THE chimes of the wedding bells are getting louder for this correspondent. Or is it the sound of the tolling bell?
The condemned man is often given one final request but unfortunately my plea to get out of scribbling the Tuesday column so I could nip off to buy a new semmit ahead of the big day fell on deaf ears.
“The bells, the bells,” bellowed the sports editor with his hands over his lugs as he careered around the office like a demented Quasimodo after a particularly rigorous bout of campanology.
This time next week, I’ll be a married man and, being one of the great romantics, I’ll be spending part of
the honeymoon on the shimmering, sun-soaked beaches of the media centre at the forthcoming BMW PGA Championship. Now, that’s attention to duty eh?
For 21-year-old Kim Si-Woo, who became the youngest winner of The Players Championship at Sawgrass on Sunday, victory in one of golf’s biggest events won’t get him out of the duty of national service for his country.
It remains compulsory in Korea for able bodied men between the ages of 18 and 35 to serve a two-year stint in the military, so Kim will eventually swap birdies and bogeys for the barracks and boisterous bawlings at some point in the next five years.
Conscription can be avoided if a golfer wins a gold medal at either the Olympics or the Asian Games but, for the time being, the golfing majors – and the so-called “fifth major” that Kim won at the weekend – are not deemed worthy enough to allow for a bit of draft dodging.
Bae Sang-moon, who won two times on the PGA Tour and played in the Presidents Cup, will finish his national service in November this year and will return to the frontline of the PGA circuit. Whether he can pick up where he left off remains to be seen.
While they are not flooding the golfing scene quite like their female compatriots, the Koreans keep marching on. There are now six male golfers from the country in the top-100 of the world rankings. There’s still a bit of catching up to do with the good ladies, of course.
There are six in the top 10 of the women’s rankings and that dominance has grown and grown ever since the trailblazing Si Re Pak barged on to the LPGA Tour in 1998 and prompted something of a pied piper effect while helping to infuse the circuit with major corporate and broadcasting partners in Asia.
While the vast band of Seoul Sisters have thrived in numbers, the military situation has certainly not aided the development of the male players as they are often pulled from the game during those formative and productive years of their careers.
Experts on all things to do with Korean culture and society, of which this correspondent is not one of them, routinely state that there has always been more of an inclination to put males on the academic track and not the athletic track.
A son becoming a doctor or a lawyer, for instance, earns far more kudos than one who batters away at a small, dimpled ba’.
In an expanding game, though, headline-grabbing victories like the one Kim enjoyed over a world-class field adds further appeal and becoming a pro golfer becomes even more aspirational.
Kim is hardly an unknown – he won the PGA Tour’s Wyndham Championship in 2016 – but his nerveless display and steely resolve
on the final day at mind-mangling Sawgrass certainly opened the eyes as he conquered a line-up boasting 48 of the world’s top 50.
The fact he’d missed seven cuts this season and had posted four rounds in the 80s in the run-up to The Players raised the eye-brows too.
It was the great Jack Nicklaus who always espoused the mantra that “success depends almost entirely on how effectively you learn to manage the game’s two ultimate adversaries: the course and yourself.”
Kim certainly managed that on Sunday. While the Stadium Course teased and tormented the great and the good – Dustin Johnson, the world No.1, didn’t contend, Jordan Spieth missed the cut, defending champion Jason Day had a nine en route to a closing 80 and Masters champion Sergio Garcia trudged home with a 78 – Kim confronted the challenge with poise and clinical efficiency.
By all accounts, the Stadium Course, with its newly sharpened teeth, was about as welcoming as a spurned ape at the height of the mating season but Kim didn’t have a single bogey in the final round and, despite missing 10 greens in regulation, he managed to get up-and-down each time.
Nine straight pars to finish highlighted these grinding qualities in this golfing war of attrition.
And so, the young man with a spell in the military to come keeps
soldiering on . . .
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