Kim Brozer This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. Official Website Of Mike Weir - news

   le.mikeweir.com/news/fullstory - [Cached]

   Published on: 1/8/2005   Last Visited: 1/12/2006

   Kim Brozer was the champion of that campaign this week at the $65,000 M&T Bank Loretto FUTURES Golf Classic and became the winner of her first FUTURES Tour tournament in nine years.New Hampshire , she tied for 44th and felt elation to be able to swing a club without pain. Brozer has struggled with a "winging shoulder blade" injury since 1997, and took off nearly two months of golf this year for rest and rehab.
   
   Earlier this year, she won twice on a West Coast golf tour and won the local U.S. Women's Open qualifier in Phoenix and the sectional Open qualifier in Denver . Sore shoulder and all, Brozer felt she was finally on to something.
   
   But at The Links at Erie Village this week, a tricky, accuracy-demanding course that plays to a par-71, Brozer might have packed some extra patience that the younger players forgot to stuff into their bags.
   ...
   Chase as they might, rookie Sarah-Jane Kenyon got within a shot of Brozer when she birdied the fourth hole. But Kenyon gave it back on the next hole, then dropped back three shots when Brozer birdied the eighth from 20 feet to reach 11-under par for the tournament. The veteran could score no better than par on her last 10 holes, but it didn't matter. The field still couldn't catch her.
   ...
   Not that Brozer even knows how to get crazy. Cranky, perhaps, and rightfully so after spending so many years with a stop-start tournament schedule. A whiplash in a car accident years ago eventually manifested itself as a debilitating injury in a game that requires players to be contortionists, anyway. Brozer tried rehab and acupuncture, and then finally found a chiropractic specialist who untwisted her pelvis and neck and unfurled the years of potential that had been bundled up inside her lop-sided shoulders.
   
   "If I hadn't have played golf, it probably wouldn't have been an issue," she said.
   
   But it was an issue for the player who didn't turn professional until age 26. Brozer earned her master's degree in Human Resource Management at Lamar University in Texas , worked in a human resource office at a petro-chemical plant and took her time moving on to the pro circuit. Once she did, she played in two events and had an appendectomy. It was just the first bump in the road.
   
   "It's been a long road," she said. "And I finally paid off the hospital bills."
   
   Brozer had non-exempt LPGA Tour status in 1999. Then she sold advertising for a Toronto-based golf magazine in 2001, and played tournaments in Canada , where she won twice. In 2004, her playing status was so low, that she only got into one FUTURES Tour tournament. That waiting game was a real confidence buster.
   
   But this week, to win against a full field of top young talent, many of whom are bound for the LPGA Tour in 2006, Brozer leaned against her car trunk after the day was done and smiled as the bubbles rose in her champagne glass. The sun might have been sinking in the western sky, but hope was rising in this veteran's heart.
   
   "I've been at this long enough and I just go do my thing," she said. "I've done it without sponsorship, which has been hard, because people look at my age and say, 'Thirty-five? I'd rather help the young ones.' So I just go play the Lotto."
   
   But it wasn't a pick-a-number-and-hope kind of day for Brozer. Instead, it was a day in which the calm professional played as if she wins every week.
   
   "I've never been one to give up, and even when people have looked at my age and said I should be where I'm going by now, I just know that everybody has a story," Brozer added.