Tom Pernice doesn't care what you think. It's not a normal quality in a person, and it's a particularly uncommon trait on the PGA Tour, where most of the players are dutiful — meaning they are polite and say the expected thing.
Pernice, who's playing the best golf of his long career, says whatever he's thinking, just like his political mentor, Rush Limbaugh, who has become a friend. Pernice, a former member of the Tour's policy board, regularly criticizes Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, for being "afraid of conflict" and for "surrounding himself with people who aren't willing to challenge him, which I consider a sign of weakness."
He believes that some of the architects the Tour has hired for its TPC courses (he names Tom Fazio and Ed Seay) have built "bad courses because not one of them can play worth a lick, can't even break 85."
Phil Mickelson once gave Pernice's older daughter a lift from California to New York on his private plane, and Pernice has asked Tiger Woods to sign things for him for charity events, but that didn't stop Pernice from criticizing both of them for skipping last year's Tour Championship.
Pernice believes Tour bylaws should require members to play more events, and certain events. But Finchem, Pernice says, would never support such a change because he doesn't want to get into conflict with the Tour's top players.
You say to Pernice, "Making guys play, that doesn't sound like something Rush would support. It doesn't sound very free market." He has an answer for you. Pernice always has an answer for you.
"You can't have a government without any laws," he says.
He could be on talk radio.
The mainstream media, with their supposed liberal bias: Don't even get him started on that. Ordinary Americans have no idea what's really going on in Iraq "because every day the media (are) reporting the number of people who die" instead of the progress being made.
Even the golf press, never mistaken for a bunch of wildeyed radicals, misrepresents the truth as Pernice sees it. At the Tour Championship, when he ripped Mickelson and Woods, one important part was omitted from his quotes, he says — the part in which he acknowledged a player's right, under current rules, to play where he likes.
In 2005 Pernice asked Tour officials to test a driver being used by Woods, to see if it conformed to the Rules of Golf. (It did.) Pernice says he was prompted to ask for the test on a dare by friends, none of them Tour players, but the press made the episode sound as if Pernice were doing the dirty work for his buddy and Woods's rival, Vijay Singh.
As a golfer Pernice is a less accomplished version of Fred Funk, but without the Funkster's playful demeanor. Pernice hits it short. You can see his fitness through his snug, carefully chosen mock turtlenecks, and he's a fierce competitor. He often plays practice rounds with two of the longest hitters in the game: Singh, with whom he shares a trainer, and John Daly, with whom he shares a taste for wine, women and song.
Actually, he doesn't. Pernice presents himself completely differently from Long John. He's been wearing a wwjd (What Would Jesus Do) bracelet since the 1999 death of Payne Stewart, with whom Pernice played junior golf in Missouri in the 1970s.
Certain issues at the intersection of faith and politics are no-brainers to him: He opposes gay marriage and all abortion procedures, and he favors school prayer. He sometime attends the Tour's weekly Bible-study meetings, and it would be easy to mistake him for one of the Tour's born-again Christians, a group that includes Zach Johnson, Bernhard Langer and Tom Lehman.
But he's not.
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