The Real Answer  PRO

THE REAL ANSWER

PGA Tour professional golfer, Paul Azinger, enjoyed the finest season of his career in 1993. That year he kept the longest active winning streak on Tour (seven years) enjoying three victories.

He captured his first major title by defeating Greg Norman on the second hole of sudden-death playoff at PGA Championship at Inverness. Earlier that year, he won the Memorial Tournament in dramatic fashion, holing out from a greenside bunker on the 72nd hole to defeat Corey Pavin by one stroke and Payne Stewart by two. He won the New England Classic that same year after taking the lead with a third-round 64. Azinger had ten top-three finishes in 1993, which was the most since Tom Watson in 1980. He finished second on the money list that year to Nick Price.

After winning the 1993 PGA Championship, Paul Azinger felt he had overcome an incredible challenge. But when the doctors found cancer in his shoulder bone, his greatest fight was just beginning. Paul Azinger had overcome tough foes on the golf pitch before, but this battle would take all the courage he had.

In his subsequent book entitled “Zinger: The Paul Azinger Story”, he wrote about his fight with cancer: “A genuine feeling of fear came over me. I could die of cancer. Then another reality hit me even harder. I’m going to die eventually anyway, whether from cancer or something else. It’s just a question of when. Everything I had accomplished in golf became meaningless to me. All I wanted to do was live.”

Then he remembered something that Larry Moody, who taught a Bible study on the Tour, had said to him. “Zinger, we’re not in the land of the living going to the land of the dying. We’re in the land of the dying trying to get to the land of the living.”

Golfer Paul Azinger recovered from his cancer treatments and returned to the PGA Tour the next year and was able to play in only four events. Since then, he’s done pretty well. In his first event of the 1995 season, he tied for fourth at United Airlines Hawaiian Open. In 1998 he recorded a career-best fifth at...

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