HOYLAKE, ENGLAND | At 21, Tom Kim is “super happy” with his golfing lot. And that was even before he started to chase up the fourth-round leaderboard in the Open Championship at Royal Liverpool.
Though he had injured his right ankle when he lost his footing on the patio of his Open accommodation, it was going to take rather more than a torn and twisted limb to get in his way as reeled off four birdies and an eagle en route to a closing 4-under 67 and a tie for second, worth $1.084 million. It was the second consecutive top-10 finish in a major championship for the South Korean.
Having started the day at 3-under par, he ended up at 7-under, six strokes behind runaway winner Brian Harman.
At the previous week’s Genesis Scottish Open at the Renaissance Club, Kim kept harping back to how the course in North Berwick was where everything had started for him when he finished third in the 2022 Scottish Open. After that, he returned to America and won two PGA Tour events ahead of his stellar performance in the Presidents Cup.
Who will forget the way he holed those Tiger-like putts in the Saturday four-balls at the Presidents Cup. And how he celebrated as he made the winning 10-footer on the 18th hole as he and rookie Si Woo Kim defeated Patrick Cantlay and Xander Schauffele.
Both teams were riveted to proceedings. Indeed, from the looks of things, Si Woo did not appear to blink or breathe as he watched his partner’s preparations for that all-important putt.
When the ball dropped, Kim thrust his cap to the ground before embarking on that runaway round of hugs. Si Woo came back from the dead, and it was as if golf itself had taken on a different lease of life.
“You’ve got to love this guy,” NBC analyst Paul Azinger said of Tom Kim.
Ah, yes, but how did Kim’s victory celebrations go down with the Korean golfing fraternity?
“What I like about Tom is that those smiles are genuine, and it’s because he’s such a genuine guy that I think he’s going to go far.”
Scottie Scheffler
In 2016, countrywoman Ha Na Jang produced a Beyoncé-style jig as she holed the winning putt at the HSBC Women’s World Championship, which was met with a mixed review. Though the celebrated band of Getty photographers said they had never seen “anything so refreshing in 25 years of covering golf,” there were those among Jang’s fellow Koreans who thought it was hardly what Westerners might call “the done thing.”
Kim, when he heard the tale, acknowledged that respect meant everything in Korean culture. However, no one, other than his parents, had queried his merriment.
So, what did they say?
“They asked, ‘Where did that emotion come from?’”
His reply? “I told them that it was all about wanting to win and wanting to let everyone know that I wanted to win.”
Tom Kim’s upbringing, it has to be said, has been rather different to that of your average Korean on tour. His father, Chang-it Kim, played on the Buy.com Tour, forerunner to today’s Korn Ferry Tour, before becoming a teaching professional, a career which led to the family spending time in Australia, the Philippines and Thailand.
As a coach, Kim senior would have known that the Korean women, when they started to swap music for golf in the 1960s, overdid the practice. It was said their parents needed to see blood pouring from wrists before they accepted that tendinitis was a genuine complaint.
The younger Kim would have learned something from all the other cultures he met during his amateur days and, when he practised, it was more with a view to being the next Tiger Woods because his parents were standing over him.
He counts himself lucky that he was so well-equipped to play in America as against those of his forebears. He mentioned K.J. Choi and Se Ri Pak, who arrived in that land unable to speak English and having no friends.
Kim, it seems, has friends from all over and, when he said two weeks ago that he could happily live in Scotland, he doubled his fan base over here.
Jordan Spieth invited him to join his family in Texas for Christmas last year. Along similar lines, Kim and Scottie Scheffler, who share the same birthday, detonated 36,046 ‘Likes’ when Kim, whose 21st birthday it was, posted a picture of the two of them sharing smiles, cakes and candles.
For another telling tale, when Kim insisted on taking Spieth and Rickie Fowler out for a Korean dinner, he went to the restaurant the previous day – on his own – simply to make sure that everything tasted as he would want for his guests.
He sees Scheffler as one of his closest friends – “a big brother, an advice-giver, and someone who can give me a hard time where necessary.”
Scheffler, in turn, is amused by the youngster. “We certainly get on well,” he said at the Renaissance. “What I like about Tom is that those smiles are genuine, and it’s because he’s such a genuine guy that I think he’s going to go far.”
No doubt Scheffler was reminding people of that observation as Kim delivered 67 shots’ worth of good cheer to a sodden crowd.
Lewine Mair