The last time Anthony Kim teed it up in a professional event, Viktor Hovland, the 2023 FedEx Cup champion, was 14, Barack Obama was in his first term in the White House and Nike still made clubs and balls.
Kim left the world of professional golf nearly 12 years ago, but now at age 38, he is returning this week at the LIV Golf Jeddah event, which will be contested at the Royal Greens Golf & Country Club in Saudi Arabia.
At one time, Kim was one of the faces of Nike Golf, and with the combination of his brash style and ultra-aggressive game, he was a magnet for fans. For golf equipment junkies, he was adored for his love of classic-looking blade irons and old-school setups like the one below.
https://www.instagram.com/p/C374a8Xp5S0/
According to LIV Golf’s website, the list of gear below is what Anthony Kim is expected to have in his bag this week at LIV Golf Jeddah:
DRIVER: Titleist TSR3 (Loft 9 degrees) with Fujikura Ventus Black TR 6X shaft
FAIRWAY WOOD:Titleist TSR2+ (Loft 13 degrees) with Fujikura Ventus Blue TR 7X shaft
IRONS:Titleist T200 (2), with Fujikura Ventus Black MB 10 TX shaft, T100 (4), Titleist 620MB (5-PW), with True Temper Dynamic Golf S400 shafts
How is he going to play? Is he going to have any sponsors? What clubs will be in his bag?
Slowly but surely, we’re starting to find out answers. Thursday afternoon, ahead of his debut Friday at Royal Greens Golf and Country Club for LIV Golf Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, we got an answer to the last question.
LIV Golf posted on social media what Kim was rocking in his bag, and he’s using Titleist clubs in his return from top to bottom.
From a TSR3 driver to a 2021 ProV1 ball, here’s what Kim will play with this week.
Earlier this week, LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman announced Anthony Kim would be making his return to professional golf at 2024 LIV Golf Jeddah in Saudi Arabia at Royal Greens Golf & Country Club.
Kim’s last PGA Tour start was 12 years ago at the Wells Fargo Championship, an event he withdrew from after an opening round 74. His last win came at the Houston Open in 2010.
The former United States Ryder Cupper will not play for one of LIV’s teams and will compete as an individual for the rest of the season.
Check out some of the best photos of Kim’s return to golf at LIV Golf Jeddah, the league’s third event of the year.
Anthony Kim is set to make his return to professional golf at LIV Golf Jeddah, according to multiple reports. Rumors have swirled for the past couple months about Kim’s possible return, and Friday night into Saturday morning, reports suggest the three-time PGA Tour winner is returning to professional golf and will play as one of the two individuals on the LIV Golf circuit, March 1-3 at Royal Greens Golf & Country Club in Saudi Arabia.
Kim, now 38, had surgery on his left Achilles tendon in his left leg following the 2012 Wells Fargo Championship and hasn’t played since, but there have been rumors of his return for some time.
One of the reported holdups was he would void an insurance policy from his playing days if he returned. It’s worth an estimated $10 million.
However, with LIV Golf’s new format including two wild card players, it opened the door for Kim to reportedly play next week in Jeddah. Each event in 2024 will have 54 players (13 teams of four players each) as well as the two wild cards, who will earn points in the individual standings with the potential to earn a spot on a LIV Golf team down the line.
Since seemingly disappearing from the golf realm, the legend of Kim has grown. Now, he’s set to return after more than a decade away.
LIV Golf Jeddah is the third event of the season. Joaquin Niemann and Dustin Johnson won the first two events earlier this month in Mexico and Las Vegas.
Signing Jon Rahm signals what LIV Golf aspires to be. Signing Anthony Kim would illustrate what it is.
As the cockiest among the PGA Tour’s young flat-brimmers back in the noughties, Anthony Kim has long been venerated by aging millennial bros as the apostolic leader of golf cool, but as with most cults, the enthusiasm for a second coming says less about the promise of the savior than the desperation of those wishing to be saved.
The enduring fan fascination with Kim is understandable. In a sport where even lifeless journeymen plow the furrow well into dotage, he was a brash and captivating personality who walked away at age 26 — not to the broadcasting booth or the corporate speaking circuit, just away. His last competitive round was Thursday, May 3, 2012, a 74 in the opening round of the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he’d won his first Tour event four years earlier. He’d been living hard, had lost a big sponsor and was close to losing his card.
