COCKY, stocky and the proud possessor of a pitbull named Rocky, Anthony Kim is, as they say Stateside, the real thing. Despite having never played a links course before last Sunday, the man rated by no less an authority than Tiger Woods' mentor Mark O'Meara as the player most likely to one day depose the world No.1 eased into the top five at Birkdale yesterday with a performance of sublimely controlled shotmaking in treacherous conditions.
It was a tour de force of restraint and tactical nous from Kim.
The 23-year-old already has $5m, two significant pro wins and a Walker Cup victory over Lloyd Saltman and Richie Ramsay to his credit but he is a novice at this level and had to be at
his very best at Royal Birkdale yesterday as he found himself out in the bad stuff, with winds gusting up to 45 miles an hour. At one stage, shortly after he had cleaned his ball on the 10th green, the wind was so strong that it rolled his newly-shiny ball seven or eight feet backwards. He and playing partner Ross Fisher had to wait almost 40 minutes before a rules official was summoned and gave the all-clear to continue.
Kim went on to complete his up and down on the 10th, which proved the turning point after an outward nine in which he had leaked three shots to move from six-over at the start of play to close at just seven-over after he eagled the par-five 17th to finish with a 71. With players losing shots and the leaderboard remaining remarkably fluid, the Californian may even be an outside bet to challenge the leading trio of Greg Norman, Padraig Harrington and KJ Choi.
He certainly thinks he can overhaul them if he throws caution to the wind. "I plan to be more aggressive tomorrow," he said after his round yesterday. "I was laying back and hitting 3 or 4 irons into the green today. There is no reason why I can't hit driver tomorrow, make five or six birdies and make a run." It would be a fairytale to rival Ben Curtis's Open win at Troon, with the crucial difference that no-one believes that Kim won't go on to win many more majors.
Kim may be a new name to many British golf-fans, but across the Atlantic he remains one of the worst-kept secrets in golf. Were it not for a self-destructive streak as wide as the San Andreas Fault, few doubt that he would already be emulating the sort of precocious feats that distinguished Tiger's early career a decade ago. And when Tiger is absent, Kim has shown that he can grab tournaments by the scruff of the neck, as he did at the Wachovia Open when he beat a full-strength field by five shots as he posted a record score of -16.
It is the sort of beating Woods used to hand out to the Tour, and one of the reasons O'Meara sees such similarities between Woods and Kim. Another is that O'Meara is not only the confidant of Woods but also became Kim's mentor when he threatened to go off the rails during a brilliant college career. No one is better placed to assess the talent of the two players at the same stage of their careers and he believes they are both defined by an outrageous one-in-a-generation talent.
That, however, is where the similarities end and the differences start to stack up. Both were introduced to golf by their fathers, but Kim and his father Paul are as distant from each other as Woods and his father Earl were close. Where Earl was a tender influence who nurtured Tiger's talent and love for the game, Paul was a disciplinarian who rammed it down his son's throat. Korean culture is highly hierarchical, and Paul, who like Kim's mother Miryoung was a poverty-striken immigrant to the US, thought he knew what was best for his son. Unfortunately this didn't include his beloved basketball, which he practised in secret every day of his adolescence in Los Angeles, nor was it the hip hop he loved, or hanging with his friends. It was golf.
Raised in the world's most liberal city, his son didn't take kindly to his father's strictures, and saw golf as a symbol of parental oppression. Theirs was a relationship defined by mutual antipathy and misunderstanding: as the rebellious Kim kicked back, his father became gradually more scathing and authoritarian. Paul took issue with everything his young son did, constantly probing him for weakness. It invoked the law of unintended consequences, making his boy teak tough and immune to criticism.
"My dad was always saying, 'You have to be tough; you can't be intimidated,'" Kim says. "I wouldn't say he encouraged me to fight, but he encouraged me to understand that if somebody got in my face, I should be the first one to pull back and rip them. So when he said something that I didn't think was right, I'd tell him he was wrong. It backfired on him. That's my dad in me. I think that's where I got my toughness for the golf course."
Paul did just enough to make sure his son stayed on the school golf team. Not that it was difficult: he was so outrageously talented that he could put in virtually no effort and still lord it over the mere mortals on the team. Yet Paul knew he wasn't working hard enough, knew he wouldn't become the superstar he could be if he knuckled down, so at the age of 16 he sent his son to the small town of La Quinta to live on his own. There was little to do there but play golf and pursue a life of sporting monasticism.
But Kim has always been a naturally outgoing and extravagantly self-confidant soul and his dedication to rebellion was already entrenched. Left to his own devices, he played a bit of golf, but he drank a lot of vodka too, going straight from the course to the bar and not spending much time at the practice range. Call it the John Daly school of golf. His parents came to see him every weekend, but it wasn't long before the self-confessed "cocky asshole" was kicking back with mates, getting drunk and skipping school.
He was still a mummy's boy at heart though; he always loved Miryoung, who grew up homeless in Seoul and first met Paul on the day of their arranged marriage. And when she begged Kim to go to Oklahoma University, he couldn't turn her down. It didn't stop his drinking though, or his winning golf matches. And then the worst thing that could possibly happen happened: hungover and with just 45 minutes' sleep, he came second in his professional debut at the 2006 Valero Texas Open.
He began to be talked about not as a pupil of the John Daly University but a graduate. Yet just as he looked sure to tank his career, he had an epiphany at last year's Reno-Tahoe Open. He realised he was on the edge. "I was embarrassing," says Kim. "I didn't respect the game enough, and I didn't respect myself enough."
The conversion has paid spectacular rewards. He ditched the booze, staged a reconciliation with his father Paul after an estrangement of two years, hired a personal trainer, amassed prize money of $5m and is seventh in the USA list for this September's Ryder Cup. And now he's fifth in the Open going into the final day. The only thing left to fix, he says, is to star on MTV Cribs – the show for the man who has everything.
"I want it all," Kim says. "I'm a man of the people. I want to help kids. I want to be No.1, to win majors, and I want to be the baddest person on the planet." Tiger, Greg, KJ and Padraig, you have been warned.
The full article contains 1355 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
