Rocket Mortgage Classic leader Chris Kirk making the most of second chance

A year after battling alcoholism, Chris Kirk takes the lead in Detroit.

In happier times, or what counted as happier times, Chris Kirk was a four-time PGA Tour winner and a top-20 player in the world. But underneath the surface, he was fighting inner demons the entire time.

Kirk realized he had a drinking problem in 2017 when he stopped drinking beer. He instead switched to hard liquor: a glass of wine, a few shots of bourbon while out for dinner with friends. Alone on the road while his wife Tahnee stayed back home in Athens, Georgia, with their three young children, Kirk had every opportunity to indulge his habit.

His first attempt to quit for good came near the end of 2018. That lasted just a few weeks. He finally gave it up on a day that’s come to mean a lot to him, April 29, 2019. A week later, he announced he was taking an indefinite leave of absence from the PGA Tour to deal with his problems.

Kirk wouldn’t play a tournament for more than a year. Even when he returned last November, his game that had carried him to so many heights now brought him down to so many lows. He won a FedEx Cup playoff event, the Deutsche Bank Championship, in 2014 and finished second to Billy Horschel in the Cup standings that year. He won at Colonial in 2015, his fourth career victory, and reached as high as 16th in the world rankings.

But that now seems like a foggy memory, a relic of a distant past when Kirk was a different person. He missed five cuts in a row leading up to the tour’s hiatus. He was tied for 60th at the Charles Schwab Challenge, the site of his last tour win. Kirk doesn’t rank inside the top-70 in any major category this season. He was forced to drop down to the Korn Ferry Tour, a tour he hadn’t played in a decade.

Then, two weeks ago, Kirk won the King & Bear Classic, his first win on any tour in more than five years. He had fallen to 522nd in the rankings; the victory in St. Augustine, Florida, raised him up to 269th entering this week when he got a second chance at the Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit.

He’s made the most of his new opportunity. Kirk birdied his first three holes on Friday’s second round. He was six-under on the front-nine. He got to eight-under for the round and two shots clear of the rest of the field with a chip-in birdie from the back of the 12th green. Only a missed short par putt on the 18th sullied his seven-under round of 65 to get into a share of the lead with Webb Simpson.

The dark days when he was consumed by alcohol and depression seemingly behind him, the now 35-year-old Kirk has found a new appreciation for what he does for a living, knowing it was once almost taken away from him.

“It’s changed my perspective, not just as a professional golfer but my perspective on anything and everything,” he told Golf Channel’s Lisa Cornwell after his round on Friday. “I’m very thankful to be out here playing again and really enjoying competing. But at the same time I realize there are things that are a lot bigger than this, and I’m just happy to be in a really good place. I’ve really enjoyed the time with my family over the last few years and loving life.”

Kirk will take the lead into the weekend, but an impressive group of competitors is waiting to challenge him. Simpson won the RBC Heritage two weeks ago. Bryson DeChambeau, the tour’s latest sensation for his long, booming drives, is a shot behind, as is 21-year-old phenom Matthew Wolff. But Kirk has stood up to bigger challenges than this and came out on top. Winning a golf tournament is nothing compared to what he’s already accomplished.