Remembering Calvin Peete, who overcame an allergy attack to win the 1985 @WMPhoenixOpen before winning @THEPLAYERS later that spring ⬇️ Peete, who never played organized sports as a kid, dropped out of school in the eighth grade to work with his dad in the Florida corn fields, supporting a family that included 18 siblings. He first picked up a golf club at age 23 while selling jewelry and clothes from his '56 Plymouth station wagon in western New York. Peete was tricked into playing golf at first – his friends said they were going to a clambake – but he developed a quick knack for the game, breaking 80 within six months and breaking par within a year. Peete was never able to fully straighten his left arm after falling out of a tree and breaking it in three places when he was 12 years old. But the self-taught Peete adapted his golf swing accordingly with the help of Ben Hogan's instruction book, "Five Lessons," and he took three stabs at Q-School before earning his TOUR card in 1975 at age 31. Peete’s strength was in finding the fairway – he led the TOUR in driving accuracy for 10 years. Many people felt his childhood accident restricted his swing, kept it on target and took the big miss out of Peete's game. He took what made him different and made it his superpower. In over 1,200 rounds, Peete only hit one ball OB. "Some of the players still drive farther than I do," Peete told The New York Times in a 1983 profile. "But I'm always in the fairway, and they're sometimes in the trees." Peete became the fourth Black player to win on the PGA TOUR, joining pioneers like Pete Brown, Charlie Sifford and Lee Elder. Among his 12 TOUR wins: the 1985 WM Phoenix Open, where he relied on longtime caddie Adolphus 'Golf Ball' Hull to read putts and pick clubs in a third round where the allergies caused trouble with his eyesight. Peete grinded out a 72 that day, then sealed the deal with a final-round 68 in a week that marked the WM Phoenix Open's 50th anniversary. "Really, I felt that I was not going to be able to play today," Peete said after the victory. "The irritation that I was suffering from yesterday was very painful all day long ... it eased up, but it was a very slow process." As he always did, Peete fought through.