In late September of 1992, an adolescent girl by the name of Se Ri Pak won the Lyle and Scott Women’s Open, a regular event on the LPGA of Korea Tour. She defeated established professional Jae-Sook Won in overtime. While no one would ever compare the Korea Tour to the worldwide talent of the LPGA Tour, it was nonetheless a stunning moment in golf history. Two days after Se Ri made that putt in overtime to win, she celebrated her 15th birthday.
A gifted junior golfer who attended a golf academy in Seoul as a youngster, Se Ri would win five more times on the Korea Tour as an amateur through 1995. She turned pro the following year and would win six more times through the end of the 1997 season. Beginning in 1998 Se Ri relocated to the LPGA Tour to see how her game would stack up against the greats of women’s professional golf. The results were nothing short of super impressive.
Se Ri rocketed to the top of the game in 1998 with her first two victories coming in major championships. She won the LPGA by three strokes in May. In early July, she found herself tied atop the leader board at the Women’s U.S. Open at Blackwolf Run with Duke University golfer Jenny Chuasiriporn. They were still tied after the 18-hole playoff and it took two holes of sudden death for Se Ri to finally prevail after 92 holes of competition.
That was just the start of what would end up being a World Golf Hall of Fame career for Pak. She would accumulate five major titles and win 25 times on the LPGA Tour along with her 14 wins on the Korean Tour. Her most amazing feat, from my perspective, was that she was 6-0 in playoffs on the LPGA Tour. Se Ri was the standard bearer among Korean women professionals who found success on the LPGA Tour. Nowadays Korean professionals such as Inbee Park, J.Y. Ko, S.Y. Kim, Sung Park and So Ryu dominate LPGA leader boards. Se Ri Pak was the trailblazer
While the Korean women have shown their ability to win against the best, the same has not been true among the men … until recently. This past weekend, 25-year-old Korean Si Woo Kim won the Desert Classic at PGA West in LaQuinta, making birdie on two of the last three holes to eek out a one-stroke win over Patrick Cantlay. On a day went Cantlay went off and shot a stunning 11-under-par 61, Si Woo failed to blink, shot 64, and claimed his third PGA Tour title.
Si Woo arrived on the PGA Tour as a 17-year-old in 2012. He went to Q School in the fall of 2012 and finished 20th to receive his tour card. There was only one catch. PGA Tour membership is restricted to professional golfers who are 18 years of age and older. Kim had to sit on the sidelines for six months until his 18th birthday on June 28, 2013. He was unprepared for his short season, missed a bunch of cuts, and was relegated to the Web.com Tour in 2014.
His game grew on the mini-tours and that first year on the Web.com saw Si Woo make 15 of 19 cuts. He spent a lot of his time in the middle of the pack and was relegated to the Web.com for another year. In the summer of 2015, Si Woo won the Stonebrae Classic in the Hayward hills and finally had his first win in America. That win resulted in him securing a spot on the PGA Tour for the start of the 2016 season. Success continued as he won the 2016 Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, beating former world No. 1 Luke Donald by five strokes.
Things got even more impressive the following March when Si Woo played stunningly impressive golf in capturing the prestigious Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass. Kim shot 10-under-par and beat golf’s strongest field by three shots. Ian Poulter and former British Open champ Louis Oosthuizen were runner-ups. The kid from Korea had the “can’t miss” label.
While Si Woo Kim would continue to play well on tour, the winning formula suddenly went dry. In 2018, he lost a three-hole playoff at Harbor Town in South Carolina. He was good enough to play on the 2017 Presidents Cup team for the Internationals, but he just wasn’t able to put it together for four straight rounds. Most notable were his finishes in the four grand slam tournaments. While Kim got into 16 straight major championships, he missed the cut in 10 of them and his best finish to date has been a tie for 21st place in the 2019 Masters.
While Kim has accumulated $13 million in earnings, it’s his ball striking that has kept him from consistent tour success. In fact, going into the Desert Classic last week, Si Woo was 152nd on tour in hitting greens in regulation and 178th in approach shots to the green. Historically he has lived off his skills around the greens and his putting. Nonetheless, last weekend was great golf.
Kim is not alone when it comes to Korean men competing on the PGA Tour. The best known of the Koreans is Sungjae Im. Sungjae spent his first two years in America with no home base. He would enter every tournament on the PGA Tour and simply live from hotel to hotel. Only recently has he decided to settle down and purchase his own house. He was the Web.com Tour’s player of the year in 2018 as a 20-year-old. In the 2018-19 wrap-around season, Im was the PGA Tour’s rookie of the year. He got his first breakthrough win on the PGA Tour some 10 months ago when he beat Mackenzie Hughes by one stroke to win the Honda Classic. He was on the Presidents Cup team in December of 2019 in Australia. Sungjae showed his true promise by finishing a distant runner-up to Dustin Johnson in the Masters last November.
The third member of the Korean contingent on the PGA Tour is 29-year-old Ben An. He is a little older than Kim and Im. He came to America as a teenager and was enrolled in the David Leadbetter Academy in Florida. As a 17-year-old, he became the youngest winner of the United States Amateur, defeating Ben Martin in the finals at Southern Hills. He started out on the European PGA Tour and won the prestigious BMW Championship at Wentworth in 2015. Since coming back to America, he’s had a pair of overtime losses at New Orleans and at the Memorial. He too was a member of the International Team in the 2019 Presidents Cup.
There’s a lot of talent out there in the world of professional golf. While the LPGA Tour has been a worldwide tour for the past two decades, the PGA Tour is joining them as a tour for the best golfers on the planet. What trailblazer Se Ri Pak started in women’s professional golf some 25 years ago has now morphed onto the PGA Tour. Expect this trend to continue.
