“I was a big Toy Story fan, so I almost named myself Buzz Lightyear.”
Just call me Tom.
That’s what South Korea’s newest PGA Tour champion prefers to be called, rather than his given name of Joohyung Kim. As the 20-year-old winner of the Wyndham Championship said in his post-round press conference, he came up with the name when he was 4 or 5 years old after his fondness for the TV show Thomas the Tank Engine, based on the famed British children’s book. As he explained in an earlier interview, “I had the whole (Thomas the Train) thing, I had the lunchbox, I had the toys, yeah.”
“It’s just a stubborn me, like you’re supposed to let your parents name yourself and I was like, ‘Nope, I’m to name myself Thomas,’” he said in his winner’s press conference. “I loved the show as a kid…apparently I really loved the train. I was like, you know what, I’m going to name myself Thomas. I haven’t told anyone this, but I’ve actually had a few more names that I could have named myself and I’m glad I didn’t, but I went with Thomas. And as years went on, people started calling me Tom, it was shorter, so I kind of went with Tom after that.”
That begged the question: what were the other names he considered?
“Do you guys really want to know?” he asked. “I was a big Toy Story fan, so I almost named myself Buzz Lightyear. That was a close one; there’s a few more. It’s actually, it’s not an English character, it’s actually an Asian character, but Buzz Lightyear was probably the closest one to Thomas.”
On Sunday, Kim both buzzed and steamrolled the field, shooting 9-under 61 at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, North Carolina, to win going away by five strokes.
“For people to call, ‘Let’s Go, Tom’ today was really helpful and it gave me the energy to keep playing better,” he said.
To borrow the nickname of another Tom, maybe we should start calling him Tom Terrific.
Fowler held on to his tenuous position to advance to next week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Rickie Fowler missed the cut and didn’t reach the weekend at the Wyndham Championship, the PGA Tour’s regular-season finale, and was left standing on shaky ground during the closing stages of Sunday’s final round.
Fowler held on, barely, to his tenuous position in the FedEx Cup Playoffs and thus advanced to next week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis, Tennessee, the postseason opener.
Joohyung “Tom” Kim’s final-round 9-under 61 and breakthrough victory at Sedgefield Country Club dropped Fowler to No. 125 in the FedEx Cup standings, the very make-or-break line for moving on and gaining entry to the playoffs.
Tour rookie Max McGreevy made a significant jump, rising from the wrong side of the bubble at No. 126 up to No. 104 in the standings on the strength of tying for fifth place at the Wyndham. McGreevy shot 65 on Sunday and carded 13-under for the tournament, with his fiancée and dog, an 8-pound Chihuahua, rooting him on among the Sedgefield spectators.
“Felt good to put four good rounds together, for sure,” McGreevy said. “Game feels really, really good and I feel like I could have popped off and played better than I did this week. Just super excited to have got it done, but just that hard work I’ve kind of put in these last couple months has actually shown.”
Kim, the 20-year-old rising star, gained temporary PGA Tour membership recently and played the Wyndham on a sponsor exemption. He had to win to qualify for the playoffs, and he delivered in first-class fashion while claiming the Sam Snead Cup, the trophy given to the Wyndham champion.
Kim’s victory bumped Matt Wallace out of the playoffs. Wallace entered the Wyndham at No. 124 in the standings, slipped to No. 125 in the projections by Sunday, and then fell to the wrong side of the postseason bubble when Kim won and leapfrogged into the playoffs.
Austin Smotherman had his playoff bubble status burst. The rookie entered the Wyndham at No. 125 and dropped one spot outside the playoffs. He made double bogey on his final hole of the second round here and missed the cut for the weekend by two strokes.
Joohyung “Tom” Kim made $1.314 million in North Carolina for his first PGA Tour win.
It was a record-setting week for Joohyung “Tom” Kim.
The 20-year-old from South Korea entered the week playing on a Special Temporary Membership after his finish at the 150th British Open. He ended the week in the FedEx Cup playoffs, capturing his first-career PGA Tour victory and his seven professional win.
Kim shot an 8-under 27 on the front nine en route to his blistering round of 9-under 61, winning by five shots. He’s the first winner on the PGA Tour born in the 2000s and the second-youngest winner since World War II, trailing only Jordan Spieth at the 2013 John Deere Classic.
Kim’s victory is also special because dating to 1983, he became the first player on the PGA Tour to begin a tournament with a quadruple bogey to go on to win the event.
Here’s a look at the prize money payouts for each player at the 2022 Wyndham Championship, the final regular-season event of the PGA Tour’s 2021-22 season.
