A visit to Perryville

Sports Illustrated senior writer John Garrity was a 42-year-old 8-handicapper when he suddenly lost his swing. Since December 1989 he has been looking for it -- a modern-day Odysseus adrift on the troubled waters of swing theory. As Garrity travels the world reporting on golf, he visits as many driving ranges as he can, avoiding the dreaded "mats only" ranges that prevent him from teeing it up.

Thursday, June 12

FRANKLIN, Ky. -- The ball machine at Kenny Perry's Country Creek Golf Course looks like it was designed by a kid in shop class. The token slide has no finger flange. A rusty iron bar sticks out on one side, like the handle on a slot machine. A sign offers detailed instructions:

1. Pull handle twice.
2. Insert tokens.
3. Pull handle, fill bucket.

Perry's course has been a boon to his hometown. Greg Foster

I was baffled, and so was Gene Menez, the Sports Illustrated reporter helping me with a U.S. Open-week story on PGA Tour stalwart Perry. Why did we have to pull the handle twice and then pull it yet again after inserting the token? Did the handle work like a bell pull in an English manor house? Would a housekeeper run down from the clubhouse with an apron full of range balls?

Stephen Kirby, a pro-shop assistant and soon-to-be sophomore football player at Campbellsville University, noticed our dithering and came over to explain. "If you don't pull the handle twice," he said, "the machine might get jammed." He unlocked the big green box to reveal an industrial-age interior of narrow chutes and rods. One pull of the handle was supposed to gobble up the token and release balls, fed by gravity, into the chutes. But that was in a perfect world. In this world balls got stuck in the mechanism and had to be dislodged with a gentle tug of the makeshift handle.

"I come up 10 times a day to fix it," said Matt Killen, who, like Kirby, was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. "It drives me crazy."

Killen, the son of Nashville steel guitarist Tom Killen, is a recent graduate of Franklin-Simpson High School and was one of the stars of the golf team that Perry helps coach when he's not winning consecutive tour events, as he did in his last two starts, or playing in the Open, as he is this week. "Used to be you could put a straw in there and get balls out," Matt said, making it clear that he was speaking hypothetically and that any experiments he had conducted were purely in the interests of science. "You could slide the straw in and move this little lever, pop it right up. But now we've fixed it so a straw'll break."

Even the tokens were unusual -- smooth slabs of steel with rounded ends. "If they don't have 'KPCC' on them, we know they're fakes," Stephen said.

Kirby (left), Killen and the notorious ball machine. Greg Foster

The other interesting feature of the ball machine was the water hazard in front of the ball drop. Gene had to straddle this puddle to pull the handle, and balls spilling out of the plastic basket splashed in the water.

"Bad omen," I said, picking a couple of range balls out the drink. (I was wrong. Gene, an infrequent golfer, played the course after I left and broke 90 for the first time. "I went to sleep with a smile on my face," he told me later.)

A muscular fellow walked up to the machine, inserted a token, and yanked the handle so forcefully that the whole box nearly tipped. Stephen and Matt rolled their eyes. "That's how the machine gets jammed."

Gene and I each hit a bucket of balls before getting back to work. The teeing ground was small and oddly shaped, but the grass was tolerable. A row of trees lined the right side of the target field; if they ever grow as tall as redwoods they'll block balls sliced toward the 18th fairway. A line of willows defined the far end of the range. I couldn't reach those trees with my 3-wood, and apparently Perry can't either. "These range balls are 85 percent, limited-flight balls," Matt said. "If Kenny hits regular balls, they go over the trees and people take 'em."

I was amazed. "Kenny Perry practices with marshmallows?"

"He loves these yellow range balls," Stephen said. "He likes their feel."

No surprise there. Perry's golf course is a feel-good kind of place.

Thursday, June 19

NEW YORK -- It's not entirely clear to me if the giant, tattooed gangster in the new movie The Italian Job is supposed to be the owner of a Los Angeles driving range or merely a favored customer. When we meet him, he is getting a bizarre putting lesson from a young woman. I say bizarre because our man-mountain, putting one-handed, smacks the ball so hard that it shoots up an artificial-turf ramp and flies off the end at near-lethal velocity.

I also question the scene in which an angry Ukrainian mobster shows up at the range with an ax, which he uses to threaten the giant, tattooed gangster. It's not the ax that bothers me. It's the fact that the giant, tattooed gangster is seated outside in a chair. In my experience, you're lucky at a commercial driving range if you can find a splintered bench upon which to rest your weary bones.

The rest of the movie, which has cars driving up and down subway steps and through drain pipes, and a helicopter flying beneath underpasses and power lines, and a 20-ton safe crashing through two floors into a Venetian lagoon where it is burgled by waiting frogmen, is believable. I just wish filmmakers would get their driving-range scenes right.

Watch this space for another installment of Mats Only. To send John Garrity advice, share your experiences, or suggest a driving range, click here.

 

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