Given that Kenny Perry comes from Franklin, a Kentucky town just a few miles from Nashville, I have in mind here a Country band with a bluegrass edge, perhaps called Kenny Perry and the Chokers, with our main man flipping between banjo and harmonica, singing to a slightly too jaunty beat, a lyrical tale about how, late in life, he finally found love. At least, he thought he had until the beat slows and an Argentinian comes and rips out his heart. And in a very Country, very dark but still too jaunty last verse, our singer confesses that maybe he was never worthy of love all along.

Or something like that.

I went in search of Perry last September. Or rather, I drove the 130 miles from Valhalla, where the Ryder Cup was about to be staged, to Franklin to get to the heart of the local boy. And I met his Dad and his schoolboy mates and the churchman who gave him hope and a $5,000 loan when his last dime and pretty much all hope had been extinguished pursuing a golf career stuck on a long road to nowhere.

His father, also Ken, merrily told me that, after Jim Furyk, Kenny had the worst swing in golf. And pretty much everyone had stories to tell about Kenny in the community; how he built a municipal golf course for the locals, how he gives five per cent of his earnings to sponsor kids through college, how he carries people with him and puts his hand in his pocket when they need a ride.

In his hometown, you could not but warm to Perry. And so I found it all too easy to forgive him for his self-imposed disaster on Sunday night, when love in Augusta had seemed finally his. But what a magnificent tale he managed to screw up.

And what self-knowledge he exhibited afterwards. The dignity of his loser’s press conference I found quite moving. “Great players make it happen, average players don’t,” he said. As if giving a lesson in humanity and what it is like to be acquainted with the reality of one’s own innate shortcomings.

And so we come to the subject of choking. To be a choker and a loser is synonymous: it is language that fairly strips fine men like Perry of their integrity. In which case: apologies, though I do not believe Perry lost any integrity on Sunday. If anything, he won friends and stockpiled admiration.

A few years back, the Observer Sports Monthly did a story on chokers in sport and received back the following stinging but intelligent reader’s response: “To reduce the career of sportsmen to specific moments of devastating failure is a shameless mockery.”

There is no mockery here. Just fascination for why some crumble when others stand strong. “I can’t seem to execute,” were Perry’s words, straightforward, honest and true.

There follows here a list of the worst chokers in sport. Perry is my favourite. But here is the debate: what was worst choke of all-time? I start, fairly confidently, with the England cricket team.

The ten worst chokers in sport

1. England vs Australia, 2nd Ashes Test, Adelaide 2006