“This was the start of my career,” Kim said that week. “Hopefully, I can start a new one here.”
Instead, he withdrew citing wrist and thumb pain and hasn’t competed since. He’s rarely even been seen, the few sightings of him posted to social media being analyzed with an intensity worthy of the Zapruder film.
Kim’s lengthy absence reportedly owes to a lucrative insurance payout for career-ending injuries, compensation that could be jeopardized if he returns to competition. If a rumored comeback happens on the PGA Tour, it would suggest his old confidence is intact, since out there money and status is hard-earned. Signing with LIV Golf, on the other hand, is more plausible and would be a slick arbitrage, the quality of his play being irrelevant to the rewards he’d receive and with guaranteed money far in excess of any insurance clawback. He may even think he can beat a handful of Greg Norman’s finest.
In lieu of results, the cult of Anthony Kim took over. A dozen years of applying Vaseline to the critical lens has obscured the reality that his prime was as brief as it is distant: three wins, three top 10 finishes in 15 major starts, one standout Ryder Cup. Revisiting performance statistics from his injury-free period suggests that Kim’s greatest weapon was his confidence, and how much of that can we reasonably expect now? Discount the messianic cult and you’ve got a 38-year-old with three wins and a bit of moxie.
He’s Scott Stallings, except that we actually know Stallings still has game.
Anthony Kim watches his tee shot on the 13th hole during the second round of the Masters.
Two things have sustained the Kim cult for a dozen years: an unshakeable belief among a subset of fans that he would have accomplished much more in his career, and the convenient fact that he hasn’t returned to test that belief. Among his peers, mild interest remains. “I’d be interested in watching Anthony Kim play golf for about five minutes,” one Tour veteran wrote in a group text Thursday evening.
“Four more than me,” another player responded.
Beyond fans who genuinely want to see what he has in the tank, the constituency most thirsty for a Kim comeback is parasitic industry executives — those hoping to skim a percentage of any deal and those urgently in need of eyeballs on a failed product. A deal between LIV and Kim would be hailed as genius marketing by those who splash in shallow waters, but it would more accurately expose a tour reliant on gimmickry.
Signing Jon Rahm signals what LIV Golf aspires to be. Signing Anthony Kim would illustrate what it is.
When Kim last played a professional event, Jordan Spieth was an amateur with a robust hairline and Nick Dunlap was playing peewee games. In 2014, it was reported that Kim was no longer even playing recreational golf. During a random fan encounter five years ago, he described his golf game as “non-existent.” Broken down, washed up, cashing in. Kim would check every box, so it’s unsurprising that LIV sees a potential asset.
Should Kim attempt a comeback, an analogous story of sorts can be found in the career of Bjorn Borg. Burned out, he quit tennis at age 25 after losing the 1981 U.S. Open final to John McEnroe (he was already in a car to the airport by the time Mac was handed the trophy). A decade later, a period longer than most professional careers last, Borg decided to return, armed with not much more than a wooden racquet and a reputation. The results were abysmal and served only to add a glumly prosaic section to the once-outstanding résumé earned in his first coming.
Kim is no Borg, in accomplishment or stature, but there’s a lesson there. No matter how much talent once existed, sporting comebacks after long absences are considerably less likely to be an exciting new chapter than a passing, disappointing curiosity.
Kim found ways to be exciting, thrilling, confounding and brilliant on the course.
Here are a few things you might want to know about Anthony Kim as rumors of a golf comeback for AK, on some tour at some time soon, swirl about.
First, he’s the best junior golfer to ever come out of the Coachella Valley in Southern California. Kim won his CIF-Southern Section Individual title in 2001 when he was a sophomore at La Quinta High School. He was done with high school golf after that year, instead focusing on his future career in golf.
Kim was brilliant at every level of golf he ever played. He was the newcomer of the year for the Big 12 during his freshman season at the University of Oklahoma. He was the team’s No. 1 player as a junior, the year he left to play professionally. In the next few weeks, he finished second in the 2006 Valero Texas Open.
He was known as a stickler for the rules of the game, not one to give a two-footer in even a recreational round.
He had confidence in his game to burn. But he was never one to embrace the Tour lifestyle, telling me once in an interview at the old Bob Hope Classic that he almost quit the game after his rookie year because he disliked Tour life so much.