[afflinkbutton text=”Tom Kim’s golf ball – $49.99 per dozen” link=”https://globalgolf.pxf.io/b3gnrk”]
GRIPS: Golf Pride Tour Velvet (full swing) / SuperStroke Traxion Tour 2.0 (putter)
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Kim became the first player in the last 40 years to overcome a quadruple-bogey start and win a PGA Tour event.
Joohyung “Tom” Kim didn’t let a quadruple bogey to start the Wyndham Championship bother him.
Instead, he became the first player in the last 40 years to overcome such an inauspicious start and win a PGA Tour event. In doing so, at 20 years, 1 month, 17 days, the South Korean became the second-youngest winner on Tour since World War II – only Jordan Spieth, who won the 2013 John Deere Classic was younger – and the first player born in the 2000s to win on Tour.
“I can’t believe I won with a quadruple bogey on the first,” Kim said. “Hopefully, I’ll never do that again.”
A front-nine 8-under-par 27 by Kim at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, North Carolina, tying the second-lowest nine-hole score in Tour history, propelled him into the lead and he cruised to a four-stroke victory over countryman Sungjae Im with a final-round 9-under 61.
Kim, who goes by Tom, a nickname he was given as a kid after the cartoon, Thomas the Train – “I had the whole (Thomas the Train) thing, I had the lunchbox, I had the toys, yeah,” – carded rounds of 67-64 to head into the weekend at 9-under 131.
He became just the third player in the ShotLink era (est. 2003) to make a quadruple bogey or worse on the first hole of a round and go on to card an under-par score.
“I was laughing,” he said after shooting 67. “It was one bad hole and I just told myself, you know what, I can still get this, I can still shoot under par today and somehow I did.”
Joohyung Kim reacts after winning the Wyndham Championship golf tournament. (Photo: Nell Redmond/USA TODAY Sports)
It didn’t hurt that his putter was on fire. In the first two rounds, he holed 301 feet, 1 inch of putts, marking the most in the first two rounds since the Wyndham Championship moved to Sedgefield Country Club in 2008. But his putter cooled off in the third round. He took 30 whacks with his short stick, ranking 68th in the field in Strokes Gained: Putting. He made just 48 feet of putts in all while still posting a 2-under 68 to trail Im by two strokes.
But the final round was a different story. With a 20-foot birdie putt at the second and 24-foot birdie at the third, he made more feet of putts in his first three holes of the final round than he did in his previous round. And he was just getting started. He sank a 12-foot birdie at No. 4, and 8-foot eagle putt at No. 5 and an 18-foot birdie putt at No. 6. He made 112 feet of putts on the front nine alone.
Kim won twice on the Asian Tour, including the Singapore International earlier this year, and topped the Asian Tour Order of Merit in 2021. He finished third at the Genesis Scottish Open and seventh at the Rocket Mortgage Classic last week. He secured temporary membership after the British Open last month by accumulating as many or more points through the non-member FedExCup points list this season as No. 150 on the 2020-21 FedExCup standings, and He secured temporary membership after the British Open last month and locked up a card for next season at the Rocket Mortgage Classic. How did he celebrate? Being too young to have an alcoholic drink, he said earlier in the week that he went back to his hotel room in Detroit and laid on his bed and stared at the ceiling for five hours.
“It’s been a dream of mine to play here full time,” Kim said.
His win qualified him for the playoffs – he leaped to No. 34 in the point standings – becoming the first special temporary member to win on Tour since Collin Morikawa at the 2019 Barracuda Championship.
“To come out here and to win on Tour as a nonmember and secure your card is really not an easy task and he achieved that,” Im said. “I’m really proud of him.”
Rookie Max McGreevy, who began the week on the outside looking in at No. 126 in the FedEx Cup point standings, shot 65 and finished T-5 and jumped to No. 104 to secure a tee time in next week’s first playoff event in Memphis. Despite missing the cut this week, Rickie Fowler hung on to No. 125, and with Kim accepting his Tour membership, Matt Wallace, who also missed the cut, was the odd man out.
But the day belonged to Kim. Just as talk of a sub-60 round emerged, Kim made a bogey at 10, his lone blemish of the round. He added birdies at 15 and 16 to post 20-under 260 as he became the youngest champion born outside of the U.S. since Englishman Harry Cooper at the 1923 Galveston Open.
All of a sudden, he’s a legitimate candidate for the International Presidents Cup team. International Team Captain Trevor Immelman walked a couple holes with Kim as he played a practice round on the eve of the British Open with Si Woo Kim.
