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By Dave Lagarde
PGATOUR.com Correspondent

It was designed to be a lovely perk, a chance to tee it up for a purse of $9 million, a reward for a body of excellent work over the course of the 2006 Nationwide Tour season. Ken Duke, as the Nationwide Tour's leading money winner in '06, was given the red carpet treatment at THE PLAYERS Championship week before last. The best thing of all was the spot in the extremely strong and very select field of the world's best players.

Ken Duke has gone from delivering newspapers to making the news as a PGA TOUR member. (Sam Greenwood/WireImage)

It was, Duke would tell you, a lovely gesture on the part of the PGA TOUR. But know what? Turns out Duke didn't need that special invitation. He would have made his way into the season's richest event the old fashioned way, by earning it.

That's because Duke went on a four-week tear leading up to THE PLAYERS, finishing in a tie for 10th at Verizon Heritage, second at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, tied for seventh at EDS Byron Nelson Championship and tied for seventh at the Wachovia Championship. The top-10 streak netted Duke a cool $1,182,525, more than three times what the Hope, Ark., native earned in 2006 on the Nationwide Tour.

And it came after Duke, 38, seemed lost in his first seven events in his second tour of duty on the PGA TOUR, when he made just three cuts and didn't register a finish better than tied for 53rd.

It was all part of growing up.

"The West Coast I really forced a lot of things, tried to make things happen,'' Duke said. "I probably played too much. We moved into a new house in November and December, but I felt like I had to play at the start off the season.''

Forced to the sidelines when he did not get into the fields at the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by MasterCard and the Masters, Duke used the down time judiciously. He went back to basics. And he found his game.

The irony is this type of torrid streak happened last April, too, when Duke, coming off a pair of top 10s, won the Nationwide's BMW Charity Pro-Am at The Cliffs and then Monday qualified for Wachovia, where he finished in a confidence-building tie for 14th.

The run in '07 just made Duke's story that much better. Here's a guy who can be classified as a professional golf lifer who finally, after 11 years of trying and failing, unlocked the vault where elusive on-course success is hidden.

He did it after some extremely lean and mean years when he was forced to take to jobs -- only one golf related -- to house, clothe and feed his family. After his only claim to fame was a pair of long-ago victories on the Canadian Tour. After he had one fleeting go at the PGA TOUR and went bottom up. After he set the modest 2006 goal of finishing in the top 60 on the Nationwide Tour, just so he'd have a place to play in 2007.

"I just wanted to keep my card,'' he said last year. "I was going through a total swing change and a total equipment change (to Cleveland). I didn't know how that would fly.''

Well, fly high it did. The swing change came about serendipitously, in a chance meeting with teaching legend Bob Toski at a pro-am in Florida early in 2006. Toski told Duke to come by and see him sometime. Who was Duke to say no?

Toski suggested Duke alter his shot pattern. Drop the draw. Switch to a gentle fade. And then Duke went straight to the top of the 2006 Nationwide Tour graduating class.

All told, he made $507,230 in official earnings in '06 -- more than he banked in nine previous seasons on the Nationwide and PGA TOURs.

"That about says it all,'' Duke said. "It's a dream come true.''

Sure is. But at least Ken Duke dared to dream. He did in 2002 when he took jobs re-delivering newspapers from 6:00 to 10:00 a.m. and then in a golf shop from 10:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. to make ends meet.

"I've always believed I could do it,'' he said. "Last year was all about a lot of hard work and belief in myself.''

So there was Duke, experiencing the spoils that world-class golf can deliver. His name was stenciled onto a placard near the entrance to the TPC Sawgrass. It was there to reserve the parking place for his courtesy car. He was treated in the same princely fashion as Tiger and Phil and Ernie and Vijay. At times he had to pinch himself convincingly, just to remind himself it all was happening to him, the same guy who wanted to keep his Nationwide Tour playing privileges last year.

"That tournament,'' he said of THE PLAYERS, "is really something special. I only wish I had come into it a little fresher.''

Nevertheless, Duke made the cut and finished in a respectable tie for 37th, culminating a five-week dream season, one in which Ken Duke became a millionaire.

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