Upper Cumberland Golf

Alan Brown

We golfers certainly love our game, don’t we? There’s that age-old story of a man playing a links course by the sea, getting so mad at his ineptness that he throws his clubs into the ocean, and then drowns trying to retrieve them.

That says a lot about the game and our love for it, but as much as we love the game, we still (like all sports people) occasionally like to make excuses about why we hit a bad shot or had a bad round. Fill in the blank with your favorite excuse–we all have one.

There’s an area golfer, though, who puts our excuse-making to shame. He’s a  young man who life has handed a pretty tough hand, but hasn’t allowed a life-threatening disease and daunting physical handicap to stop him from not only playing, but competing in the game he loves.

Losing a limb

Cookeville’s Allen Brown picked up the game in 2003 at age 22, in a company scramble, and like so many of us, was hooked. In February of the next year, he was diagnosed and hospitalized with what was thought to be just shin splints. Doctors discovered, though, the situation was much worse than that.

Three inches of Brown’s tibia had been destroyed by a type of cancer known as Ewing Sarcoma, which most commonly affects people aged 12-25, particularly males. Brown found out about his cancer on his 25th birthday.

He underwent four months of chemotherapy, and in July of 2004 doctors replaced part of the tibia with cadaver bone. That surgery was followed by six more months of chemo.

Brown stayed cancer-free for about two years, but the disease reared its ugly head again in his left collar bone and four months later in his right hip.  The treatment for the hip problem wound up being the amputation of his right leg.

Determined not to give up the game, Alan started the process of learning to play golf on one leg earlier this spring. Golf is tough enough with four sound limbs. Most of us who have played the other sports readily available in the Upper Cumberland would likely say golf is the most difficult of them all.

Brown says he spent countless hours just figuring out how to maintain his balance and subsequently, how to aim. He plays as a righty, and his right leg, the one he would plant his weight against on the backswing, is gone. Try that for a balancing act.

Including in learning this balancing act has been falling dozens of times, he said, and regaining his stamina has also been a challenge. Playing nine holes has been pretty taxing, Brown said, but the entire process has been coming along pretty well. His best score for nine holes has been a 42 on the par 36 Bell Acres track in Cookeville.

Alan and son Bradley (center, front) with Scramble Tour players

Continuing battle

Brown now faces another challenge over the next two months, undergoing a combination of chemo and stem cell therapy in his continuing battle against cancer. He will be at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville for the next two months.

He has been a part of the uppercumberlandgolf.com Scramble Tour this season, and will miss the rest of 2009 due to the treatment that is already underway. The Tour, through the efforts of Sean Monday, has presented Brown with gift cards and meal coupons from Crawdaddy’s West Side Grill, Chili’s, Cheddars, O’Charley’s, Red Lobster, Outback Steakhouse, and Applebee’s to be used by family members while Alan is in the hospital. Members also donated to the cause.

Upper Cumberland Golf and the Scramble Tour wish Allen, his wife Shannon, and their children–Kaitlin, Jarrod and Bradley–well and hope for him good health and a quick return to golf. The Browns are in our thoughts and prayers.

No related posts.

Tags: Features // 1 Comment »