Cullan Brown's memory lives on at Barbasol Championship

Cullan Brown had zero expectations when he teed it up in the Barbasol Championship at Keene Trace Golf Club two years ago.

“He had nothing to lose that week,” Emily Brown, Cullan’s mom, recalls. “He wasn't like the other men trying to make their living at it. He considered it a free pass and he was going to make the best of it.”

And that’s exactly what Cullan did.

The affable 19-year-old, a rising sophomore at the University of Kentucky, was playing in the tournament on a sponsor’s exemption. Cullan proceeded to make the cut in his home state’s PGA TOUR event, shooting par or better in every round, and tied for 53rd.

Among the highlights that week? Cullan reeled off five straight birdies on the front nine Saturday with his dad, Rodney, on the bag. Rodney – a last-minute fill-in when Cullan’s caddie got heatstroke – was so intent on his job he didn’t even realize that his son was on such a roll.

“I don't think that was by accident,” Kentucky coach Brian Craig says. “I think that was coordinated there by the man upstairs that his dad was going to be caddying for him in a TOUR event. It was pretty cool, pretty amazing.”

“I'm so glad that those two had that,” Emily says, her voice catching, before she continued the thought in the present tense. “Rodney has that memory of doing that. That's something he'll always cherish.”

The Barbasol Championship would be the last tournament Cullan Brown would ever play.

On Aug. 17, 2019, barely a month after he made his TOUR debut, Cullan was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, after doctors found a tumor in his right thigh. Sadly, he died 345 days later.

In Cullan’s short life, though, he had a significant impact on his family, friends and teammates – and essentially everyone else he met. He was friendly and faithful, humble and kind, the guy with the biggest smile in the room and the heartiest laugh and the Pied Piper personality.

That’s why the same people who extended that sponsor’s exemption to Cullan in 2019 wanted to honor him in a more permanent way. So, the winner of the Barbasol Junior Championship – this year’s inaugural champ was Preston Summerhays – will receive the Cullan Brown Trophy and a spot in the PGA TOUR event.

And this week at the Barbasol Championship, Cullan’s sister Cathryn, an accomplished player in her own right, will hit the opening tee shot on Saturday. It will be a quick turnaround – she’ll rush home from an AJGA event in South Dakota that ends on Thursday, then drive to Lexington, Kentucky on Friday – but it’s something she doesn’t want to miss.

“Someone asked her the other day, why does she play golf?” Emily says. “And she said, well, Cullan always told me that I could be better than he was if I just dedicated myself to the work and put in the time. So that's why she says she plays.”

The Brown family received some more exciting news recently. Cathryn had just shot a career-low 69 in an AJGA qualifier in Ashland, Kentucky, which is five-and-a-half hours from their home in Eddyville. She was ushered into a room, presumably for an interview, only to see her grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends and Coach Craig gathered around.

On the phone was Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear who told the Browns that the golf course where Cullan grew up playing is being renamed in his honor. It will now be called “The Cullan at Mineral Mound State Park.”

“His legacy literally is going to go on and on and on,” Craig says. “We're all going to make sure of it, but just the things that have even happened so far, like, wow. That just tells you what kind of impact he had and what kind of person he was.

“I mean, you just don't see it at that age, I mean, people want to recognize him like this. They want to cement his legacy by doing all these really amazing things – and for a 20-year-old, you know what I mean? Like, that's pretty awesome.”

The family joke was that Cullan started playing golf because he hated to run. He could shoot the basketball, but he didn’t like to run up and down the court. He’d knock the cover off a baseball, but he didn’t want to run the bases. Football and soccer, now those were out of the question.

But when he was 8 years old, Cullan started tagging along when his dad and his grandfathers and his uncles when they headed to the golf course.

“He just kind of picked it up and he was like, hey, you don't have to run in golf,” Emily says. “That's kind of how it came about.”

The natural ability was there, though, as was the work ethic. When Cullan was in the eighth grade, his instructor, Todd Trimble, called Craig to give him a head’s up. That summer, the Kentucky coach went to a junior tournament and the first two shots he saw Cullan hit were a driver, 3-wood – into the wind – to 25 feet on a lengthy par 5.

“That got my attention really fast, really fast,” recalls Craig, who offered Cullan a scholarship four years later.

A wrist injury kept Cullan out of the Wildcats’ lineup during the fall semester of his freshman year. But he managed eight starts that spring, posting a 72.42 scoring average with a career-low 64, and landed a spot on the All-SEC Freshman Team.

The sponsor’s exemption into the Barbasol Championship that summer was a bonus. Cullan, who had caddied for his good friend Emma Talley at an LPGA event the previous week, called it an “opportunity unlike any other really – to get to be here and just to get to play, much less compete against these guys is just fantastic.”

Craig was on a Greek island on a long-planned family vacation when Cullan and several of his former Kentucky players were competing at Keene Trace. But he had his smart phone and the PGA TOUR app to follow their progress.