He hasn’t played professional golf in 12 years. The last of his three Tour wins came 13 years ago. He beat Sergio Garcia in singles in the Ryder Cup 15 years ago. People forget Kim was so intensely focused during that match that after he had closed Garcia out, Kim started to walk to the next hole to keep playing. Garcia had to call him back.
Kim found ways to be exciting, thrilling, confounding and brilliant on the course. In the 2009 Masters, he made 11 birdies in the second round, still a single-round record for that event. He shot 65. He was touted as the next Tiger Woods in the very era of Tiger.
Yet by 26, it was over, a result of wrist and ankle injuries and a nice, plum insurance policy. Like Bo Jackson in football and baseball, golf fans were left to wonder what could have been.
Anthony Kim raises the trophy after winning the Wachovia Championship golf tournament in Charlotte, N.C., Sunday, May 4, 2008.
Long-awaited return?
Maybe now we will find out. All due respect to other golfers on Tour, but the return of Anthony Kim, now 38, would be one of the two or three biggest stories of the year, and perhaps the biggest story if he resembles the old AK (remember that massive belt buckle?)
In any other time, fans could be excited by the prospect of Kim’s return. Is he missing the game that he didn’t seem to miss all that much when he left 12 years ago? Is his game up to the standard of representing AK?
But as with everything in golf today, the potential return of Anthony Kim includes the prospect of a PGA Tour return vs. a LIV Golf debut. The PGA Tour offers stability and a road back through a past champion’s status and sponsor exemptions that any tournament would be foolish not to offer. LIV offers money up front, but perhaps not the kind of money a 26-year-old Kim could have demanded.
Kim has to make several decisions if he is to come back, and some of those decisions might have already been made. Is his game good enough to put on display for the public? Does he long for the traditions of the history of the PGA Tour and its four-day, 72-hole events, most with 36-hole cuts? Or does LIV’s different format of 54 holes and no cuts and team play hold an appeal, even if critics don’t believe it’s real golf?
Maybe, just maybe, Kim decides not to come back at all. Kim was always a different kind of golfer, so remaining a non-golfer wouldn’t be a surprise.
But if he does come back, at least for a while, Kim would be a red-hot story for the game.
Larry Bohannan is the golf writer for The Desert Sun. You can contact him at (760) 778-4633 or at larry.bohannan@desertsun.com.
Kim built a four-stroke lead through 54 holes with a 66 on Saturday. His playing partner Jason Bohn called the round “almost Tiger-esque.”
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – There is a banner not far from the first tee at Quail Hollow Club this week commemorating the winner of the 2008 Wells Fargo Championship, but otherwise, the champion that year is very out of sight, if never quite out of mind with his legion of golf fans.
On this day 15 years ago, Anthony Kim became the tournament’s original first-time winner after enjoying a near-flawless performance in the final round.
The then-22-year-old Kim became not only the youngest champion of the Wells Fargo Championship, but he became the youngest first-time champion on the PGA Tour since 2001. Kim built a four-stroke lead through 54 holes with a 66 on Saturday and never looked back. His playing partner Jason Bohn called the round “almost Tiger-esque.”
“I’m a little bit numb right now, but that walk up 18 was the best feeling of my entire life,” Kim said after finishing five strokes ahead of former British Open champion Ben Curtis and shattering Woods’s tournament scoring record with a 16-under 272 total. “I’ll never forget that feeling. I had chills going up and down my spine. I want to recreate that as many times as possible now, so I’m really going to work hard.”
Kim would go on to win two more times on Tour and play on the 2008 U.S. Ryder Cup team before injuries derailed his career. He made his final start at Quail Hollow in 2012, withdrawing after an opening-round 74 and hasn’t competed in a Tour event since.
“A full decade after Kim stopped playing professional golf, people are still fascinated by him, still asking where he is, still curious if he might ever return,” the Times wrote. “They wonder, in part, because of his talent. His power, his touch, his moxie — they were a recipe for sustained greatness. More than that, though, they wonder because he never bothered to explain himself. In a world of interminable retirement tours and heart-tugging valedictory speeches, Kim walked away in 2012 without saying goodbye and has made almost no public appearances or utterances since.”
