Quitting · Field Notes Archive
Anthony Kim, First Win in Sixteen Years
February 15, 2026. The Grange Golf Club, Adelaide. Kim, 40, three years sober, walks off the 18th green having won his first professional event since 2010. His four-year-old daughter Bella runs to him on the green. He tells the press she will not understand what she just saw — but he will tell her, later, what it meant.
On the 18th green
“For her to be able to run on the green and see her dad isn't a loser was one of the most special moments of my life.”
— Anthony Kim, post-round press conference, Feb 15 2026
16
years between wins
3
years sober
63
final-round score, bogey-free
The shape of the day
Kim started the final round five strokes back of co-leaders Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau — two of the best in the world, in his group. He shot a bogey-free 9-under 63, finished at 23 under, and won by three. The win came in the country of the team he plays for (Ripper GC, Australian-anchored). The Rippers also won the team event the same week. The crowd was, by every contemporaneous account, the loudest the LIV format has seen.
The cleaner version of why this matters: Kim's last win before this one was the 2010 Houston Open. He walked away from professional golf in 2012 at age 27, citing injuries publicly. Years later, he disclosed the rest — alcohol, drugs, the lost decade. He returned to competitive golf with LIV in 2024 as a reserve. He lost his card at the end of 2025. He won this event a few months later.
What he said about the daughter, and the sobriety
On what the win was for
“I just want her to know that no matter how bad your day is, if you keep fighting, you never lose.”
Said in the same press conference, referring to Bella. The framing is worth noticing: not "if you win," not "if you make it back." If you keep fighting, you never lose. Kim is the proof of his own sentence — he was, by the public-record standard of a professional golfer, lost. He came back anyway.
Coverage: Sportskeeda · DailyClubGolf
On what made the comeback possible
“With God, my family, my sobriety being the key things to my life, I can go as far as I want.”
Direct, unhedged ordering. Sobriety listed third — alongside, not subordinate to, the other two load-bearing things. Kim has been explicit in interviews that the years away involved drug and alcohol addiction, and that the sober years are why he could even be at the tee on Sunday, let alone shoot 63.
Coverage: PGA — press conference quotes · Yahoo Sports — the comeback story
On the lost years
Kim has talked openly about playing in majors years ago while in active addiction — the kind of detail you can't unhear once you've heard it. He has framed the years away not as a mystery, the way the golf press did for over a decade, but as exactly what it was: addiction running the show.
Coverage: Golf.com — drug and alcohol addiction · Golf Digest — on playing majors while using
Why this one is on the wall here
Public sober comebacks are not usually this clean. Most of them stop at "I got sober" and skip the part where the thing that was broken actually gets fixed in front of the people who watched it break. Kim's case has both. The chronology — 16 years, the disclosed addiction, the visible work, the child on the green — is a tidy answer to anyone who has been told, or has told themselves, that the door has closed.
Filed here for the same reason the Hopkins entries are filed: as evidence. The point is not that everyone who quits gets a 63 on Sunday. The point is that the door is not as closed as it feels, and people we have heard of keep walking back through it.
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See also: Anthony Hopkins, Every December 29th · The Counterweight · a wider field guide of sober public figures.
Part of the Counterweight archive →