Walking with Friends by D.J. Gregory & Steve Eubanks

Author:D.J. Gregory & Steve Eubanks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

My second new friend of the week was also my subject: Kenny Perry, the forty-eight-year-old veteran from Franklin, Kentucky, who, like the last days of a bright nova, made his final professional moments the hottest and most brilliant of his career. Kenny is a humble middle-aged man with a lovely wife and grown children. “I’ve been married twenty-six years, but sixteen of those I was traveling and she was raising kids, so we’re just getting to know one another,” he said with a smile.

Sandy Perry smiled, too. They traveled together a lot more once the kids were in college. His son was finishing his senior year at Western Kentucky, Kenny’s alma mater, his older daughter had recently gotten her master’s at SMU in Dallas and had started a life on her own, while his younger girl was a sophomore at SMU, living in Dallas and completely independent.

“I started golf because of my dad,” Kenny said. “Dad was always my biggest fan. He sold insurance, and what time me and him spent together was on the golf course. We’d always spend our weekends playing golf. He would beat the crap out of me and laugh. I gotta tell you, that was tough. I guess my mental toughness comes from my dad. He would beat me so bad, and it’d get me so upset I’d cry. He’d just tear me up. But he did that in everything: board games, cards, whatever. I think he had a master plan to harden me up that way. Now I like it. I’ve got a quiet killer instinct, something inside of me that wants to win.

“I distinctly remember, I was probably six years old, we had this old bag cover, the one that you would slide over your golf bag and you could snap it on if you wanted. Dad would fill that up with range balls, just old beat-up balls, and I remember Dad would sit on a towel on the ground with a big cigar—he always had a big cigar, still does, and he’s eighty-three; I always remember the smoke, the smell, that takes me back to my childhood—but he’d sit there and tee a ball up and I would smack it. Then he’d tee another one up and I’d hit it. Once all the balls were gone, I’d grab that bag cover and take off running down the fairway to pick them all up. Then I’d come back to Dad and say, ‘Let’s do that again.’ He would sit there with me for hours.”

I could relate to those stories. My dad sounded like a younger version of Kenny’s dad, only instead of pushing me on the golf course, Dad pushed me in school and at home and in every other aspect of life. He knew what I would face; he knew how many times I would be told “you can’t do that” and that I would have to be tough and determined to overcome those obstacles. No grade short of an A was acceptable, and there were never any excuses for not doing a job well.

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