Rory McIlroy shakes hands with Anthony Kim on the 18th hole at Quail Hollow Club on May 2, 2010, in Charlotte. (Photo: Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)
But 15 years ago, Kim, who turns 38 next month, showed what he was capable of; it’s too bad that his brilliant artistry turned out to be short-lived.
A New York Times feature on Kim’s quick rise and quiet exit included some great tidbits on the former star.
Anthony Kim left golf fans wanting more.
Known for his swagger and social life, Kim won three times on the PGA Tour from 2008-2010 and was a star at the 2008 Ryder Cup before injuries to his hand and surgery to his left Achilles tendon stalled his career. The last time we saw Kim on the course was when he withdrew from the 2012 Wells Fargo Championship.
So why are we talking about him today, more than ten years after his last PGA Tour appearance? A New York Times feature on Kim’s quick rise and quiet exit included some great tidbits on the former star, including his thoughts on LIV Golf.
In the feature, longtime swing coach Adam Schriber confirmed Kim still has “the same swing you remember” and that he still plays on occasion. Over the last two years, Schriber said he’s played with Kim twice.
Kim’s caddie from 2008-2009, Eric Larson, told the Times about how he once went to a public driving range in Los Angeles with Kim and none other than Cheech and Chong’s Tommy Chong, whom Larson met in federal prison. He also mentioned a recent phone call with Kim where he asked about his interest in LIV Golf.
“He goes, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’” Larson said. “I said, ‘Come on, man, get the old clubs out. Go out there and have some fun.’ And he starts laughing at me. He goes, ‘That’s what everybody wants me to do!’”
A decade later and Kim still knows what the fans want.
The Wells Fargo Championship has been a happy hunting ground for several first-time winners.
Simply earning a PGA Tour card is an achievement in itself, but for a player to feel as if they belong, as if they’ve really made it to the big time, eventually a player needs to hoist a trophy. Not just for the paycheck and the two-year exemption that comes with it, but for the confidence it produces. Winning is validation. It’s what every pro lives for, but unless your name is Tiger Woods a win once a year can be the makings of a Hall of Fame career.
Since its debut in 2003, the Wells Fargo Championship has been a happy hunting ground for several first-time winners. As a measure of the quality of Quail Hollow Golf Club, once a quail-hunting preserving, the list of players to claim the trophy in the Queen City includes the likes of major winners Woods, Jim Furyk, Vijay Singh, David Toms, Jason Day and Rory McIlroy, who has won the title three times. (The 2022 edition is being played at TPC Potomac at Avenel Farms, just 20 miles north of the nation’s capital because Quail Hollow will host the Presidents Cup later this year.)
McIlroy, who won here in 2010, 2015 and 2021, leads a stout foursome of Rickie Fowler, Anthony Kim, and Max Homa who made their debut Tour victory at Quail Hollow. And let’s not forget the Cinderella story that was Derek Ernst.
In 2008, Anthony Kim became the tournament’s original first-time winner after enjoying a near flawless performance in the final round. The 22-year-old Kim became not only the youngest champion of the Wells Fargo Championship, but he became the youngest first-time champion on the Tour since 2001. Kim built a four-stroke lead through 54 holes with a 66 on Saturday and never looked back. His playing partner Jason Bohn called the round, “almost Tigeresque.”
“I’m a little bit numb right now, but that walk up 18 was the best feeling of my entire life,” Kim said after finishing five strokes ahead of former British Open champion Ben Curtis and shattering Woods’s tournament scoring record with a 16-under 272 total. “I’ll never forget that feeling. I had chills going up and down my spine. I want to recreate that as many times as possible now, so I’m really going to work hard.”
Kim would go on to win two more times on Tour and play on the U.S. Ryder Cup team in 2008 before injuries derailed his career. He made his final start at Quail Hollow in 2012, withdrawing after an opening-round 74 and hasn’t competed in a Tour event since.
Anthony Kim throws his ball to the crowd after winning the 2008 Wachovia Championship in Charlotte. (Photo: Associated Press)
Two years after Kim’s debut victory, another boy wonder – this one with staying power – earned an impressive breakthrough win. Two days before his 21st birthday, the baby-faced McIlroy became the youngest winner on Tour since Woods in 1996. The Northern Irishman also became the third straight player in his 20s to win the Wells Fargo Championship and the youngest winner in tournament history.
