben Hogan famously described as a "monster" after he won the 1951 U.S. Open. Hogan also said the venue designed by Donald Ross and toughened considerably in 1950 by the late Robert Trent Jones was "the greatest test of golf I have ever played, and the toughest course."

Not much has changed on a venue that has been host to six U.S. Opens, two other PGA Championships and the 2004 Ryder Cup. The rough is four inches high and thick, the fairways are narrow and the undulating multi-tiered greens always have been considered among the most challenging putting surfaces of any major championship course.

"It's nearly more of a U.S. Open type course than the U.S. Open is at the moment, if that makes any sense," said Irishman Padraig Harrington, trying to win back-to-back majors after prevailing three weeks ago in wild and windy conditions at Birkdale. "It's actually as if they switched the two of them around this year.

"This is a tougher test, and it's more intimidating and more punishing in the sense that a slight miss is just as bad as a big miss. This course is set up the way the U.S. Open was set up three, four years ago, where missing the fairway by a couple of yards is the same as missing it by 10 yards. There's no first cut, no second cut, no third cut of rough."

The course also includes four par-4 holes measuring in the neighborhood of 500 yards apiece, with two brutish par 3s -- 257 yards at No. 9 and 238 yards at No. 17.

But Phil Mickelson, ranked No. 2 in the world, insisted the other day he found Torrey Pines "a lot more difficult" in the U.S. Open six weeks ago.

"I think [Oakland Hills] is a very fair setup," he said. "I didn't see anything unfair about it that was going to make scores ridiculously high."

Perry, meantime, sees an opportunity to break through for his first major title in his 40th major championship. He has had five top 10 finishes in majors, and three of them have been in the PGA Championship.

"To me, it would be the icing on the cake," he said. "It would be the ultimate goal to win a major. Putting has always held me back, but for the last three months, I've putted better than I've ever putted in my life."