Commentary: Masters has new victim

AUGUSTA, Ga. – People get all gushy-eyed about the Masters. The Masters plays right along with that.

It’s basically the first week of spring in the South, the first week of golf for many Americans, the first time all year that a lot of weathered-in folks actually get to use their five senses.

You see the flowers and hear the birds and listen to that saccharine CBS music and you’re ready … ready to get your heart bashed in by a 7,435-yard Jezebel. The Masters is in the punishment business. On Sunday, business was good.

What would have been wrong with 48-year-old Kenny Perry becoming the oldest major champion in history?

With Perry giving a Masters victory to his tough-loving dad, and a mom trying to hang on against cancer?

With Perry patiently watching Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods whipping up the noise ahead of him, making the long-lost Augusta charge that we had almost forgotten, and then smacking a tee shot on 16 that was so pure that Perry began walking before it even reached its zenith?

But the Masters, so mannerly and green, called in the bulldozers and ran right over Perry, leaving him in the tracks of Greg Norman and Johnny Miller and Scott Hoch and Chris DiMarco and whoever else might be buried under the greens. Maybe that explains all those mounds.

Let’s not get confused here. Perry did most of this to himself, with an assist from champion Angel Cabrera.

After that shot on 16 that landed a clubhead’s length from the cup for a birdie, Perry led by two strokes. Mickelson and Woods were safely in the clubhouse after they had rocked the joint all day – Mickelson with a 67 that featured a front-side 30 that got him to a shot behind Perry, Woods with a 5-under stretch through nine holes that got him to 10 under.

“It’s the most fun I’ve ever had on a golf course,” said Jim “Bones” McKay, Mickelson’s caddie, who has helped out on three major titles. “It was the Masters, the coolest tournament in the world, we were 5 under on the front, with the best player who ever lived, and it was 75 without a cloud in the sky. What could be more fun than that?”

But Perry seemed to be floating above all that commotion.

“Those guys were having a lot of fun,” he said. “I was hoping they’d have a boxing match and knock each other out. But I was staying in the moment. I was enjoying it. I was having fun, too. But I feel bad that I three-putted 13, and I had a lot of other chances to get a bigger lead.

“In the end, that’s what separates great players from average players. I’m not saying I’m average, but they make those shots, they do what they have to do, and the others don’t, and I didn’t.”

First, Perry missed the 17th green and gunned his chip shot well past the pin, for what led to a bogey. That, he admitted, was pressure.

“I won (at Quad City) when I skulled two chips coming in,” he said. “It’s something about my right hand. I can’t keep it from firing in situations like that. I can’t get it calmed down.”

Then Perry drove into a bunker on 18 and shook his head in exasperation as he watched his iron shot drift left. The subsequent chip set him up in the honey spot 15 feet to the right of the pin, a little break to the left, “the same putt I’ve watched Tiger and Mark O’Meara and everybody else make.”

Except he didn’t. He babied it just enough to watch it come up short.

“You’ve got to give that putt a run,” he said. “How many times do you have a chance to win the Masters?”

On the first playoff hole Cabrera arose from tree-hugging jail to make a par with a daring 8-footer. Perry got up and down from the right side, while Chad Campbell dropped out with a bogey.

On the second, Perry and Cabrera drove down the middle, and Perry spotted mud on the right side of his ball. “It’s going left,” he told caddie Freddie Sanders. He tried to compensate, but the shot sailed off the green, the same torture chamber Len Mattiace found in his 2003 playoff loss to Mike Weir.

“This is the ultimate test,” Perry said. “I put a lot of work on these greens. I still didn’t putt well. I still couldn’t figure the breaks out. But you see Tiger make those putts. That’s why the stars are up there. And the rest of us are down here.

“I’ll try not to dwell on this. I’ll look back the rest of my life wondering what might have been, and I’ll probably have heartaches, but I was there. I was good enough to win, but I didn’t. Maybe this will help me down the road, maybe not.”

By then the Masters will have flashed its siren smile at somebody else who will get too close, and then will be found the morning after, sprawled out and bruised, without his wallet.

Nice guys don’t finish last at Augusta. That would be too kind. They finish second.