By Harry King
NORTH LITTLE ROCK — Several years have gone by since I saw Ken Duke hit a golf shot in competition.
On that day, he drove past the North Little Rock animal shelter on his left, up and down the road now known as Championship Drive, on his way to a golf course with fairways that once were pocked with hard-baked cracks. A mish-mash of practice balls clattered into a metal basket after he inserted the appropriate tokens.
Duke paid $300 to play in the Arkansas Open and the year might have been 1995 when he won and pocketed about $5,000.
Thursday, he will travel 330 yards down Magnolia Lane lined with 61 large magnolia trees that sprouted from seeds planted in the 1850s to the clubhouse at Augusta National Golf Club and tee it up on an immaculate and revered layout. He’ll warm up with new practice balls dumped from Masters-green sacks, specific for the player — Nike for Tiger, Callaway for Phil, and so on.
At 40, Duke will play in The Masters for the first time. For the crass and curious, Trevor Immelman pocketed $1.3 million when he donned the green jacket in 2008.
At Burns Park that long-ago day, Duke was pigeonholed as a 20-something who would toil on the fringes of the big time until circumstances dictated that he get a real job. Nothing much happened to change that opinion until the fall of 2005 when Duke took a friend’s advice and contacted famed teacher Bob Toski, who plied his trade at a no-frills facility in Florida.
The first time they met, Duke banged only a couple of balls before Toski unloaded a swing criticism laced with choice words. It is blankety-blank impossible to play a right-to-left shot with an open stance, teacher told student.
Toski stuck two golf club shafts in the ground a couple of feet apart, just outside of Duke’s swing plane, and told Duke to drive the ball between them. The first few swats were nowhere close. On the fifth try, Duke hit a shaft, broke it, and complained about the difficulty of the task.
Toski, then in his late 70s and wearing flat-sole loafers, grabbed the driver and piped it right between the shafts. If you can’t get it on line in the first six feet, Toski said, you can’t play the PGA Tour.
In response, Duke squared up his alignment and went to a baby cut as his preferred shot.
He was the Nationwide Tour Player of the Year in 2006, a standing that earned him a PGA Tour card. Playing 31 events, he made 24 cuts and banked $1.9 million. Last year, he won $2.2 million and was 28th on the money list, good enough to get into The Masters.
Duke played Augusta last October as a guest of Joe Ford. “It was my first time ever going there to play or watch,” he said in an e-mail. “I have asked a lot of people about the set up and what to look for.”
He’ll get some help early in the week, playing a practice round with 2000 champion Vijay Singh. He also plans to seek out former champions Mike Weir or Zach Johnson for 18 holes.
“I’m just going to enjoy the moment,” he said.
He still goes to see Toski when something goes awry and Toski usually goes straight for the stack of shafts. The former Henderson State University player said thanks by taking Toski — Duke calls him “Mr.” whether in conversation or correspondence — to Augusta for a round last week, his first on the course since a non-tournament outing in 1956.
That year, Jack Burke Jr. won with 289 — still the highest winning total in tournament history — on a course that measured 6,965 yards. This week, it will be 7,435 yards for Woods, Mickelson, and the former Arkansas Open champion.
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Harry King is sports columnist for Stephens Media’s Arkansas News Bureau. His e-mail address is hking@arkansasnews.com.
