ESPN Commentary

FRANKLIN, Ky. -- The guy taking a leak at the edge of the golf course didn't seem to care that it was broad daylight. Or that he was facing directly toward Interstate 65, which was just on the other side of a wire fence. Howdy, truckers.

Kenny Perry's Country Creek Golf Course is no trust-fund track. You can play in a T-shirt -- no collar, no holler. The general public pays $28 for 18 holes, and don't bother calling for a tee time on weekdays -- there are none.

Most days he's in town, you can find the namesake at the course, sometimes helping out behind the counter in the clubhouse. Most every day, you can find the namesake's 84-year-old father, Ken Sr., on a tractor shagging range balls. He's the guy in the bib overalls with the stogie stuck in his mouth.

This is golf the way Kenny Perry envisioned it when he built the county's first muni in his hometown of 8,000 on the Tennessee border.

"He wanted the average person to have a place to play," Ken Perry said.

Some 114 miles of rolling southern Kentucky countryside away sits Campbellsville Country Club. It's in the belly of the state, just off Highway 210, across the road from a grain silo. If you get to the Best Western billboard, you've gone too far.

Campbellsville C.C., which is one county over from Abraham Lincoln's birthplace, sits just outside a town of 11,000. This is the no-frills course where J.B. Holmes learned to hit the snot out of a golf ball, playing 54 holes a day in the summers and joining the high school golf team as a third-grader.

"I come from a small town," Holmes said. "It shows the people in Kentucky and in small towns that you don't have to be in a big city, you don't have to have the nicest golf course, you don't have to have the nicest stuff, you don't have to have everything be perfect to be able to be successful. You can just go out, work hard, do your best and be committed, and good things can happen to you."

That is the hillbilly fairy tale come true at this Ryder Cup. In the absence of Tiger Woods, the biggest American story has become how two country boys from golfing backwaters somehow made it to this most international competition. And as Kentucky karma would have it, they'll play it before raucous crowds in their home state at Valhalla Golf Club.

"The Kentucky boys are a pretty good story," Perry said. "… We're going to be like rock-star status, like Tiger Woods status. It's going to be huge."

For both men, the journey to something huge began somewhere very small. And that small place remains a big part of who they are.

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Ken Perry sold insurance as his day job, but he also was the president of Franklin Country Club for seven years. When Ken was tending to business at the club, son Kenny was outside beating on shag balls for hours.

"He'd get blisters on his hands -- big, white blisters," Ken Perry said. "And he'd tape 'em up and hit some more."

By the time he was 12 years old, Kenny beat a man in his 50s to win the second flight in the club championship. But his dad was the white whale to his Ahab.

"I saw how competitive he was," Ken Perry said. "I was playing to a minus-2 handicap, and he was trying to beat me."

Franklin was a famed dueling ground in the early 19th century, a place where disputes of honor were settled with pistols. Late in the 20th century, the golf course became a nonlethal dueling ground for Kenny and his dad.

Once, when Kenny was 13, he was 1-up on his dad going to the 18th hole and lost.

"I told him, 'I'm going to beat you 'til I'm 95 years old,'" Ken Perry recalled. "I never did ease up on him." But he couldn't keep beating Kenny, either. It didn't take long before his son was the best golfer in the family.

Before Kenny started high school, the Perrys moved to the big city of Paducah, Ky., pop. 25,000. While there, Kenny lost contact with a pretty girl who had been his eighth-grade sweetheart, Sandy Ware. But when he decided to play golf at Western Kentucky University, just 20 miles up the road from Franklin, he wrote her a letter saying he'd be around and had just bought a new red Z28 Camaro.

Cruising the town square one night that summer, Sandy spied a red Camaro and followed him to a video arcade, where it turned out Kenny was working for the summer. They reunited and have been married for 26 years.

"If it hadn't been for that red Z28, we might never have gotten married," Sandy said.

After getting married, Kenny began working the mini-tours. His length off the tee and swing hitch -- he picked his club up almost vertically on his backswing -- led to a nickname from his peers, "Lift and Smash."

But with a wife and baby, mini-tour checks weren't paying the bills. On the verge of giving up golf and getting a real job, Kenny asked a friend in Franklin, Ronnie Ferguson, for a $5,000 loan to pay for one more shot at PGA Tour qualifying school.

Ferguson agreed, on one condition: If Perry failed, the loan was forgiven. But if he made the tour, he'd donate 5 percent of his earnings every year to Lipscomb University, a Christian college in nearby Nashville, Tenn. That was the alma mater of Ferguson and of Kenny's wife.

Kenny agreed, and he has kept up his end of the bargain faithfully every year. To date, he has donated $1.5 million to Lipscomb, and he will continue to give as long as he plays golf.

He also has donated generously to the Franklin Boys & Girls Club, and he turns his course over to the local high school team for practice and matches. He's gotten his hands on 75 Ryder Cup tickets, giving most to his Franklin friends and family. Whenever he's in town, he'll eat chicken, veggies and banana split pie at Jim's Bar-B-Que. And the church deacon who lives in a dry county has never had a sip of liquor pass his lips, according to Country Creek manager Greg Nugent.

"My whole life has been here," Kenny said.

"I'm so proud of who he is," said Kenny's big sister, Lydia, who helps run the golf course. "He's never changed."

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At Campbellsville Country Club, everyone has a J.B. Holmes story.