“I literally was just refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh,” Craig recalls. “… I was following it as closely as you can follow it without being there.”

Cullan finished with rounds of 72-68-67-71. He called the week a “fantastic” opportunity for an amateur to “be able to see where their game is and where it needs to be and what they need to do to get from A to B.”

“He got to experience his dream,’ Emily says. “He got to live his dream and that's what I've told a lot of people. I'm so thankful he got to do that because as a mom, I got to see it.”

Several weeks later, Cullan got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He hit his right leg on a piece of furniture. At first, doctors thought he had a deep bone bruise on his knee. When medicine didn’t alleviate the pain, an MRI was ordered.

Cullan, who loved classic country music, had to give up tickets to the Grand Old Opry to go to Lexington for the procedure. The news was not good. The chemotherapy was aggressive, and Cullan spent between 150-200 of his remaining 345 days in the hospital.

He died on Aug. 4, 2020.

“I'll never understand that -- why, why, why he couldn't stay with us longer, but I guess God needed him more than I did,” she says. “But maybe I'll get my answer one day when I get up there.”

“I still feel like I'm in a bad dream,” Craig says. “I just can't even grasp it. I just, I really can't. It's just so, so unfair.”

Cullan knew how serious the diagnosis was. He was treated in the pediatric oncology unit at the University of Kentucky but at 19 he was considered an adult. He was a part of every meeting with the doctors – “there was nothing really we kept from him or sugar-coated up until the very end,” Emily says.

“He never complained,” she continues. “People would come to the hospital to visit -- how are you? (He’d say) there's nothing I have to complain about. He was more worried about us. He was more worried about how everybody else was doing.

“And that was just Cullan. He was like that from an early age.”

Craig and the team visited Cullan often in the hospital. It was an awful battle, Craig says, but Cullan handled it like a “superhero.” The Kentucky men’s and women’s golf teams wore B4B – “Birdies 4 Brownie” – stitched on their uniforms last year.

“He went through it valiantly and he was a champion all the way through it,” the UK coach says. “He was an inspiration to so many people, not just our team, but I mean, the people in the hospital -- like he touched everybody, like everybody that came in contact with Cullan, whether it was a nurse or the doctors or whoever.

“They felt his influence in such a powerful way.”

Craig feels his team gained perspective from the way Cullan lived his life. He understood golf was just a game, and his demeanor never changed whether he shot 67 or 76. He always tried to do his best, but he knew his family, teammates and friends would love him regardless.

“He was very laid back,” Emily agrees. “… He just kind of took the world as it came. I wished I had his demeanor on a lot of things like that.

“He loved life and he did a whole lot of living in the 19-and-a-half years that he had before his diagnosis.”

In nearly two decades at Kentucky, Craig has coached PGA TOUR players like Josh Teater and J.B. Holmes. He feels certain that Cullan had the talent to join them although he wonders whether he would have liked the lifestyle.

Many people describe Cullan as an “old soul.” He loved to read, particularly novels about the old West, and was an A-student. He also was an avid hunter and fisherman -- in fact, he’d already seen a ranch in Montana on-line that he wanted to buy.

“So, my guess is he would have tried to have made the TOUR and make as much money as he could, as quick as he could, and then said, boys, I'll see, y'all later, I'm retired to my ranch in Montana,” Craig says, “That's probably what he would have done to be honest with you, and then just made an appearance every now and then.

“That’s exactly what he would have been like. He would not have been one of these guys that would have sacrificed everything to be a TOUR player. … He would have figured out a way to, to balance both of them.”

Cullan also loved to watch cooking shows and try new recipes. On an offseason golf trip to Florida with some current and former UK players and some of their fathers, he cooked every night. His grandparents gave him a Blackstone grill last Christmas so he could cook his specialty – hibachi chicken or steak with fried rice and homemade yum-yum sauce.

In fact, cooking was one of the topics of conversation when Cullan met John Daly at the Barbasol Championship. Cullan told him about a dry rub called “Flavor Dust” that he and a high school buddy created when they were tasked with cooking for the FFA banquet. It was so successful, the two bottled and sold it.

“He really enjoyed talking to John,” Emily says. “I think there’s a shared love of food there, as well.”

Emily says the last promise she made to Cullan was to try to live her life the way she thinks he would have lived his. She wants to keep his memory alive and share his faith and the hope that everyone has a chance of seeing him again one day.

“I have a picture of him when he was like less than two and he has a diaper on and he's swinging one of those big plastic golf clubs that all kids have in the house,” she says. “And I always say that when he was in contention on Sunday at the Masters, that was the photo I was going to give CBS because that was our dream. That was his dream.

“It was our dream and I believe that he could have achieved that if cancer hadn't taken him from us. So, you know, the Barbasol was a gift from God. And it's only in God's timing that he got to experience that, just before his diagnosis, we all got to live it.’