Golf Could Use More Pat Perez-Type Winners
Pat Perez is a refreshingly self-depreciating, sometimes NSFW but always marches to his own I-don’t-care-what-anyone-thinks beat. He also won the CIMB Classic by 4 shots over Keegan Bradley. It shows that some can overcome and succeed no matter the odds, age or injury as GolfChannel’s Will Gray reports. And, as you read along, Perez provides just enough sass to stir the Tour’s vanilla-flavored pot.
“I guess I’m a lot different than I was 10 years ago, for sure. I can’t really explain it,” Perez told reporters. “I’ve been working hard on a lot of things, and it’s all kind of come together now.”
It was only a year ago that Perez showed up to Malaysia full of doubt. He was seven years removed from his lone PGA Tour win, eight months removed from his last Tour start and six months removed from shoulder surgery that sidelined him for the summer of 2016.
At age 40, Perez had accepted a sponsor invite to play in Kuala Lumpur simply with the hopes of getting his season on track. His goal was simply to keep his card as he embarked on a new campaign equipped with a major medical extension.
But he played well, finishing T-33, and two starts later captured the OHL Classic at Mayakoba to spark a career season that was capped by his first-ever trip to the Tour Championship.
“I really can’t believe what’s gone on basically really a year from this tournament last year,” Perez said. “But if they hadn’t given me the spot (at CIMB), the funny thing is I don’t know if I would have started the Tour until January. So all those chain of events might not have happened.”
In the wake of his win Sunday, Perez explained that he was “dropped” by Callaway last year before signing with PXG, although he offered a more colorful recount of the situation earlier this year.
“I was so excited to come back, and then I got a call from Callaway [last July],” he says of the equipment company that had sponsored him for the preceding three years. “They said they had nothing for me in 2017. I said, ‘O.K., fine. You don’t believe in me, you don’t believe in my comeback, then f— you.’ I loved those irons, but I couldn’t wait to put something else in the bag and then shove it up Callaway’s ass. It was such a motivator. I thought about it all day and all night, month after month. All I could think was, I am going to bury these people and nothing is going to stop me. So you ask me how it felt to win? That’s how it felt to win.”
“I’m not going to change anything. I’m still not going to work out. I’ll still have a bad diet, and I’m going to enjoy myself,” Perez said. “I’m just taking it one day at a time, I really am. That’s all I’m doing. I don’t get ahead of myself, I don’t look in the past, I’m just kind of doing it.”
GolfWorld.com’s Dave Shedloski offers this stance that’s spot on.
He’s a throwback story, too. Four of his favorite things are eating, drinking, smoking and swearing, and perhaps his least favorite activity is exercising. He’d have fit right in with Ben Hogan and Tommy Bolt and Lloyd Mangrum, but he plays in an era with fit, young bombers like Justin Thomas and Xander Schauffele, the PGA Tour Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year, respectively, who were in the field Perez pummeled at steamy TPC Kuala Lumpur.
Even Perez is amazed at what he’s accomplished of late after his third career title and second in less than a year. It took him 182 starts between his first win and his second, at last year’s OHL Classic at Mayakoba. The wait for No. 3 was 24 events.
If you have the time, check out SI.com Alan Shipnuck’s profile on Perez. It’s worthy of your time. I never knew that Perez relies solely on his caddie Mike Hartford for all club selections.
Unlike every other player on Tour, he leaves club selection to his caddie. “I put my entire trust in H,” he says. “He’ll say, ‘You’ve got 158 [yards] front, 172 hole, 165 over this corner, wind off the left, give me a three-quarter six-iron.’ Bang. Done. He can see it more clearly than I can. With all the pressure and the nerves, it’s easy to lose your head out there.”
Wife Ashley, 29, is a fierce advocate for her man. “I remember when we had just started dating, I was walking with Pat’s agent and I said, ‘How come Pat is the only guy out here without endorsements?’ And he said, ‘Oh, because he’s unsellable.’ And I was like, Well, guess what? You’re not his agent anymore. He thought I was kidding, but I was dead serious, and just like that he was gone. Pat needed people who believed in him.” In the last couple of years he has signed endorsement deals with MGM Resorts International and William Murray Golf clothing, which explains why the brand’s patriarch, Bill Murray, can sometimes be spotted in Perez’s gallery.
