No one is surprised when the latest party of Korean golfers arrives in the west and makes its mark sooner than its predecessors. One way and another, they look so much more at ease on the PGA and DP World tours than they did before.
In the recent Presidents Cup, there were four Koreans representing the International team: Si Woo Kim, Tom Kim, Sungjae Im and K.H. Lee.
Tom Kim was the star of the show. Golf Digest described him as “recklessly entertaining,” while Scott Michaux wrote in these pages, “If you don’t love and can’t root for this gifted and relatable kid, that’s your problem.”
To cite one more of Kim’s many admirers, namely International captain Trevor Immelman, “He is just wired differently.”
“Whatever stage you’re at, if you’re 100 percent focused on your golf on the course, make sure that you are 100 percent focused on being relaxed when you are not playing.” – Se Ri Pak
The chances are that when any of the leading Korean men of the moment are interviewed, their interviewees will bring up the names of Y.E. Yang and K.J. Choi as the home heroes who paved the way for their success. And, almost every time, the players will go along with that suggestion.
Yet the more you think about it, the more you wonder why the moderns do not heap rather more of the credit on Se Ri Pak and the other Korean women. From the start, these women have been nothing if not generous with their advice on how to cope with the hazards attached to a Korean upbringing.
Pak, as everyone knows, went through hell to become the extraordinary, if somewhat alarming, success story that she became.
As a rookie on the LPGA Tour in 1998, she won the first two of her five majors, and that in spite of being woefully lonely in that alien environment. Unable to speak English, Pak found the only voice she could understand was that of a father who talked of nothing beyond how hard she needed to practice.
To their credit, Koreans are seldom anything but respectful to their parents, and Pak has neither confirmed nor denied too much about the routine she was expected to follow under her father’s eye.
When, for example, the family lived in Seoul, he would oversee a leg-strengthening exercise in which his daughter would run up and down 15 flights of stairs in the family apartment block. After that, he would take her to a local driving range where, in winter, she was said to have practiced until her plaits were intertwined with icicles.
The fact that Pak eventually dealt with emotional issues no doubt contributed to the gems of wisdom she imparted ahead of her retirement in 2016. None, perhaps, resonated more than one of her comments about going easy on the practice.
“Whatever stage you’re at,” she said, “if you’re 100 percent focused on your golf on the course, make sure that you are 100 percent focused on being relaxed when you are not playing.”
When this correspondent suggested to Pak that the girls’ parents would not thank her for what she was saying, she agreed: “It is difficult for them, but they are learning at the same time as the players are learning.”
The now 34-year-old Jiyai Shin, the winner of two Women’s British Opens, has often explained the circumstances in which she realized that Korean parents’ emphasis on practice was bordering on crazy.
“When I first saw Laura Davies,” said Shin, “I thought to myself, ‘She must be very confident that she doesn’t feel she has to practise.’ Then, after a bit, my thinking changed. I began to see that Laura was actually very smart. No Korean is going to be playing for as long as Laura. They’re all going to burn out too fast, either mentally or with injury problems.”
So Yeon Ryu, who won the U.S. Women’s Open in 2011 and the ANA Inspiration in 2017, explained the difference between a Korean and a Western upbringing.
“Up until the age of 19,” she said, “Korean girls do everything their parents tell them to do, almost to the point where they have absolutely no idea how to be independent. If, for instance, they don’t have their parents with them when they set out on tour, they can have real trouble in managing themselves.
“And if they do have their parents with them,” she continued, “it’s not necessarily a good thing. If your parents are telling you to do something and you fail, you tend to blame them when things go wrong – and they tend to blame everyone in sight.”
To say the Korean women ganged together to send their fathers home is going a bit far, but that is precisely what began to happen as the “golf daddies,” as players called them, began to accept they would do better to give their daughters, and then their sons, a bit more space.
Alas, none of that happened in time for Jin Jeong who won the Amateur Championship at Muirfield in 2010 and the Silver Medal for low amateur at that year’s Open in St Andrews – at age 20.
It was shortly after that stellar season that the lad lost form. At first, his father pointed the finger of suspicion at the player’s coach, Australia’s Trevor Flakemore, and that though coach and player had the best of relationships.
“Early on, they were pretty miserable, but now, like us, they have friends out here, and that can make an incredible difference.” – Richie Ramsay
He also stopped his son from seeing his girlfriend on the grounds that it was interfering with his concentration. Though Jeong surfaced to win the 2013 ISPS Handa Perth International at Lake Karrinyup in Western Australia, he missed 32 consecutive cuts across 2015 and 2016.
Richie Ramsay, a top Scot who has been on the DP World Tour since 2009, has been an interested observer in the development of those Korean men who are beginning to do as their Korean sisters in winning on a regular basis. (For now, Yang remains the only male Korean to have won a major title, at the 2009 PGA Championship.)
“One thing I’ve noticed,” said Ramsay, “is that they’ve become more like Scots. Early on, they were pretty miserable, but now, like us, they have friends out here, and that can make an incredible difference.
“When you combine that with their innate sense of discipline, rather than the over-the-top variety, you can see why they’re only going to get better.”