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Friday
Aug212009

Remembering Phil Kosin

Writing from Chicago
Thursday, August 20, 2009

It is 10 days ago that Phil Kosin died after an intense, and intensely private, four-year battle with cancer.

It has been awfully quiet around here ever since.

Kosin loved golf, loved life, loved to talk, loved to be in the middle of it all. Publishing and writing Chicagoland Golf, and taking the air on his Chicagoland Golf radio show, allowed him to do so, and make his love his life's work.

But he did more than that. He conceived and supported a golf tournament – the Illinois Women's Open – which has grown to become an indicator of young golf talent in the Midwest. He backed a charity – the Chicago Friends of Golf – that donated clubs, balls and other equipment to younger golfers in the area. He supported young pros occasionally by slipping them some money.

He was a fireman in his youth, and never got over the lure – reporters can do this – of chasing a story, whether it was a fire engine going down the street or a golf rumor found over the next hill.

He was the master of the well-developed argument. As Bill Shean, the emiment Chicago amateur, said, "Some people didn't like Phil voicing his opinion, but he always backed it up with the facts. When Phil made a point, it wasn't just an opinion. He had done his research."

And to your counter-argument, he would often say, correctly, "But I'm right."

Never boring, Kosin could carry a radio show with 50,000 watts of enthusiasm and storytelling. He filled pages of his newspaper with more of the same, and had the gift of being an excellent photographer.

Yes, it's awfully quiet around here. He missed last year's Western Open – a.k.a. the BMW Championship – in St. Louis because it had gotten harder for him to travel. He said he had a bad leg that wasn't healing, and that was true, but we didn't know what Paul Harvey called the rest of the story. A few days before he died, Kosin let a few people know it. The night he died, he was still greeting visitors to his hospital room with a one-liner and the classic Kosin eye-roll.

The Solheim Cup starts in hours at Rich Harvest Farms in Sugar Grove. Phil Kosin was one of the first reporters to detail owner Jerry Rich's quest to build a golf course on his property. As a great supporter of women's golf, he would have been all over Rich Harvest this week, getting the scoop the rest of us missed.

It will be awfully quiet in that press tent this weekend. The rest of us, who will tell Phil Kosin stories from now until we meet him again, have big shoes to fill.

– Tim Cronin

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