Country Creek GC in Franklin, Ky., gives owner Perry plenty to smile about. Photographs by Darren Carroll

"A warm, wonderful guy and a terrific human being," says swing coach Ron Gring, who has known Perry since the minitours in the early 1980s.

"Nicest guy in the world," says Brad Faxon, a competitor of Perry's since college. "Hits the highest, longest, most beautiful draw you've ever seen. Nobody can say a bad word about Kenny Perry."

In fact, that '96 PGA, Perry's lone dalliance with victory at a major championship, was the first major in 44 years played in Kentucky, which is the only state Perry has ever called home. It would have made for a terrific story -- the Bluegrass Boy finding his pot of gold not two hours from the town where he grew up -- except that Perry lost in a playoff to Mark Brooks and has won just one tournament since.

He has four tour victories in all those years, five top-30 finishes on the money list, all since 1994. Perry has never made a U.S. Ryder Cup team but did qualify for the 1996 Presidents Cup. Perhaps the most staggering aspect of his career is that he has accumulated nearly $10 million in earnings while remaining next to invisible. At 42 Perry is a perfect example of how the rich only get richer, of how consistent, unspectacular golf can buy you all the peace of mind and blessed anonymity one could possibly need.

You might even look at guys like Perry and see how the system has gone wrong; how the all-exempt tour breeds complacency and undue job security and other feathered pillows the average tour pro isn't supposed to enjoy. Back when full-time status on the tour was reserved for the top 60 money winners, Perry would have lost his card seven times. He spent the first half of his career bouncing around the back half of the top 125, playing extremely well a couple of times each year, which was more than enough to retain his playing privileges.

Not once did Perry return to PGA Tour Qualifying School. "I think my best golf is still to come," he says now. "I think I can win more golf tournaments. I'm more relaxed now than I've ever been. I don't feel the pressure like I used to."

Is this good news or bad? His easygoing nature aside, shouldn't Perry be doing 800 sit-ups each morning and hitting 12 buckets of balls each afternoon, pushing himself toward the day when he takes down Tiger Woods? Shouldn't his competitive disposition be a bit more intense? For that matter, shouldn't Perry pack up his family and leave his hometown of Franklin, a weary little hamlet 12 miles north of the Tennessee-Kentucky border, for a warm-weather climate where he can obsess about becoming the best player in the world?

Isn't that how we define success? Isn't that what all good tour players are supposed to do?

Well, actually, no. Kenny Perry is already a star, a guy who gives something back every day, every month, every year. Most of his trophies come in the form of good deeds -- unsolicited acts of kindness from a man whose word means more than any major triumph. All things considered, Perry is a perfect example of how the system does work. A lot of that $10 million has been put to good use. A lot of people in his little world are happier because he's on the PGA Tour.

When he was chosen by the Golf Writers Association of America to receive the 2002 Charles Bartlett Award, given to the player who best demonstrates "unselfish contributions to the betterment of society," Perry did not arrive at the podium with the same confidence as when he stands over a golf ball. His acceptance speech was a bit unpolished, his Gomer Pyle accent turned to high. His voice cracked a couple of times, and a few of his words collided with thoughts still inside his head. The country boy was getting a big slap on the back and he didn't appear all that comfortable, maybe because he'd been asked to spend a few minutes talking about himself.

When Perry was finished, there were grown men in the room with lumps in their throats and tears in their eyes, many of whom had no idea. Not every act of kindness in this world comes wrapped in an all-points bulletin. Not every donation to charity comes with a press release. And by the way, Kenny Perry hurt for a long time after losing that '96 PGA Championship, after fumbling away the biggest tournament of his life in front of everyone who ever mattered to him.

It's the one gift he wasn't able to give. "One of the most devastating things I've ever had to deal with," he says. "That was a huge disappointment. You want something so bad and it's right there in the palm of your hand. É I've never told anybody this, but it took me two or three years to get over it." Not that anybody would have noticed.

A bad bounce on Valhalla's 18th pointed Perry toward a bogey and a playoff.

Country Creek GC meanders across 142 acres of tumultuous ex-farmland just off Interstate 65 in Franklin, about an hour north of Nashville. This is Kenny Perry's place -- a project he started from dirt in 1991, financed with his own career earnings at a time when he'd made a little more than $1 million, then all but donated to a town full of starving golfers upon its completion in May 1995.

