Jerry Kelly meets golf and life head on. Brace yourself for some frank talk from a scrapper who also happens to be one of the nice guys on tour

Golf Digest, July, 2004 by John (English admiral) Hawkins

JERRY KELLY DOES NOT BACK DOWN. NOT TO A rattlesnake on his driveway or a flurry of fists on a hockey rink, much less to Tiger Woods, whom Kelly made a point of studying while both men represented the United States at the 2003 Presidents Cup. After toiling for six years in golf's minor leagues--he failed to make it through PGA Tour Qualifying School six times--Kelly has surprisingly emerged as one of America's top players. The guy would like you to think he's half-crazy, which may be true, but he's also bright, personable and opinionated. And since winning the 2002 Sony Open in Hawaii for his first tour victory, Kelly has been consistent--22 top 10s and more than $5 million in earnings. Not bad for a mutt who barely made a ripple as an amateur, and whose first $100,000 season as a pro didn't occur until his late 20s.

It's not nearly good enough for Kelly, a player whose inadequacies have always fueled his desire. Few are so harshly candid about their shortcomings, yet Kelly, at 37, sees his best golf ahead of him. A lifetime of swing flaws didn't receive serious attention until instructor Rick Smith intervened in 1997. To that point, Kelly, an all-city hockey center in high school, had gotten by largely on hand-eye coordination and trinkets of advice from his wife, Carol, without whom he might be selling insurance in his hometown of Madison, Wis.

Golf Digest hardly had to badger Kelly for lengthy interviews on four separate occasions in early 2004. Qualifying for September's Ryder Cup matches would mark another personal milestone in a career few saw getting this far, although Kelly, for all his physical limitations and competitive insecurities, didn't get to where he is by believing he couldn't.

Ten years ago you were on the Nike Tour with nothing more than a victory at the 1992 Wisconsin State Open on your resume. A decade later, is this what you had in mind?

Absolutely. My brother is eight years older than I am, and I told him and his buddy when I was 12 that I was going to be a pro golfer. We were all watching golf on television one afternoon. I don't remember this, but they do. I pointed at the TV and told them, "That's what I'm going to do for a living someday."

That's a pretty lofty ambition at age 12.

[Laughs.] My father is a big insurance guy, and he tried to get me interested in the insurance business. He had me doing odd jobs around his office at an early age, but he also realized golf was something I really wanted to do, so he let me pursue that. He did things to give me structure early, which made it like work. Still, he never forced anything on me. It was more like, Hmmm, not practicing?

He'd shame me a little bit. I could always hit a 1-iron high and low, things like that, but he knew it would take so much more.

Hockey was also a big part of your youth. How good were you? Scratch? Best player on your high school team?

No way. I played with NHL-bound guys in high school. No way was I turning pro. I was fast and fearless, a center who would go into the corners, but this was a time when the physique of hockey players was changing. It went from 5-feet-10 and 165 pounds to 6-feet-4 and 220, from [Wayne] Gretzky to [Mario] Lemieux. And I was starting to get hammered.

I didn't study hockey like I studied golf. I had a natural instinct for getting around the golf course, but in hockey, I didn't have a vision for the ice. Hockey was my first love--maybe I loved it more because I wasn't as good at it.

Give us your starting lineup of the best hockey players you've ever skated with.

That's tough, because I did the summer-league thing once and had my butt handed to me. Chris Chelios was on the ice, Mike Richter was on the ice. Kevin Dean, my best friend growing up, got a Stanley Cup ring with the New Jersey Devils. There were probably a dozen guys from my neighborhood who went on to play pro hockey.

What was the wildest hockey fight you were ever involved in?

That's easy. I remember it very well. Midget traveling team, Madison Capitals. I was 16.

Don't stop now.

I'm about to take a face-off, and the other team is huddled up just to the right of the goal. I'm like, Are they calling a play or something? So they drop the puck, and every single one of them jumps on me. Every single one of them! I'm underneath the pile just laughing, maybe trying to take a swing. My teammates come, and the whole thing is a mess--they ended up calling the game because we'd been fighting all day. It was absolutely comical.

I did some bad things that day, going after guys and missing them. One guy hit me in the neck with his stick out by the blue line. I went down, couldn't breathe. It was like my trachea was crushed. I got up and saw him in front of the net, started skating as hard as I could, right at him. At the last second, he ducked, and I went right over the top of him. I looked pretty dumb. But you know what? It was kind of fun. That kind of emotion didn't transfer very well into golf. I've learned how to control that [rage] pretty well.