Golf Digest
The hottest player on tour: Pat Perez tore it up in 2002.
Now, about that temper
Jan, 2003 by John Hawkins
Online Article
The father waited until September to talk to his son, three full months after the kid's second meltdown on national television. The Buick Classic had been Pat Perez's golf tournament to win, but three putts from eight feet on the 71st hole cost him a share of the lead, and in an equally poor dose of timing, transformed the PGA Tour's most tempestuous rookie into a crumbling cookie.
Perez tapped in for bogey, left a large pile of obscenities on Westchester CC's 17th green, then stormed off to the par-5 18th and launched his drive into a fairway bunker. He would finish in a four-way tie for second, another superb result, but for the second time in 16 career starts, Perez had been victimized by the inability to control his emotions under pressure.
Short fuse, you lose.
Still, the dad bit his tongue all summer, searching for a moment when his message might be heard. "I told him
I wasn't going to lecture him, but there was something I had to get off my chest," Tony Perez says. "I told him the F-word and the tantrums had to stop. I told him his behavior was hurting his mother and me. We hear our friends talking about it, and I cringe."
At least this once, the kid didn't overreact. "It was like he was waiting for me to say something," Tony adds. "He listened to me that night, and when we were done, I felt a hell of a lot better."
From an emerging generation of polished young soldiers with level heads on their shoulders, Pat Perez comes to us straight from a microwave oven. A native of San Diego and a product of Torrey Pines, one of the country's great municipal-golf complexes, he wears his public-course pedigree like a dragon tattoo.
"I've tried to play with no emotion, but it just doesn't work," Perez says. "I end up not caring."
At 26, two months younger than Tiger Woods, Perez stomped through his first year on tour like a man making up for lost time. Streaky and ultra-aggressive, Perez roared past $1 million in earnings midway through 2002. "If you have talent like he has," says Woods, "it's going to show whether you have a temper or not."
Not bad for a guy who was hauling graphite shafts up and down Interstate 5 for a living less than four years ago. "Pat's got a fire you can't teach," says caddie Mike Hartford, who has known Perez since the sixth grade. "People say he needs to change, but I don't want him to change one bit."
Not that he could if he wanted to. Spend any time watching Perez on the course and you'll notice two glaring traits--effortlessness and impatience. It's as if the game comes almost too easily to him. Standing in a cavernous greenside bunker during a practice round, Perez's ability to park eight consecutive shots inside five feet of the hole--all within 30 seconds--emits a certain metaphoric twist: Digging out of trouble is honorable. Continuing to court it is self-destructive.
A gifted kid who won the 1993 Junior World at Torrey Pines--"He blew me away on Sunday, shot a great round, and I went for numbers," says Woods, who finished fourth--Perez helped lead Arizona State to the 1996 NCAA Championship as a sophomore. But Perez was essentially booted off the team before his senior year after repeated clashes with coach Randy Lein. Their troubles began even before Perez arrived at ASU, when Lein told the freshman he could not miss the first week of school to compete in the '94 U.S. Amateur.
"He's a good guy and a great coach, but we didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things," Perez says. "It's an individual sport. I never saw the team side to it."
Lein says the two still speak on a semi-regular basis. "He's what we call a high-maintenance individual," the coach says. "We've had a lot of laughs together, a lot of good times. You can't help but like Pat."
So Perez turned pro in 1997 and spent a year on the Canadian Tour, returning home only because he ran out of money. He worked at a Nevada Bob's for eight months, then spent six months driving a truck for McHenry Metals, the clubmaker. With a financial assist from Dad, Perez earned a Buy.com Tour card and won his 10th start in 2000. But it wasn't until Q school in December 2001, when Perez took medalist honors, that he began to validate his big-league potential.
Keeping his composure as a tour rookie has been an entirely different matter. In Perez's fourth start, he led the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am by four strokes with 18 holes to play and was still up by one after chipping in for birdie at the 13th. After a perfect drive at the par-5 14th, Perez sliced a 3-wood out-of-bounds, missed his next shot left, then tomahawked the guilty club into the turf.
