Joohyung “Tom” Kim didn’t let a quadruple bogey to start the Wyndham Championship bother him.
Instead, he became the first player in the last 40 years to overcome such an inauspicious start and win a PGA Tour event. In doing so, at 20 years, 1 month, 17 days, the South Korean became the second-youngest winner on Tour since World War II – only Jordan Spieth, who won the 2013 John Deere Classic was younger – and the first player born in the 2000s to win on Tour.
“I can’t believe I won with a quadruple bogey on the first,” Kim said. “Hopefully, I’ll never do that again.”
A front-nine 8-under-par 27 by Kim at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, North Carolina, tying the second-lowest nine-hole score in Tour history, propelled him into the lead and he cruised to a four-stroke victory over countryman Sungjae Im with a final-round 9-under 61.
Kim, who goes by Tom, a nickname he was given as a kid after the cartoon, Thomas the Train – “I had the whole (Thomas the Train) thing, I had the lunchbox, I had the toys, yeah,” – carded rounds of 67-64 to head into the weekend at 9-under 131.
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He became just the third player in the ShotLink era (est. 2003) to make a quadruple bogey or worse on the first hole of a round and go on to card an under-par score.
“I was laughing,” he said after shooting 67. “It was one bad hole and I just told myself, you know what, I can still get this, I can still shoot under par today and somehow I did.”
It didn’t hurt that his putter was on fire. In the first two rounds, he holed 301 feet, 1 inch of putts, marking the most in the first two rounds since the Wyndham Championship moved to Sedgefield Country Club in 2008. But his putter cooled off in the third round. He took 30 whacks with his short stick, ranking 68th in the field in Strokes Gained: Putting. He made just 48 feet of putts in all while still posting a 2-under 68 to trail Im by two strokes.
But the final round was a different story. With a 20-foot birdie putt at the second and 24-foot birdie at the third, he made more feet of putts in his first three holes of the final round than he did in his previous round. And he was just getting started. He sank a 12-foot birdie at No. 4, and 8-foot eagle putt at No. 5 and an 18-foot birdie putt at No. 6. He made 112 feet of putts on the front nine alone.
Kim won twice on the Asian Tour, including the Singapore International earlier this year, and topped the Asian Tour Order of Merit in 2021. He finished third at the Genesis Scottish Open and seventh at the Rocket Mortgage Classic last week. He secured temporary membership after the British Open last month by accumulating as many or more points through the non-member FedExCup points list this season as No. 150 on the 2020-21 FedExCup standings, and He secured temporary membership after the British Open last month and locked up a card for next season at the Rocket Mortgage Classic. How did he celebrate? Being too young to have an alcoholic drink, he said earlier in the week that he went back to his hotel room in Detroit and laid on his bed and stared at the ceiling for five hours.
The youngest player to win the @WyndhamChamp.
20-year-old Joohyung Kim is a PGA TOUR champion 🏆 pic.twitter.com/t1MTvXzQ0y
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) August 7, 2022
“It’s been a dream of mine to play here full time,” Kim said.
His win qualified him for the playoffs – he leaped to No. 34 in the point standings – becoming the first special temporary member to win on Tour since Collin Morikawa at the 2019 Barracuda Championship.
“To come out here and to win on Tour as a nonmember and secure your card is really not an easy task and he achieved that,” Im said. “I’m really proud of him.”
Rookie Max McGreevy, who began the week on the outside looking in at No. 126 in the FedEx Cup point standings, shot 65 and finished T-5 and jumped to No. 104 to secure a tee time in next week’s first playoff event in Memphis. Despite missing the cut this week, Rickie Fowler hung on to No. 125, and with Kim accepting his Tour membership, Matt Wallace, who also missed the cut, was the odd man out.
But the day belonged to Kim. Just as talk of a sub-60 round emerged, Kim made a bogey at 10, his lone blemish of the round. He added birdies at 15 and 16 to post 20-under 260 as he became the youngest champion born outside of the U.S. since Englishman Harry Cooper at the 1923 Galveston Open.
All of a sudden, he’s a legitimate candidate for the International Presidents Cup team. International Team Captain Trevor Immelman walked a couple holes with Kim as he played a practice round on the eve of the British Open with Si Woo Kim.
“It was the first time I got to see him and I would love to make his team obviously. I’ve watched the Presidents Cup ever since I started playing golf,” Kim said. “It was actually pretty nerve wracking for me for him to walk a couple holes, obviously you don’t want to shank one in front of your future captain, potentially. Yeah, I was actually hitting it pretty good. I said to my caddie, you know what, I think I’ll be ready for that. If you can hit it good in front of the captain, I think you’ll be OK. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to represent his team in Charlotte.”
To Kim, his victory at the tender age of 20 is just the start of bigger things.
“I still have so much I want to accomplish,” he said. “We bought the car, we just need to drive it, so hopefully I keep pushing that pedal.”
