The 20-year-old golfer Tom Kim doesn’t get fazed much anymore. Kim has been playing professionally since he was 15, secured full-time status on the PGA Tour with two season-ending victories last year, and has quickly become a friend of top players like Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, and Max Homa. But in early March, he had a rare pinch-me moment.
Ahead of his first appearance in the Masters, which begins tomorrow, Kim headed to Augusta National Golf Club to practice on the legendary track. Halfway through his round, he ran into Rory McIlroy, who had brought his father along for his own round at Augusta. Kim said hello to his fellow PGA Tour pro, whom he’d only met briefly at tournaments over the past year, and to McIlroy’s father. Tom was then introduced to the McIlroys’ other playing partner: recently retired quarterback Tom Brady. It was a surreal moment in a two-year whirlwind full of them. “It was unbelievable,” Kim says, “even though I’m not sure he knew who I was.” And then, with a chuckle, he adds: “But then again, I didn’t ask.”
Still, it wouldn’t be crazy if Brady had recognized him: over the past eight months, Kim has exploded onto the golf scene, a blistering start to his career that has golf commentators drawing comparisons to figures like like Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, and, yes, Tiger Woods. He's ridden unparalleled iron play and a hot putter to two exciting victories and six top-10 finishes—and he’s celebrated his high points with a Gen Z flair that plays big on Golf Twitter. If all goes right, he just might become the biggest young star of his generation. “Both of those wins were just out of the blue,” Kim says. But “after that moment, the confidence really began to hit and I really started feeling comfortable.”
His biggest moment yet came at last year’s President’s Cup, the high-wattage tournament that pits a team of American golfers against one of international players. Kim, the youngest player in the event by half a decade, stole the show by hitting a match-deciding putt with his entire team watching during Saturday’s matches. As the putt dropped, he yanked off his hat and sprinted across the green to his teammates, an unerasable smile on his face.
Most striking has been the way he’s done it all: with rare self-confidence, verve, and style. He’s unafraid to let his personality shine, like the time he and Sungjae Im tried sinking putts with 25-pound putters. During the Waste Management Open in Scottsdale, Arizona—notoriously the rowdiest event of the year—Kim rocked a Devin Booker jersey, putting on for the hometown crowd’s favorite NBA star. He has a 20-year-old's appreciation for fast food. “I don’t put a mask on and I think that comes across in the way I play,” Kim explains. “I have no problem showing everybody exactly who I am.”
Kim’s heroics have come at precisely the right time for his employer. Over the last few years, the PGA Tour has found itself locked in an existential wrestling match with LIV Golf, the renegade golf league backed by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. This opened a massive chasm in the golf world, a disruption the PGA Tour had never before seen. A handful of stars current and past joined the new organization, and their defection highlighted the ways in which the Tour sometimes struggles to highlight its strongest asset: its star players.
The Barstool Sports golf writer Dan Rapaport explains that Kim is uniquely positioned to solve that problem. “What the Tour was hoping would happen is [that] if people leave, then the ecosystem will produce new stars,” he says. “It's one thing to say it in theory, but Tom was the first guy who emerged from the ashes of LIV to become one of these featured-group players.” And he’s doing it in a way that endears him to a golf audience hungry for a new breed of golfer: one unafraid to show emotion, feeling, humanity. In this regard, he follows in the footsteps of golf’s best Tweeter Max Homa and its Full Swing standout Joel Dahmen.
All of this establishes Kim as something rare in the world of golf: a fan favorite who also has a plausible route to the title of best golfer alive. At 20, he’s done things that only a handful of golfers have done before him. (Tiger required two more tournaments than Kim’s 18 to win his first two trophies.) And this weekend, he’ll debut at Augusta—his first try at the most important golf tournament on earth. “It was weird visiting because I had seen it on TV so many times,” Kim says of his March practice round. Up close, he determined that his favorite hole was 12, which looked infinitely cooler in person than from the couch. He fired a 67 at practice, but was quick to hedge: “The conditions are so different from the tournament that you can't really say you shot 67.” One way the real thing is different: on Monday, Kim played a practice round in Augusta with Tiger, who won his eighth major days before Kim was born in 2002.
But as I learn over the course of a day with Tom Kim, it’s not quite so simple. At 20, he seems to have learned the thing that it often takes athletes years to figure out: that greatness requires a level of discipline that the average person would find uncomfortable, or just impossible. He has ruthlessly pruned his life of distractions—or, maybe, because he’s so young and so driven, simply never bothered to become interested in distractions in the first place. “There's a lot of sacrifice in this career—not just from me, but from a lot of people around me. It's really hard to have a life outside of this,” he explains.
It’s clear to anyone who knows him, and even to folks who just catch him on TV for a few hours on Sunday, that Kim is an exceptional golfer who just might do exceptional things. But when I ask about the moment he realized he was good at golf, his answer hints at the scope of his ambition. “Last year, after I won twice,” he says, almost smiling. “That's when I really realized, ‘Man, maybe we can do this.’”
As we take our seats to chat in a South Carolina hotel just over the state line from Augusta, Kim’s agent delivers him a non-alcoholic Negroni-inspired mocktail. He doesn’t care for it, and trades it in for a Shirley Temple, which he also dislikes. I wonder: does he plan on drinking after he turns 21 in June? “No way,” he says. “I mean, it's not going to help me play better golf.” Before the Genesis Invitational in LA earlier this year, he took a few of his new buddies on tour—Spieth, Thomas, and Homa—out for Korean barbecue. Kim, nervous about making a good impression, even scouted out the restaurant a few days earlier to make sure it was good enough for his pals. “I was in LA a bit early so I wanted to check it out and see what was the best thing to order. “After I tried it I knew those guys would be eating good,” he says. Of course, no amount of preparation could help him surmount one hurdle: at dinner, only his over-21 friends could order beer.