The double bogey dropped him two behind Matt Gogel, but birdies on Nos. 15 and 17 sent Perez to the 18th tee with a one-stroke lead. His drive sailed right, coming to rest about 18 inches out-of-bounds. Perez removed his ball from the hedge and made the deathly march back to ocean's edge. Feeling like he needed a miracle to win, which he did, Perez played a good second tee shot but pumped his fourth shot into the Pacific. With Jim Nantz, Ken Venturi and what seemed like the entire golf universe as his witness, Perez tried to snap his 3-wood over his knee. Asked if he overreacted, Perez says, "Maybe a little, but I don't know how many people would have reacted differently. At that point, I'm thinking about winning. That's it."
For several days, no golfer was the subject of more buzz around the water cooler. "Two things I took away from that day," says Lee Janzen, Perez's final-round playing partner at Pebble. "One, I knew he was young, and he's going to learn a lot. Two, he really impressed me with how he came back from the babe-in-the-woods mistakes, the overaggressiveness."
When Perez lost it again four months later at Westchester, a pattern had been established. After both losses, Perez came off as remorseless about his behavior. Media accounts depicted him as a punk, boorish and indignant, and his negative comments about two of America's finest golf courses earned him few sympathy points. By referring to Pebble Beach's bunkers as inconsistent and the final-day pins at Westchester as ludicrous, Perez only reaffirmed that behind every frustrated golfer is a strong case of denial.
"I'm not saying I'm right and everybody else is wrong, but I'm gonna get mad," Perez says. "A lot of the great players, I don't know how they control themselves. I haven't found a way to do that yet."
Janzen, whose temper led to self-destruction as a young player, considers himself an authority on the subject. "I used to break clubs all the time," he says. "When I was in college, people used to check how many clubs were left in my bag before they asked me what I shot.
"I know he can get it under control," Janzen adds. "If he doesn't, it will eat him up. There's a point where temper stops making you determined and starts making you an emotional wreck."
Such was the case at the PGA Champ-ionship. In Saturday's swirling winds, Perez arrived at Hazeltine's par-3 eighth (his 17th) six over par for the day, 10 over for the tournament. A fierce gust pushed his tee shot into the pond right of the green. Perez dropped from a forward tee box, knocked another ball in the water, and had his hand out for a third ball from his caddie even before the second splash.
Perez quick-putted while his playing partners were still shuffling around the green. True to form, he almost holed the 40-footer before Hartford could run over and pull the flag. At this point, Perez was clearly in surrender mode. A sloppy triple bogey on the ninth completed an 85 and guaranteed he would be off first in the final round. Just himself, Hartford and the marshals. Perez toured the grounds in one hour and 53 minutes, never stopping for longer than a few seconds to hit any of his 76 shots.
Such a pace brings to mind another rebel without a pause. And it comes as no surprise that Perez has struck up a fast friendship with John Daly, who today is giving Perez the same advice Daly never listened to himself. Perez visited Daly's motor home after a dismal third round in Canada. "He shows up and says, `I just shot 74. I suck,' Daly recalls. "I told him to forget about it and go shoot 63 tomorrow, and that's exactly what he did."
Two weeks later, Perez blew a third chance at his first win, firing a final-round 74 in the final group at the Tampa Bay Classic. The next week, there he was again, holding the second-round lead at San Antonio, where he tied for fifth. The question isn't whether Perez has a hot head, it's whether he can get his hands on the thermostat.
"I see a lot of me in him," Daly says. "He gets down on himself, and he lets it show. He's had to deal with some bad press. He's a great kid with a lot of ability, and he gets a little tense, even during practice rounds. He wants to hit every shot perfect. I mean, we all do, but at some point, he's got to learn that's not gonna happen."
The quest for perfection is what Perez really must come to terms with--the futility of such a mission, the ability to find strength and serenity in the surrender. Ask him about the September talk with Dad, and you hear the son talk from both sides of his heart. "I told him it's something I can't tone down that much, so I don't know," Perez says. "I've definitely thought about it. Of course, I don't want my parents to be embarrassed. But it's something I'm going to have to deal with."
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