“It was the first time I got to see him and I would love to make his team obviously. I’ve watched the Presidents Cup ever since I started playing golf,” Kim said. “It was actually pretty nerve wracking for me for him to walk a couple holes, obviously you don’t want to shank one in front of your future captain, potentially. Yeah, I was actually hitting it pretty good. I said to my caddie, you know what, I think I’ll be ready for that. If you can hit it good in front of the captain, I think you’ll be OK. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to represent his team in Charlotte.”
To Kim, his victory at the tender age of 20 is just the start of bigger things.
“I still have so much I want to accomplish,” he said. “We bought the car, we just need to drive it, so hopefully I keep pushing that pedal.”
Nick Faldo retired after 19 years as a golf broadcaster. Here’s what his friends and colleagues had to say.
It’s the end of an era on the CBS broadcast.
After 16 years wearing the headset for the network, Sir Nick Faldo said goodbye from the booth during the final round of the 2022 Wyndham Championship at Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Sunday. The six-time major champion, who has a deep history at Sedgefield dating back to his PGA Tour debut at the 1979 Greater Greensboro Open, was honored with a plaque behind the ninth green on the club’s Wall of Fame where he joins the likes of Charlie Sifford and Arnold Palmer.
The broadcast also featured a handful of messages from Faldo’s former and current colleagues both on and off the golf course, and it got to be pretty emotional at times. So much so that Dottie Pepper at one point joked, “Are you guys able to call this or do you want me to take it?”
“The toughest decision I’ve had to make in my golf career.”
GREENSBORO, N.C. — While Will Zalatoris went about fulfilling autograph requests for rows of Wyndham Championship spectators after wrapping up his third round Saturday, a few feet away coach-turned-caddie Josh Gregory explained what he tried to provide during his emergency fill-in role.
“Hopefully a little smile,” Gregory said. “Most importantly, he needed to laugh and smile. He needed to have fun. And I think just commitment. I’m about as positive of a coach as I can be, and I was just super positive with him.”
It made for a contrasting scene in regard to the events that followed the finish of Zalatoris’ previous round one day earlier here at Sedgefield Country Club, when he fired caddie Ryan Goble in the middle of the tournament and called it “the toughest decision I’ve had to make in my golf career.”
The former Wake Forest star and one of the top-ranked players in the world, shot 4-under 66 in third round to improve to 7 under for the tournament, five strokes behind leaders Sungjae Im and Brandon Wu. The third round was suspended by storms Saturday and will resume at 7:30 a.m. Sunday.
Zalatoris delivered eight birdies on the day, recovering from a double bogey on the second hole and weathering two bogeys on the back nine with the 47-year-old Gregory, his short game coach, on the bag for the first time.
Zalatoris, 25, said Goble had been his only caddie on a sanctioned professional tour, and said “he’s basically been my best friend for the last three years.” He added, though, “it was just getting a little unhealthy for both of us and obviously it hurts” about their relationship — a partnering that produced eight results among the top 10, runner-up finishes at the PGA Championship and U.S. Open, and more than $6.6 million in earnings this season.
“We’ve kind of had a rough month together, and it was starting to affect our relationship,” Zalatoris said. “I know guys say that when they split, but it really was. We were guys that we would love to have dinner together and hang out and what was happening on the course was starting bleed off the course, and that’s not what you want.
Zalatoris said Joel Stock will caddie for him in the FedEx Cup playoffs, which starts next week in Memphis. Gregory said he pulled on-the-fly duty as a fill-in caddie for Henrik Norlander in February at the Phoenix Open.
“It was time for a change,” Gregory said of the split between Zalatoris and Goble. “And honestly, it’s what’s best for both of them. The change was coming anyway, and it was time to go ahead and rip the Band-Aid off.”
Zalatoris began the third round at 3 under for the tournament, six shots off the lead. Then, a wayward moment off the tee left him with double bogey on the second hole to drop to 1 under.
“Even when he made double on the second hole, I just said, ‘Hey, let’s go see how many birdies we can make. Let’s have fun,’” Gregory said. “And that’s what he needed. And then he just needed a little extra commitment, a little extra conviction in his decisions. So just tell him how good he is. It’s pretty easy when you’re carrying his bag. He’s really good.”
Adam Smith is a sports reporter for the Burlington Times-News and USA TODAY Network. You can reach him by email at asmith@thetimesnews.com or @adam_smithTN on Twitter.
