Note: This story appeared in the Jan. 27, 2007 issue of Golfweek.
By REX HOGGARD
PALM DESERT, Calif. – Hindsight can be a painfully cathartic endeavor, with an emphasis on painful. It’s a life lesson that, even at 65 years old, Paul Kim is learning to accept.
As Kim, the father of PGA Tour rookie Anthony Kim, trailed his son during the third round of last week’s Bob Hope Chrysler Classic – an occasion the elder Kim should have celebrated as a watershed event – it was impossible to keep the unremitting demons of the past at bay.
“I pushed him really hard,” Paul Kim says quietly, his eyes fixed on the ground. “I hurt him, pushing him so hard, and I’m sorry I did that.”
He is sorry, for example, for rousing his only son at dawn each day to train. He is sorry he was so controlling he refused to buy Anthony a car. And he is sorry that after a junior tournament, an event Anthony won with an over-par total, he wrenched the trophy from his son’s hands and threw it to the ground.
“Over par is no good,” Paul Kim remembers telling Anthony.
Anyone who has ever watched the rail-thin Californian in action marvels at a near-flawless swing and a golf IQ that is off the charts. But Anthony Kim’s tale is not so much an examination of the next PGA Tour star in waiting as it is an outline for healing. Kim’s is a story of an overbearing father and a rebellious son. It’s a story about a nonconforming, headstrong kid from Los Angeles who discovered though he loved golf, he didn’t always fit into the game’s often exclusive world. But, most of all, Kim’s tale is a testament to the therapeutic powers of time and family bonds that often bend but refuse to break.
“We’ve had a rocky relationship. It comes from him wanting the best for me, like all parents,” says Anthony Kim, who tied for 45th at the Bob Hope in his second start as a card-carrying Tour member. “I held a grudge for a while when I was in college, but it got me to this point so it obviously wasn’t wrong, and I think I’m starting to realize that.”
The Kims’ relationship is one born of sacrifice and discipline and, like many father-son sagas, expectations ran amok.
At an early age it became apparent Anthony Kim had the golf gift. So much so that Anthony’s golf career became the family’s solitary focus. After Anthony learned the game on L.A.’s dogeared municipal tracks, Paul Kim sold the family house in Studio City in 2001 and purchased a condo adjacent to the Stadium Course’s first green at PGA West in La Quinta in order to give Anthony a better opportunity to hone his powerful action.
Moving from L.A. to the affluent desert digs was the first of many difficult transitions for a young man best described as more South Central than Southampton. The move also hastened the ever-expanding gap between father and son. “He is a downtown L.A. kid,” says Rocky Hambric, Kim’s manager. “That is what he is inside. What world does he live in when both worlds want him to be one way, but not the other? Anthony has been a kid wedged between two worlds.”
Kim, a highly recruited four-time AJGA All-American, opted to attend the University of Oklahoma as a form of rebellion, a youthful attempt to jettison an omnipresent authority figure. It was a move, viewed through the everpresent filter of hindsight, that was akin to an alcoholic getting a part-time job tending bar.
While Kim gave the Sooners a potent No. 1 man, his aversion to authority quickly became a liability within the team-oriented confines of Norman, Okla. He clashed early and often with Oklahoma coach Jim Ragan.
“He had an opinion on how things should go, and if your opinion didn’t agree with his, there was usually conflict,” Ragan says. “The problem came with his immaturity. Certain times throughout his college career he made some dumb decisions, but we all have.”
The discord boiled over in the fall of Kim’s junior year when, after an event in Tennessee, a disagreement escalated into what Kim characterized as a physical altercation.
University policy prohibits Ragan from talking publicly about the incident, which resulted in Kim being suspended from the team for two tournaments. Ragan’s only comment concerning the incident is that, “the benching did him some good.”
Kim, however, is not as diplomatic.
“I didn’t feel like I deserved to be shoved in the back and if somebody wants to shove me they are going to have another thing coming,” Kim says. “I’d respect someone who would do it when I’m looking at them. But not from behind.”
When he returned from the suspension, Kim responded with successive victories: a seven-shot romp at the Ashworth Invitational and an eightstroke victory at the Hall of Fame Invitational. It was those commanding performances, moreso than his fractured relationship with Ragan, that sealed Kim’s early exit from Oklahoma.
On an ailing left ankle, the byproduct of an injury suffered during a pickup basketball game, he literally and figuratively limped out the season. He then spent most of the summer in Traverse City, Mich., working with his swing coach, Adam Schriver, and preparing for his pro debut.
If the baggage of three tumultuous years in Oklahoma or his ongoing estrangement with his father were weighing on him, it didn’t show when he joined the play-for-pay set.
He tied for second in his first Tour event (Valero Texas Open), followed with a T-16 at the Southern Farm Bureau Classic and closed the year with a relatively easy trip through three stages of Q-School to earn his card.
Kim is what baseball scouts call a five-tool player, with copious amounts of power, touch, imagination, fearlessness and game management. He’s also brimming with the type of confidence that sometimes is interpreted by arm-chair analysts and players of lesser skills as cocky.
“Ricky Bobby (of “Talledega Nights” fame) said it best, ‘If you’re not first, you’re last.’ You don’t get a trophy for second,” says Kim, who wisely hired veteran caddie Ron “Bambi” Levin for his rookie year. “I want a jacket. I want a jug. I want everything.”
Kim’s edge, however, quickly fades when the conversation drifts back to his family. His goals for his rookie campaign are simple: win and earn enough money to buy back that three-bedroom home in the Studio City hills with the sweeping views of the L.A. skyline.
“I’ve driven by it a couple of times recently,” Kim says. “It’s not that big, but my mom (Miryoung) wants that back. She loves that place.”
Kim also seems bent on mending the rift with his father.
The first signs of a family detente surfaced at Q-School last December at PGA West, not far from the condo where the Kims lived on the Stadium Course. Father and son shared a long-overdue embrace after Anthony earned his Tour card.
“We cried for five minutes,” Paul Kim recalls.
On Jan. 18, just prior to Kim’s second-round tee time at La Quinta Country Club, the rift narrowed even more when Anthony called his father onto the practice putting green to ask him swing advice. It was the first time since the younger Kim bolted for Oklahoma that he’d let his father back into his golf world.
“That was very special,” the elder Kim says as he fought back tears. “Even if I didn’t push him that hard, I knew he would have practiced and trained hard. But in life you only get one chance. That’s why I pushed him.”
Fortunately for Paul Kim, a son can give a father a precious second chance.
Posted: 2/29/2008
