Joo-Hyeong Kim lifts the trophy following winning the PGA Tour One-Dum Championship. [뉴시스]
Kim Joo-hyeong (CJ Korea Express), born in 2002, won the first championship in the last regular tournament, the One-Dum Championship ($7.3 million in total prize money) of the American Professional Golf Tour (PGA). He became the second youngest player in history to win a championship since the 1932 PGA Tour split, and the first born in the 2000s to become the first PGA Tour winner. It is also the ninth time in history for a Korean player to win the PGA. Previously, Kyung-Joo Choi, Yong-Eun Yang, Bae Sang-Moon, Seung-Yeol Noh, Si-Woo Kim, Sung-Hoon Kang, Seong-Jae Lim, and Kyung-Hoon Lee took the top spot. Kim Joo-hyung became the fastest Korean player to achieve his first win.
Kim Joo-hyung took the top spot with a total of 20 under par 260 in the fourth round of the final day of the tournament held at Sedgefield Country Club (par 70) in Greensboro, North Carolina, USA on August 8 (Korea time). After beating joint 2nd place Lim Seong-jae and Korean-American John Hur by five strokes, he received $1314,000 in prize money (regarding 1.7 billion won) and became a full member of the PGA and competed in the playoffs starting next week.
The road to his first PGA title was not smooth. He made a quadruple bogey on the first day of the tournament by making mistakes on the first (par 4) rough. But he later wrote an anti-war drama, hitting 24 under par on the 71st hole. Kim Joo-hyung said in an interview with the domestic media following confirming the championship, “I never thought that the PGA Tour victory I had been hoping for since I was a child would come so soon.
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Kim Joo-hyung was born in Korea in June 2002, at the height of the World Cup, and moved to China when he was two years old with his father, who taught golf. He started playing golf in Australia at the age of six, and developed his skills in the Philippines and Thailand. He turned pro in June 2018 at the age of 16, and at the end of that year he won the Asia Tour (Part 1) at the youngest age (17 years and 149 days) for the second time. In 2020, when the Asian tour disappeared due to COVID-19, he returned to Korea and set the record for the youngest winner in the history of the Korean Men’s Professional Golf Tour (KPGA), and won the prize money and grand prize last year.
Also this year, he took on the PGA Tour challenge and was successful. Unlike other Korean players, he did not go through a second division tour or qualifying school, but participated in eight tournaments as a non-member and proudly qualified for the PGA Tour. Standing 180 cm tall and weighing 89 kg, he shoots drive shots over 300 yards. He started this year at number 131 in the world, but jumped to number 21 following winning this Wyndham Championship. As a young seven-year-old, he dreamed of becoming a golf player by watching Tiger Woods firsthand at the Australian Masters in Melbourne, Australia.
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