If you leave Louisville and drive 130 miles south on Interstate 65, you would never believe Paul Azinger's assertion that his team will whip up passions among the Kentucky crowd. Indeed, if you turn off the I-65, up Kenny Perry Drive and into Kenny Perry's Country Creek Golf Club, or head farther, into the town of Franklin, you would not believe that the redneck stereotype could remotely influence the outcome of the 37th Ryder Cup.

Perry, you see, is decent, clean-living and God-fearing, and the quiet, well-heeled, 1,000-strong town of Franklin seems that way, too. Yet Azinger believes that the Kentucky galleries will be his “thirteenth man”; Perry says that it is “a very boisterous state” and he has made it clear that he hopes that he and J.B. Holmes, another Kentuckian, will be pair one in the foursomes tomorrow morning purely to draw every decibel of boisterousness on to his side. “The Europeans are going to be stunned,” Perry said. “It's going to be very pro-USA.”

The best portrait of a Kentuckian may come from Charlie Portman, a Franklin friend, golf buddy and former Little League baseball team-mate of Perry who edits the local newspaper, Franklin Favorite, in which Perry shares the front page this week along with news of the winner of the county talent contest and a preview of this weekend's antique car show.

“We're not rednecks like Jay Leno [the television talk-show host] might portray us,” Portman said. “He believes we marry our kinfolk. And we do have a bad reputation for being hillbillies and behind the times, but Kentucky has made a big effort to revamp our education. In eastern Kentucky, where the coalmines are, there are still some places like you see in the movies - old houses with people sitting on the porch. That's where the stereotype comes from. It is a bit rougher there. They don't particularly care for visitors.”

But, rednecks or not, Portman will be part of a crowd that he believes will be “loud and rumbustious”. And that is how Perry wants it. “I'm glad they're playing this in the South,” Perry said. His only other Ryder Cup was four years ago in Detroit, Michigan, where the immigrant population is high and the crowd noise was low. There are Mexicans here and a pocket of Bosnians in Bowling Green (yes, there is a town called Bowling Green), but Kentucky retains a largely unchanged demographic with an industry - agriculture - so little changed that you can buy numberplates that read “Born to farm”. It is from here that the “very pro-USA” sound will come.

And you could not find a more positive role model to rally the local crowd than Perry. In the mid-1980s he tried so many times to break into the PGA Tour in the United States that his funds and his backers were drying up. As a last shot, in 1986, he approached Ronnie Ferguson, a friend through his church, who had always promised to help him if in dire need. Perry asked for a $5,000 loan. Ferguson agreed but said that if he failed to make the tour, he should never return the money, but that if he did succeed he should give 5 per cent of his winnings to Lipscomb University. Twenty-two years later Perry has won $26million but refuses to stop paying the 5 per cent. At the golf club, Ken, Perry's father, proudly tells the whole story. Ken's father was Mayor of Franklin, he is 84, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, he could shoot his age on the golf course until he was 73 and he patrols the driving range at Country Creek in a pair of denim dungarees, with four fat Florida cigars down the front pocket, picking up balls from his golf buggy.

Ken was young Kenny's gateway to golf. “I've seen him hit balls till he had blisters on his hands,” he said. “Then he's taped them up and carried on hitting more.” Ken also declares confidently that, after Jim Furyk, his son has “the second-worst swing in golf”.

In 1993, Kenny conceived the idea of his own municipal golf course. The local alternative was the country club, which was expensive and exclusive. “Kenny wanted to build a course everyone could enjoy,” Ken said.

He bought land from three local farms, designed the course and paid his brother-in-law to do much of the work. He has his sister, Lydia, working as assistant there, his father picking up balls, his own workshop underneath the clubhouse and punters can work out next to him on the range. For a regular, a round costs $23 (about £13). As his father said: “He's got a lot of money, but he's never yet pulled a dime out of this place.”

The community work does not end there. He has donated $125,000 to the local Boys & Girls Club and he is now a deacon at Ferguson's church.

Quietly spoken and modest, he is the sort of figure who carries people along with him. His family, Ferguson's family and Portman will be at Valhalla over the weekend. As a player, he gets 30 tickets for the event, but he has managed to get his hands on more than 100 (he has given them away) and Country Creek has received more than 100 calls from other friends asking for more.

If these people were typical of the Kentucky crowd, it would surely be a good one. Loud, boisterous and inspired by the local man.