Unlike others, Anthony Kim is not describing his climb from suicidal drug addict to LIV Golf’s Adelaide champion as the sport’s greatest comeback.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But he does want his feat to inspire.<\/p>\n
“When I was in rehab, that was my goal,” Kim said after chasing down Spanish great Jon Rahm to win in Adelaide on Sunday.<\/p>\n
“So absolutely my goal is to inspire the people that are struggling because I feel like the world needs more of that.”<\/p>\n
Kim said his lesson was simple: “Don’t f***ing quit. That’s it. Don’t f***ing quit.”<\/p>\n
He is a one-time golf boy wonder but also a one-time drug and alcohol addict who stopped playing a dozen years ago.<\/p>\n
The 40-year-old, who teed off on Sunday at the Grange a whopping five shots adrift of Spain’s former world number one, shot a flawless 9-under 63 to finish 23-under and overtake Rahm (20-under).<\/p>\n
Kim’s redemption round featured a tournament-defining stretch of five birdies in six holes from the 12th, and he fired nine in total to collect the $US4 million ($5.7 million) winner’s cheque.<\/p>\n
The Californian burst onto the global golf scene after turning pro in 2006. He holds the record for most birdies in a round at the US Masters (11), is a three-time US PGA Tour winner, and a Ryder Cup champion.<\/p>\n
But in 2014, he stopped playing amid drug and alcohol addiction. It took him almost a decade to get clean.<\/p>\n
“I wasn’t the best person, the best partner, the best whatever you want to call it, the best son, I could be when I was younger,” Kim said.<\/p>\n
“But who I am today is a completely different person.<\/p>\n
‘With God, my family, my sobriety being the key things to my life, I can go as far as I want.”<\/p>\n
Now sober for three years, Kim returned to golf with LIV in 2024 as a reserve but lost his card at the end of last season.<\/p>\n
He scraped back as a reserve via an international play-off and, this week, joined a LIV team for the first time.<\/p>\n
Kim triumphed at an Adelaide tournament attracting more than 115,000 spectators, the biggest crowd of any Australian golf event.<\/p>\n
On winning, Kim hugged his four-year-old daughter Bella and wife Emily as tears flowed on the 18th green.<\/p>\n
What would he tell Bella, later in life, of his struggles?<\/p>\n
“I’m going to try to leave a lot of details out,” Kim said.<\/p>\n
“But I will tell her that before she came into this world, I didn’t feel any purpose in my life.<\/p>\n
“Whether you have a lot of money, whether you have a lot of success in your life, you still can feel lonely and feel like the world is against you.”<\/p>\n
Kim’s triumph was met with universal acclaim from his rivals, with Australian veteran Marc Leishman summing up the reaction.<\/p>\n
“He was a gun,” Leishman said.<\/p>\n
“He had almost had an aura about him, somewhat for his golf, somewhat for his partying.<\/p>\n
“The place he got to and how close he was to not being here \u2014 I’m not talking about in Adelaide, I’m talking about not being on this planet.<\/p>\n
“I hope that people realise how it’s a fairytale, it really is. Not just golf, but life.”<\/p>\n
Leishman and his fellow Australians fell short in their quest to become the first local winner of Adelaide’s individual LIV crown.<\/p>\n
Lucas Herbert (16-under) was best-placed, followed by Leishman and Cam Smith, both on 15-under, with Elvis Smylie, the 23-year-old who won the individual title on his LIV debut last weekend in Saudi Arabia, 9-under.<\/p>\n
The quartet’s combined feats at least helped their all-Australian Ripper GC win the teams event by two strokes from Rahm’s Legion XIII.<\/p>\n
AAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlike others, Anthony Kim is not describing his climb from suicidal drug addict to LIV Golf’s Adelaide champion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[3443,214980,64,63,755,15811,6410,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-482398","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-adelaide","9":"tag-anthony-kim","10":"tag-au","11":"tag-australia","12":"tag-golf","13":"tag-jon-rahm","14":"tag-liv","15":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}