There was the time he had a kids' clinic, and got down on his knees on the driving range to smash tee shots over the net 250 yards away. There was the time he shot a course-record 61; the scorecard can be seen behind the counter in the pro shop. There was the teenager who would hit 5-wood to the green on the 320-yard 13th hole -- driver would send it into the pasture behind the course. There was the time he showed up at a high school tournament having forgotten his clubs and nearly won the thing with a borrowed set -- as a ninth-grader.

"He's always been eat up with golf," said Holmes' dad, Maurice. "We've got film of him swinging a club with diapers on."

And, of course, the folks at Campbellsville C.C. talk about when the little kid with the pull cart and his hot-shot golfing buddy, Brandon Parsons, were part of the high school team well before they were even in middle school.

"He had to reach up to pull down the handle on his cart," Parsons' dad and the boys' high school coach, David Parsons, said of Holmes.

They were way ahead of their time -- in part because of their precocious talent, and in part because Taylor County High just flat didn't have enough good players. But somewhere around the midpoint of their 10-year high school golfing career, Holmes and Parsons made a deal: whichever one made the tour first, the other would be his caddie.

Friday at Valhalla, Parsons will be on Holmes' bag -- just as he always has been since Holmes sailed through Q-school on his first try. And a whole bunch of Campbellsville will be there cheering them on.

It was standing room only in the pro shop to watch the live announcement of the Ryder Cup team on TV, and a banner hangs on the side of the building proclaiming Holmes the club's "first Ryder Cup participant." He'll probably be the last, too, but Holmes wanted that specific wording to help inspire young golfers to dream the way he once dreamed.

"It's a big deal for a small town like this, where everybody knows everybody," said Campbellsville C.C. club pro Mike Kehoe. "We can all take a little piece of John out there and say, 'That's me.' Everyone has a connection with him."

That's why the pro shop at the golf course has become "a brokerage office," in Kehoe's words, for Ryder Cup tickets. Among the Holmes memorabilia and the University of Kentucky merchandise (Holmes played for the Wildcats) are signs for people buying and selling passes for this week.

Maurice Holmes and David Parsons already have been taken care of. Over the years, they've spent more time together than some married couples, watching their kids play golf.

Brandon was always the one with the infectious personality.

"You could take Brandon and drop him in the middle of nowhere, and in six months he'd be mayor," Maurice Holmes said.

J.B. was always the one who lived to kick your tail on the course.

"His bulldog attitude comes from his daddy," said Fred Waddle, who coached Maurice in basketball in the mid-1970s. (He also coached a slightly more talented Taylor County High School basketball player a bit earlier than that, a guy named Clem Haskins.)

"I've been a bunch of miles with that boy," David Parsons said. "And I wouldn't take a million dollars for them. I'd do it all again."

He'll walk a few more memorable miles with J.B. Holmes this weekend.

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The Kentuckians are intent on enjoying this moment together. Perry, 48, has been a mentor to 26-year-old Holmes on the PGA Tour. He pushed for Holmes' inclusion as a captain's pick and has lobbied to be paired with Holmes in the team competition. They've played practice rounds together this week.

"Kenny's been a big, big help," Maurice Holmes said. "John has a whole lot of respect for Kenny Perry."

But as much as this is a career highlight for both -- "to be able to represent your country in your home state, it doesn't get much better," Maurice said -- it's bigger for Perry.

Holmes likely will have other Ryder Cups. Perry probably will not. At his advanced age, Perry was a long shot to make the team when the season started.

But Perry made this his No. 1 goal, putting it in writing. And when he heard captain Paul Azinger say he wanted tournament winners on his team, Perry started winning tournaments -- three of them this year alone.

"I was 110th in the world in January of this year," Perry said. "I knew the Ryder Cup was at Valhalla, and I set all my sights on making that team. And magic happened."

Don't underestimate Valhalla's part of the equation. Not only is it in Kentucky but it's the site of Perry's most indelible tournament.

In 1996, Perry strode to the 72nd tee leading by two shots and pumping his fist with the home crowd going wild. He pushed his tee shot into the left rough and took bogey, but still held a one-shot lead as he went to the CBS tower for an interview while pursuer Mark Brooks played the 18th.

While Brooks was making birdie and forcing a playoff, Perry was sitting in the tower. He asked to hit some warm-up balls before the playoff, but the request was denied. The two went back to the 18th, and Perry made a mess of it, never even finishing the hole before Brooks won with another birdie.

Perry was crushed. It was the closest he's ever come to winning a major.

"It took a lot out of him for about a year," Ken Perry said of his son. "It was a really hard loss for him."

The memory of it has never gone away.

"I think there's some unfinished business there for me," Perry said.

To finish that business, his tunnel vision on the Ryder Cup led him to skip the U.S. Open and British Open. That touched off a bit of a furor in the golf community, where the majors come first. After decades of cruising along as a successful but second-tier player, the tumult amused Perry.

"For 22 years, nobody cared where I went, who I was or what I did," he said. "Now everyone wants to talk to me."

Last week, people wanted to talk to Perry at Country Creek about his all-in commitment to the Ryder Cup. His entire season is on the line, and a poor performance will render it a disappointment.

"I'll have a lot of pressure on myself, but I don't mind that," Perry said. "I've always played well under pressure. It's really going to test myself, mentally and physically.

"It's going to kind of make or break what kind of player I've been on the PGA Tour."

Despite the stakes and the world stage, Kenny Perry and J.B. Holmes have a chance at Valhalla to simply be themselves: two good ol' boys playing golf on Kentucky bluegrass with their home state behind them every swing of the way.

Pat Forde is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at ESPN4D@aol.com.