"There wasn't anything close to us," says Bobby Bush, Perry's brother-in-law, a man who describes himself as "chief cook and bottle washer" at Country Creek but essentially runs the operation. "You used to have to drive up to Bowling Green, 20 or 25 miles away, and it was always sold out. We do about 30,000 rounds a year here, and for this area, that's pretty good."

Instead of paying homage to himself or launching a second career as a course architect, Perry built a playground for the 20 handicap. Wide fairways, no trouble right, a 69.5 rating and 105 slope from the tips -- in the most endearing sense of the term, Country Creek is a chopper's paradise. "If a scratch golfer doesn't shoot 68 out here, he hasn't played very well," says Perry, who twice has missed birdie putts on the 18th green for 59. "I wanted to build an atmosphere more than a championship layout. I wanted something where people could feel good about themselves, where people could get around and not hold up everybody."

At $28 to ride on weekends -- $20 during the offseason -- Perry's not holding anyone up, either. He installed zoysia grass in the fairways to make it easier to get the ball in the air. He used bent grass on the greens so the putting surfaces could stay open all year. His log cabin-style clubhouse accommodates a pro shop, snack bar and dining area all in one room. It's hard to imagine a more civic-minded enterprise, particularly one that is privately owned.

Both Perry and Bush seem surprised Country Creek has been so successful, that it has turned a nice profit and that the $2.5 million borrowed to fund the course is $200,000 from being paid off. On this third Wednesday in November, the place is packed, every cart in use. "I was raised on a little [private] nine-hole course [Franklin CC] on the other side of town," Perry says. "Even back when I was on the mini-tours, Bobby and I had been talking about how Franklin needs a public course.

"We started looking at costs and realized we just couldn't afford it, so we kept the idea in our heads. I finally started having some decent years on tour, and that's when we began to pursue it heavily. I just thought it was unfair that people around here had to drive a half-hour in any direction to play golf. We were hoping the town would support it, and it has."

There are a number of factors in play here -- the idea that a kid who had private-club access would think first of the public sector, that he'd take his own profit margin out of the equation, that he'd take on a project of such magnitude with his pro career still in the balance. The beauty of it is, Perry has become a better player over the years, success he attributes to the responsibilities of owning Country Creek. "I think it has propelled my game," he says. "Getting into this so seriously, borrowing money, made me aware that I had to be successful on the tour to make this easier."

'Nobody can say a bad word about Kenny Perry.' -- Brad Faxon

It has never been a cakewalk for Perry, who had a decent college career at Western Kentucky but failed to win a tournament or qualify for the NCAAs. He bounced around the bush leagues from 1982-86, mostly in Florida, failing several times to advance through Q School. With his wife, Sandy, and two young children back in Franklin, Perry spent a lot of homesick nights racked by guilt and a loss of confidence. At some point, he'd have to get a real job.

When a group of local sponsors finally dropped Perry in 1986, he was reduced to asking a man named Ron Ferguson, an industrial launderer he'd met several years earlier, for a loan that would buy him one more shot at Q school. "I went home and talked about it with my wife," Ferguson says. "We came up with the idea that we'd give Kenny the money, and if he made the tour, he'd give a percentage of his earnings to Lipscomb University [a Christian college in Nashville]."

The men agreed on 5 percent. Sixteen years later, Perry continues to endow Lipscomb with a nickel for every dollar he makes on the tour, meaning he's given a half-million dollars to a school he didn't attend to pay back a $5,000 favor. Not once has Perry talked to Ferguson about terminating the arrangement or cutting the size of the donation to Lipscomb, but there is a problem. "My daughter [Lesslye] is a freshman there," Perry says. "She absolutely loves it, and I can't get her to come home anymore."

It might have been the best drive he hit all week, a bomb down the left side struck so purely that Perry didn't bother to monitor its progress up Valhalla's 18th fairway. Right after he bent over to pick up his peg, however, his ball did something funny. Instead of coming off a gentle, left-to-right slope and sliding away from a bunker 290 yards off the tee, it hopped forward into the four-inch bermuda rough fronting the sand.

