Alex Fourie’s life started in Ukraine with devastation. Now he is trying to help those facing another unfathomable situation in the country he once called home.
Fourie was born in Zvenyhorodka, a small city within the Cherkasy Oblast in central Ukraine. He never knew his biological parents, who gave up custody at the hospital immediately after his birth, and he grew up in orphanages for his first seven years. Fourie was born with only his left arm and a cleft lip and palate, which he believes was due to lingering radiation effects from the Chernobyl disaster, which had taken place in the country a handful of years before his birth.
At the time of his adoption in 1999, a nearly 7-year-old Fourie weighed only 35 pounds and ate soup for nearly every meal.
“I’m working with a therapist because I’ve been trying to forget all of the memories,” Fourie told Global Golf Post. “And with everything that is happening (with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), it’s crazy. I wake up at night with visions and memories from the orphanage. … I was just trying to fight for food every day. I didn’t care about having one arm or anything else.”
This sounds like anything but the childhood of a future PGA member. Remarkably, that is the position Fourie, now 27, finds himself in two decades after his adoption.
Fourie’s path out of Ukraine began when he was just 2 years old. The Rev. Vic Jackopson, the founder of Hope Now Ministries, saw Fourie as a 2-year-old baby and decided to adopt him. However, when Jackopson went back five weeks later to bring his new child home, Fourie had been transferred to a different orphanage, and a paperwork mishap rendered him lost.
Jackopson continued to search during his travels to the country until 1999, when he received a random call from an orphanage director in Ukraine. The director explained that he had a kid who required significant medical attention, and it would be for the best if a couple from the western world could adopt him. Because Fourie had been incorrectly labeled as having a mental disability, he would not be allowed by the country to be adopted beyond age 7. Essentially, he would have been forced to stay in Ukraine still fighting for food and not receiving the necessary medical help. The statistics on Ukrainian orphans who don’t get adopted are frightening, as about 30 percent go on to commit suicide and the majority establish a criminal record. Many are now fighting a war.
Just in time, Jackopson was reunited with the kid he had first seen five years earlier. He brought Fourie to Oxford, England, where the boy immediately underwent surgery on his cleft lip and palate – the first of 23 surgeries he has endured.
That was when fate intervened again. In Birmingham, Alabama, two South African missionaries had been trying to have a child for several years and finally agreed to stop trying. The next day, their friend Jackopson was preaching at their church and explained about Fourie’s situation. Suddenly, Anton and Elizabeth Fourie had a son whom they would meet for the first time in Oxford on Mother’s Day in 1999.
Soon Fourie would call Birmingham home.
“In my mind, they are my biological parents,” Fourie said. “They are truly the most supportive parents anyone can ask for.”
The first week being in the U.S., Anton put a golf club in Fourie’s hand. It would take time for him to develop that passion, as Fourie played several sports. He was a kicker on his high school football team and got to play in front of a few different Southeastern Conference coaches, including Lane Kiffin, who were at games looking to recruit. Fourie also played soccer, tennis and golf in high school, calling golf the sport he was only moderately interested in at the time.
“The cheerleaders were only on the football field; they weren’t at the golf course,” Fourie said jokingly.
But once Fourie went to college, he found himself interested in “skipping his 8 a.m. art class” so he could hit balls on the range. Playing with a right-handed swing with which he leads with his left arm, Fourie trimmed his handicap to the high single digits. It snowballed from there. Fourie had been working on the side as a tech at Maximum Physical Therapy, and he ended up being sent by his boss to Atlanta for a seminar to become Level 1 certified for the Titleist Performance Institute. From there, his passion for teaching golf – particularly to those with physical disabilities or limitations – continued to evolve.
Still, golf was far from the only passion in Fourie’s life. He moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, and became a youth pastor, following in the footsteps of his father. However, Fourie didn’t like the continued pressure to be a preacher with little work being done directly with youth in the community.
He quit and decided to go the club pro route, becoming an assistant at Williams Creek Golf Course. He now gives lessons on the side, both in person and online, while his day job is selling roofs for Litespeed Construction. His handicap is down to 0.6, making him one of the best one-armed golfers in the country – and now he has started his own company, Single Hand Golf. At the same time, he is on the path to full Class A PGA membership, as he is currently a Level 1 PGA associate member. Fourie was the only person in a group of 15 players to pass his Playing Ability Test, and he also won the North American One-Armed Golfers Association spring championship last year.
He has a wife, Olivia, and is a father to a beautiful baby girl, Lila.
That alone is an accomplishment, given how he grew up, but now Fourie is doing something even more spectacular. With the city and orphanage he once called home being bombed, Fourie decided to sell T-shirts, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to Hope Now in an effort to transport orphans out of Ukraine. The T-shirt is a golf ball in the yellow and blue Ukraine national colors with the words “One Ukraine” on top and “One World” on the bottom. It is produced in conjunction with Bacon and Co., a local company that made the University of Tennessee’s SEC Championship T-shirts when the school’s men’s basketball team won earlier this month.
There are still roughly 175 children living in Fourie’s old orphanage, and it costs about $1,000 in fuel to get out of the country. Getting them out is not as simple as it sounds. Hope Now has five vans in the country, but finding drivers willing to leave their families during a period of war is a difficult task. Hope Now has moved about 150 people – not just orphans, but mainly women and children of Ukraine – out of the country.
Fourie says there are projections that the war could cause some 100,000 Ukrainian kids to become orphans. His blood boiled watching the invasion.
“Watching videos of my home city getting bombed … I was ready to go back and fight,” Fourie said. “But after being calmed down by a friend, I realized I could probably do more good here than by carrying an AR-15.”
It’s all come full circle. A man of strong faith, Fourie wants to serve God by helping those who are in a dire situation.
The morning Fourie spoke over the phone, an order of 150 shirts had been placed and a check for $3,000 had been given to Hope Now. Fourie appeared on Fox News last Saturday, and word of his story began spreading rapidly as several people, including former University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, have reached out asking how they can help. You can order a T-shirt here.
“Right now, it’s not about me and it’s not about Single Hand Golf,” Fourie said. “It’s about getting kids from Ukraine into Romania.”
It even goes beyond pure escape into another country. One couple from Nashville who had submitted paperwork to adopt a Ukrainian child called Fourie asking for his help in locating the child because contact had been lost during the Russian invasion. Fourie coordinated an effort with orphanage directors in Ukraine, and it’s believed the child could be heading to the U.S. soon.
It’s all come full circle. A man of strong faith, Fourie wants to serve God by helping those who are in a dire situation.
As Fourie has shown, anything is possible when you are given a chance.