He orders his life around the game. His days are simple: he wakes up, stretches, hits the gym, goes to the range, goes to the course, and returns to his home in Dallas, which he shares with his mom and dad. There, he watches videos of his swing on YouTube, scrutinizing himself for flaws, tweaks, marginal adjustments he might make tomorrow. Outside of occasional Korean meals in downtown Dallas, there is very little deviation from his training regimen. He doesn’t use TikTok, he’s rarely on Instagram, he can’t even name a favorite binge show on Netflix. He likes pop music and romantic comedies, but hasn’t had much time for either of late. When I ask what he does in his spare time, he sheepishly acknowledges that he doesn’t really do anything. When I ask what he does on airplanes, he cops to a similar admission: any time he can, he’s thinking about his swing. “I'm 20 years old,” he says, sounding like a much older man. “I've got a lot of golf to play and I've got a lot of learning to do in life. Any down time I get, I think about these questions.”
Kim was born Joo-hyung in Seoul, in 2002. (He borrowed his Americanized name from Thomas the Tank Engine, a childhood favorite.) His family moved to Australia when he was five, and Kim began learning about the game from his father, who played professionally overseas. He learned other lessons from his mom, including the maxim he carries with him to every practice round, every weightlifting session: “If you get caught up in your past just a little bit, you're not going to go forward.” He was playing professionally by the time he was 15.
He has always been the youngest guy in the room, and it hasn’t always been easy. “It's hard to always figure out where exactly I fit in, because even my friends on the Tour, people that have taken me under their wing, they're all married,” he says. “I'm 20 and I'm single, so it's a very, very different life. I can't bother them all the time—they have a family. I understand that. So it's really hard to cross the line when our situations are so different.”
He understands why his fellow pros might cut practice short to spend time with their families—he just can’t imagine making the same choice himself. “I'm not sure if it's great to have this discipline or if it's bad,” he says. He knows it might not be permanent: “I often think about when I'm older—28 or 30—and thinking how much my life is going to change if I get married or start a family.” Still, he says, “It's really hard to imagine doing anything differently than the way I do it now.”
That hasn’t stopped him from trying to bridge the gap with his friends and peers. Last year, he wound up spending Christmas with Jordan Spieth and his family—a story that promptly went viral in golf circles. It wasn’t that unusual, Kim explains. Kim caught a ride back to Dallas on Spieth’s chartered plane, and when Spieth asked about his plans for the holiday, Kim explained that his parents were out of town, so he didn’t really have anything planned. The older golfer invited him over. “I thought they were just being really nice and I really appreciated the gesture,” Kim explains. But what Kim mistook for niceties was a genuine invitation, and he ended up dining with the Spieths and their extended families during the holiday. Tom found a new fan in toddler boy Sammy Spieth—and, for the first time, the idea of having his own children crossed his mind. “I've seen a lot of kids, but when you see Sammy, he definitely makes you want to think about it because he's such a sweet baby,” Kim explains with a chuckle, before hedging: “But at church and around town there are kids who are just crying all the time, so I don’t think I’m ready yet.”
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Spieth and Kim have forged a bond: Spieth himself started as a great prodigy, winning two majors his rookie season (and placing second at a third), and snagging his third two years later. “[Kim's] run reminds me of Speith’s rise, which was the last time I remember someone being that polished as a teenager and being totally unafraid,” Rapaport, the golf writer, says. “I think that's one of Tom's best attributes: it's almost like he hasn't stopped and smelled the roses. That's a good thing.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Kim being content with the career of a journeyman golfer—one where he wins a tournament every few years, cashing enough prize money to float him through leaner stretches.
Lately, though, he’s been struggling: he finished tied for sixth at a tournament in January, but he’s failed to crack the top 30 since. And though he’s currently the number-19 golfer on earth, he’s still learning how to deal with the breaks of the game. When his putter isn’t working, it’s a lot easier to remember that he ranks 125th in driving distance—and that it’s going to be even harder to sustain that top-20 ranking than it was to get there on the back of his improbably white-hot season. “Golf can be the most frustrating thing ever and sometimes it can be the most joyful thing ever. That's why the highs are so high and sometimes the lows are so low. It’s just an emotional rollercoaster,” he says. “I'm very lucky to have something that I want to be good at and structure my whole life towards something that I enjoy, but it’s really painful when I don’t play as well as I know I can.”
Competitively, Augusta will be the first big test of where Kim’s game is in 2023. Symbolically, it’s without comparison. It’s the most important tournament in golf—and it’s where the players who want to be the best must shine the brightest. For the first time, Tom Kim has a chance to prove that he can be one of those players.
He won’t rest until he wins, and even then he doesn’t plan on slowing down. “Sometimes I feel like I've achieved something great and I want to enjoy it a little more, but I don't because of how my brain is wired,” he explains, less with sadness or regret than as a fact he’s grown to deal with.
Like so many greats before him, he has learned—at a remarkably young age—to find motivation in places it probably doesn’t exist. “There's always someone who's out there that's wanting the same things as me. If I achieve something and I lay down a little bit and enjoy it, that guy is working really hard to beat me,” he says. I ask if he’s got someone in mind, or this is a Mamba Mentality-style strategy to help him keep his eye on the prize. “I know that there are people out there that root against me and want what I have,” he says. “But I can create those people, too. I have a good imagination.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Sydney A. Foster
Skin by Breanna Jones using Global Glamor
Special thanks to River Golf Club and The Willcox Hotel
