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TAMPA, FLORIDA | His friends call it the Book of Brooke.
For every awkward, nobody-can-pull-off-this-shot kind of place Chip Brooke has found in his golf career, he’s extricated himself more times than thought possible.
There was the 10th hole at Merion Golf Club when he hit it through a 90-foot fir tree, discovering the smallest of gaps to land safely on the narrow putting surface. Or late in a match during the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball at Jupiter Hills Country Club’s 16th hole when he punched a 9-iron under a tree to a green perched 40 feet above the fairway, hitting the exact spot he told his partner he would as the ball ran up the front hill guarding the green, taking the slope perfectly as it rolled down to 8 feet from the hole.
Time after time, Brooke takes the poorest of positions and turns it into a chance to display masterful imagination. In the words of his father, Ken, Brooke “has been getting into trouble his whole life, so that must be why he is so good at getting out of it.”
He’s a match-play nightmare. And it goes without saying, but bet against him at your own peril.
“It can be detrimental to an opponent watching it and it’s certainly been detrimental to my wallet over the years,” Brooke’s close friend and fellow golfer Rich Stapleton said. “There are shots he hits where you are asking yourself, ‘How did he even see that?’ His short game and creativity are so good that if you just put him in the fairway, I’m taking him over every amateur in the country.”
The latest chapter in the book was written two weeks ago at the Gasparilla Invitational. Brooke, from Altamonte Springs, Florida, took a one-stroke lead into the final round against one of the top mid-amateur fields of the year but got off to a bizarre start when he hit the wrong ball on the par-5 third hole, leading to a double bogey. Paul Simson, a senior amateur legend, called Brooke after the round and opened the conversation with, “Son, don’t you have a Sharpie?”
The error didn’t cost him the tournament. He settled down on the next three holes, but missed the fairway left on the par-4 seventh and had to bend a 20-yard hook around one of Palma Ceia Country Club’s many oak trees, hitting the green and saving par. A few holes later, tied for the lead with Tug Maude, Brooke missed the par-4 11th fairway well to the right and executed what may have been the shot of the tournament, lifting an approach shot over the trees and curving it just enough to find the green again, two-putting for par and flipping momentum on his way to a one-stroke victory ahead of Maude.
“I had my juices going and I had to stop to appreciate how cool it is that I was doing this.”
Chip Brooke
Averting disaster by going 3 under in his last 15 holes may be the Book of Brooke’s finest chapter. He’s won a Florida Mid-Amateur, qualified for three U.S. Mid-Amateurs and reached the final of the 2018 U.S. Amateur Four-Ball with Marc Dull as his partner – Brooke and Dull also reached the semifinals the year prior to that – but winning on a Palma Ceia course that feels like playing golf inside of a tollbooth is vindicating. Brooke has never been the straightest driver of the ball, but he found something in his swing just before the tournament while working with his coach Matt Borchert of Isleworth. With a gallery of a few hundred people engulfing the last group in a cloud of cigar smoke, Brooke was walking in putts like a swashbuckler and offering smiles of gratitude to a crowd smitten with his ballstriking and laid-back attitude.
“I had my juices going and I had to stop to appreciate how cool it is that I was doing this,” Brooke said a week after his victory. “I’ve been in the Gasparilla before where I’m 3 or 4 over for the week and I’m on 18 in front of that gallery and I’m thinking, ‘God, please don’t embarrass myself.’ But I wasn’t really nervous this time. It probably had as much to do with how I was playing than anything else.”
When he made a 4-foot par putt on the final hole to win, Brooke gave a mighty fist pump and spent much of the next several hours answering questions from proud Palma Ceia members about his thoughts on the short yet daunting Donald Ross-designed course and how he navigated it with such ease. One of the beautiful parts about golf is that even a player in his mid-40s such as Brooke, a father to two teenage girls and a 1-year-old son who was the star of the trophy ceremony, can mature as a player later in life. Dull, his four-ball partner, knew it would take Brooke time and a different approach to his game in order to win the Gasparilla.
He’s always had the ability to get out of trouble. Getting the ball in the fairway has been a different story.
“Three years ago, he couldn’t win on that golf course,” said Dull, who won the event in 2018. “I told him how proud I was of him because I didn’t think his game could translate to a place like that, but that’s how he has gotten better.”
Brooke grew up in the Jacksonville, Florida, area as a child of divorced parents, playing golf mainly in the summers when he would visit his dad, who won the 1980 FSGA Four-Ball Championship. He bounced around at Charleston Southern University and Central Alabama University, before turning professional in Southern California in 1999. After a few years without much success, he got into the real estate business and started to have a family.
“I got about as removed from golf as you could possibly get,” Brooke said. “I really didn’t play for about five years.”
After moving back to Florida in 2010, Brooke started to play again, got his amateur status back and returned to the golf industry by starting the caddie program at Streamsong Resort in Bartow, Florida. That’s where he met Dull, whom he hired as a caddie.
Before that job, Dull had unknowingly met Brooke at Bartow Golf Club and didn’t make the greatest first impression.
“I had no idea who these guys were, but I was making jokes and trying to drum up a little gambling bet,” Dull said. “I was talking a lot of trash … Well a month later, I pull up to Streamsong to try to get a job and it’s Chip. He looks right at me and says, ‘You’re that guy from Bartow.’ I just thought, ‘Man, I am never getting a job.’ ”
However, Brooke surprised Dull by not only giving him a job but making him one of the top caddies at the resort. The two friends have moved on from Streamsong to jobs outside the golf industry – Brooke works for a lumber company and Dull has a landscaping business – but they still foster a close partnership. Dull was the first person to embrace Brooke after he signed his winning card at Gasparilla.
“He’s one of the few guys I play with regularly where I know I have to play really well to beat him,” Brooke said. “I’m sure he would say the same thing about me. It’s that drive. We never really talk about it, but we both know if one of us is in a tournament we are going to have to play well to beat each other.”
Brooke and Dull will be among the favorites in this year’s U.S. Amateur Four-Ball at Chambers Bay, especially given how well Brooke is playing at the moment.
Since Brooke left professional golf in 2003 and the golf industry in 2014, it’s been a golden hour of understanding his swing and enjoying the environment of amateur golf.
“I’ve never loved the game more,” Brooke said. “And I’ve never been more thankful for it.”
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