Anthony Kim Is Back. How Good Could He Have Been?
Anthony Kim Is Back. How Good Could He Have Been?
At age 38, the reclusive Kim is finally set to play again for the first time since 2012.
Of all the young golfers touted during the 2000s and 2010s as the “Next Tiger Woods” — admittedly, a terrible burden of expectation to place on any player — one of the most curious cases always belonged to Anthony Kim.
Just like Woods, Kim was an Asian-American from California with a winning smile and the ability to blast the ball off the tee, then sink a clutch putt with a tournament on the line. At age 23 in 2008, Kim won twice on the PGA Tour, finished sixth on the official money list and went 2-1-1 in the U.S.’s Ryder Cup victory, winning a memorably dominant match against Sergio Garcia when the Spaniard was ranked 5th in the world.
But as bright as Kim’s future seemed 16 years ago, now it is news that he’s simply playing competitive golf again. Reportedly, Kim is set to end his long, mysterious and premature retirement at this week’s LIV Golf Invitational Jeddah event.
When Kim tees off, it will mark his return to the professional game after more than a decade’s absence. The sport has been waiting for him to come back for most of that time, but it wasn’t all that long ago that the elusive Kim was known as golf’s version of famous cryptids like Bigfoot, Yeti, or the Loch Ness Monster — always rumored to be out in the wild, but seldom actually documented.
We don’t know what to expect from Kim in his comeback, but we do know just how good he was as a young player. In that peak season of 2008, he ranked third in total Strokes Gained behind only Phil Mickelson and Garcia, propelled by a No. 9 finish (out of 197 qualified golfers) in driving performance, plus rankings of 29th on approach shots and 38th in putting.
His +1.48 Strokes Gained per round from that season still stands as the eighth-best in a season since 2005 by a player at age 25 or younger (and in their first 3 qualified PGA Tour seasons). Some of the other names on that list ended up being really, really good pro golfers:
To get a sense of just how good the most similar young players to Kim ended up being, take a look at that “career earnings” column above. It offers a glimpse into what might have been, had Kim remained healthy and cashed in on his immense potential.
Putting aside the 24-year-old Swede Ludvig Åberg, who just turned pro last season and has his whole career in front of him, the rest of the group averaged $55.4 million in winnings, with most still adding to their totals (or playing in LIV, coincidentally enough). And that’s on top of winning an average of 2.4 major titles apiece. By comparison, Kim only ended up earning $12.2 million in his career, and never finished better than third in a major. (He only ever made the cut in 11 majors overall.)
Even before his hiatus, Kim had started to come down from the heights of his sensational 2008 performance. In 2009, his Strokes Gained ranking dropped to 58th and he finished 39th on the money list, failing to win in 22 tournaments. He bounced back to rank 24th in money (and won another tournament) in 2010, despite missing multiple months after undergoing thumb surgery, but he wasn’t the same player (114th in Strokes Gained; 87th in money) on the other side of the injury in 2011.
Then came the torn left Achilles tendon that cut short his 2012 season — and, in retrospect, his entire PGA Tour career. Kim has not played a single event since withdrawing from the 2012 Wells Fargo Championship after carding a first-round 74. In the more than 4,300 days that have passed since, he has become something of a mythical figure. Apparently, the folk legend will become reality again very soon.
But there’s a reason why the golf world has been so fixated on Kim for so long, even in his decade-plus of absence. Though it was always unrealistic to expect him to become the Next Tiger, Kim’s early peak was on the same level with other phenoms who went on to become superstars. We’ll never know what might have been in an alternate timeline, but sometimes the ability to fill in an athlete’s career gaps with imaginary accomplishments can make them almost as legendary as if they’d actually pulled off those feats in reality.
Filed under: Golf