Wall Street Journal writer John Paul Newport caddied for LPGA Tour professional Christina Kim during Sybase Match Play Championship’s Official Pro-Am on Wednesday. See Newton’s article from the Wall Street Journal below:
I spent a couple of days this week in the hyperkinetic orbit of LPGA player Christina Kim, and I’m still worn out. At a book party in her honor Monday night in Manhattan, I heard her across the room before seeing her. “Hi, Honey!” she whooped, and came charging across the room with fingers wiggling high overhead to greet Michelle Wie, her fellow LPGA star. On Wednesday, when I caddied for her in the pro-am at the Sybase Match Play Championship in New Jersey, the happy talk and wise-cracking stopped only once or twice, after she hit a bad shot and stalked down the fairway cursing like a sailor.
It’s worth noting, as always with Ms. Kim, what she was wearing: a low cut black sheath dress, spectacular jewelry and lacey, high-strapped, four-inch Rene Caovilla heels which must have cost at least $1,000 when she bought them in December in Dubai. “They’ve even got sparklies on the bottom,” she told an admiring cluster as she demurely balanced on one shoe to show off the sole of the other. A few minutes earlier she had smashed a few 250-yard drives on the range at Chelsea Piers, just behind the party room, wearing said impossible heels.
The title of Ms. Kim’s book, appropriately enough, is “Swinging From My Heels: Confessions of an LPGA Star.” Written with Sports Illustrated’s Alan Shipnuck and structured as an account of her 2009 season, it’s just the kind of saucy tell-all you’d expect from perhaps the Tour’s most flamboyant personality. Among the controversial topics she choses not to avoid are the influx of South Koreans on the LPGA Tour (Ms. Kim herself is Korean-American), lesbianism (by her reckoning, the percentage of gay players on the Tour is roughly the same as in the general population, about 10%) and how the economic crunch led to the ouster last summer of LPGA Commissioner Carolyn Bivens (Ms. Kim was on the Tour’s Board of Directors during the putsch). Readers will find at least one sexual double-entendre or irreverent laugh-line per page of text. Example: “When it comes to equipment, I am a total slut. I’ve never signed an exclusive deal with any manufacturer because I want to be able to spread it around to different companies.”
But behind the breezy, high-octane prose lies a surprisingly affecting story of a 25-year-old girl (“girl” is the word she uses most often to describe herself and the other LPGA players) desperately seeking her identity, not to mention a boyfriend. And that deeper vulnerability came through in personWednesday, too. “The only place I really feel at home these days is at a Marriott,” she told me as we marched up a fairway.
Ms. Kim is very bright and very quick. When I accidentally left a towel behind on a tee box, she noticed instantly, seemingly from eyes in the back of her head. “I’m part Ninja,” she explained. And she never missed an opportunity to playfully misinterpret remarks by her partners, frequently with the addendum “That’s what she said.” Her pro-am ate it up, especially since she was also attentive to their games. “Somewhere between those two,” she said more than once after the first amateur sliced and the second hooked.
Ms. Kim was a straight-A student growing up in San Jose, California, but decided at 16 to drop out of high school to devote herself to golf. Her father, a South Korean immigrant, first put a golf club in her hand when she was 11 and directed her to swing as hard as she could 500 times a day. Dutifully she did so, in the backyard. After several weeks of this she finally got to hit an actual golf ball at a range. At 17 she shot 62 in qualifying for the U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship. At 18 she turned pro and has since won $3.5 million on the LPGA Tour, with two victories.
Her game was not at its best on Wednesday. “I’m here for entertainment value only. In pro-ams I usually play to a six handicap,” she said. Her driving was superb. “I love my driver. But my putting—that’s the eternal quest. That’s my White Whale,” she said. A couple of months ago she starting putting cross-handed for the first time, with the right hand lower on the grip than the left. “So far it’s helped me lip out putts that I used to miss entirely,” she said.
Although Ms. Kim plays at a high level, the putting swoons, late-round blow-ups and weeks-long lapses of confidence that she details in her book are familiar to golfers everywhere, but in her case are linked to off-the-course turmoil. Shortly before the book-year began, she broke up with her boyfriend of more than two years, a non-Korean caddy of whom her parents disapproved. She also cycled through caddies, clubs and confusing body image issues. By the end of the year, with great effort, she had lost 40 pounds. “It was the year I grew up,” she said.
But it’s hard to know whether that process is complete, if it ever is for anyone. This year she continues to plow through caddies, and was dealt a blow two weeks ago by the still-unexplained death of her Tour pro friend and fellow 25-year-old Californian Erica Blasberg. “I’ve known her half my life,” she said in the 18th fairway, moved to tears. “I should have called her more, I could have done more.”
The hardest part of the book to write, she told me, was the section about Koreans. “It’s such a weighted topic,” she said. Since Ms. Kim understands Korean fairly well and speaks a little, some American players consider her a liaison to the 45-woman contingent from South Korea. “But the Koreans, they don’t really know what to make of me,” she said. “I’m loud, I’m not thin and I say what I think. I’ve got a bunch of good friends among the Koreans, but it’s complicated.”
Part of the problem, she said, is that several years ago she became a devisive figure in South Korea after praising American speed-skater Apollo Ohno as a sexy male athlete. Mr. Ohno, it turns out, is a persona non grata in South Korea because his gold medal at the 2002 Olympics was awarded only after the South Korean skater who crossed the finish line in front of him was disqualified—unfairly and because of Mr. Ohno, most South Koreans think. The negative press about Ms. Kim in South Korea has, if anything, become stronger in recent years, she said. Last year she sued a leading South Korean newspaper for defamation.
All of which makes establishing her own identity even more difficult. She remains close to her parents. Last year she bought them a shiny new Mercedes-Benz and shares a house with them in Orlando. Florida. “My parents came to this country because they wanted the best possible life for me and my siblings. They want me to be who I am, and that’s why I speak out. Writing the book, getting my life down on paper, that’s the American side of the Korean-American thing. It has been incredibly liberating,” she said.
Thus far, however, it hasn’t helped her putting much. And she washed out of the Sybase Thursday, losing her first match to Jee Young Lee of South Korea. View the article here.