Fate had been smiling on Kentucky's son all week, but down the stretch, some weird stuff was happening. "Same hole in regulation, a half-hour earlier, Kenny's drive hit a TBS golf cart and kicked dead-left into the ravine," Bush says. "I was right there. I can tell you, if he hadn't hit that cart, he'd have been up where I was standing, where the gallery had stomped all the grass down."

History will remember the 1996 PGA Championship as an exciting tournament with a messy finish that was won by Mark Brooks but lost by several others. When Perry arrived at the par-5 18th for the first time that afternoon, it was with a two-stroke lead and the easiest hole on the course left to play. A driver and a 4-iron, two putts for birdie, and he'd win going away. Instead, he hooked his drive and caromed off the cart, played up the left rough and missed an eight-footer for par.

"A little left-to-right breaker, a putt you dream of," Perry calls it. "If you had to pick one to win a tournament on, that would be the one."

At that point Perry, still leading by one, was asked to come to the CBS tower and sit with Jim Nantz and Ken Venturi while the final two pairings finished. "I wanted to see what was happening," Perry recalls, as if it were yesterday. "I watched [Steve] Elkington and [Vijay] Singh, then I watched Brooks. It might have been 20 or 30 minutes that went by. Nobody said anything about me going to hit balls or getting ready for a playoff. I do recall them saying you don't have to stay up here if you don't want to."

'I wanted to build an atmosphere more than a championship layout. I wanted something where people could feel good about themselves.' -- Kenny Perry

Perry wanted to stay, and so he did, because he didn't figure he needed to hit 20 balls on the range to stay loose in the August heat. Brooks made a birdie to force a playoff. The two men returned to 18, and Perry responded to the pressure by hitting it 20 yards farther than he had all week. Adrenaline? Maybe, but it definitely wasn't because he didn't hit balls. "I've thought about it a lot, and I would've done the same thing I did," Perry says. "If I had stepped up there in the playoff and hit a terrible tee shot, you could say I screwed up. I loved that tee shot. I just hammered it."

Brooks birdied the hole and Perry made an X, ending the fairy tale in cold blood. After the loss Perry immediately second-guessed himself, saying, "I probably stayed up in the tower too long. I probably should have gotten away from everybody and hit some balls and tried to get ready for the playoff. Maybe I let my mind wander. I learned a good lesson, I guess. It's a hard one."

Time heals all wounds, but only after making some bleed worse. "I know it affected him because for two or three years, he just shut it down," Bush says. "You ask him about it and he'll say no, but he just didn't have that push anymore." After finishing 26th, 21st and 13th on the money list from 1994-96, Perry fell to 90th, 58th and 94th. "I remember walking [in regulation] from the 17th green to the 18th tee, going down this little walkway," Perry says. "Everybody was touching me, and I'm trying to get through there. I had so many friends and relatives there -- it was unbelievable."

Bush (left) takes justifiable pride in overseeing Perry's course, which does about 30,000 rounds each year.

So maybe the moment got to him, because driving the ball has never been a problem. Perry's ability to hit it long and straight off the tee is the reason he has been out here for 16 years, the biggest reason he has made $10 million. "I cannot remember a year when he didn't finish in the top 20 [in distance + accuracy]," Gring says. "He's not afraid to hit driver on any hole, and he's a terrific iron player, which is something nobody gives him credit for."

Like a number of veteran players -- Fred Couples, Nick Price and Tom Lehman come to mind -- Perry hasn't won more tournaments because of his putting. He has finished among the top 10 on the tour in greens in regulation in each of the last four years. In the "ballstriking" category, which combines GIR and total driving, Perry has ranked fourth, sixth, fourth and fourth since 1999. In putts per round, however, he consistently falls outside the top 100.

Two more 12-footers a week and he might be a household name. "I've tried everything," Perry says. "Belly putter, long putter, crosshanded, regular -- I keep searching for something that's magical. I think all great putters have great eyes, and I've had Lasik surgery twice. I don't think my vision's as good as it should be."

There are others who think Kenny Perry's view of the world is just fine. "He just loves riding around in his old cars and going to church," Ferguson says. "A friend of mine met Kenny and said to me afterward, 'I just stood beside one of the top golfers in the world -- that's hard to believe.' He is very benevolent. Whatever he can do, he just does, and nobody knows it. He's a giver."

January 17, 2003