His final-round 62 included six consecutive threes on his scorecard over the final six holes as he shattered the course record by two strokes and won by four over reigning Masters champion Phil Mickelson.
“To win this tournament as my first is something quite special,” McIlroy said.
Remarkably, McIlroy needed to hole a 6-foot eagle on the par-five 7th (his 16th hole of the day) to make the 36-hole cut on the number with a 1-over total. He was nine strokes out of the lead before climbing within striking range with a third-round 66.
Of McIlroy’s final-round exploits, Kim, who was his playing partner on Sunday, said, “He was in a total zone.”
McIlroy has gone on to win four majors, reach World No. 1 and win 20 PGA Tour titles, including twice more at Quail Hollow – in 2015 when he broke his own course record with a third-round 61 and again in 2021.
“This place has been good to me,” McIlroy said of Quail Hollow following his win in 2021. “Ever since I first set eyes on this golf course, I loved it from the first time I played it, and that love has sort of been reciprocated back. I’ve played so well here over the years. … this is the first time I’ve ever won an event for the third time, so that’s pretty cool to do it here.”
Rory McIlroy reacts after winning the 2021 Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte. (Photo: Jim Dedmon/USA TODAY Sports)
Two years after McIlroy established himself as a winner on Tour and used it as a launching pad toward stardom, Rickie Fowler faced off with McIlroy and D.A. Points in a three-way playoff. The 23-year-old Fowler gambled with a 51-degree wedge that had to be perfect on an 18th hole that had yielded only four birdies all day.
Having already overcome a three-shot deficit on the final day by firing a 3-under 69 to join a playoff when Points bogeyed the final hole of regulation, Fowler returned to No. 18 and attacked a dicey pin with a creek hugging the green’s left side. Fowler’s gamble paid off as he stuffed the shot to 4 feet and made the birdie putt to claim his first of what has grown to five Tour wins. Fowler had finished second four times previously in 67 starts as a pro.
“There’s a lot of people that have doubted or said, ‘You’ll never win,’ ” Fowler said at the time. “It’s nice to kind of shut them up a little bit.”
Rickie Fowler holds the trophy after winning the 2012 Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte. (Photo: Gerry Broome/Associated Press)
If Fowler continued a trend of first-time Tour winners in their early 20s at Quail Hollow, a year later in 2013 an even younger first-time champion confirmed a pattern. Ernst, in only his ninth Tour start and 11 days shy of turning 23, emerged late Sunday from a leaderboard full of proven winners to give himself an early birthday present.
Ranked 1,207th in the Official World Golf Ranking at the time, Ernst won in a playoff over England’s David Lynn. Adding to Ernst’s rags-to-riches story was the fact that he began the week as the fourth alternate for the Wells Fargo field, and so drove to Athens, Georgia, planning to play in a Korn Ferry Tour event before getting a phone call that there was a tee time with his name on it in Charlotte.
“This feeling is unbelievable right now,” Ernst said after he won his lone title on Tour.
Derek Ernst won the 2013 Wells Fargo Championship at the Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte. (Photo: Getty Images)
When Homa found the winner’s circle in 2019, his victory fell into the category with Ernst of unlikely champions. Homa, winner of the 2013 NCAA individual title, had dipped to No. 829 in the world when he got his third crack at the PGA Tour for the 2018-19 season. In his previous stint two years earlier, he made only two cuts in 17 tournaments, missing the 54-hole cut in one of them and finishing last at an opposite-field event in the other, and earning the grand total of $18,008. But he made six of seven cuts coming into the Wells Fargo Championship and had climbed to 417th in the world.
At Quail Hollow, he carded three rounds in the 60’s including a second-round 63 which tied for the low round of the week, and closed with a 4-under 67 to top Joel Dahmen by three strokes.
Max Homa celebrates on the 18th green after making his par putt to win the 2019 Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow Club n Charlotte. (Photo: Sam Greenwood/Getty Images)
“When I hit rock bottom I found a shovel and kept digging,” Homa said. “I’m very proud I finally found a ladder and started climbing upwards because it was getting dark down there.”
In his 68th start as a pro, Homa won for the first time and it proved to be only the beginning as he’s climbed inside the top 50 in the world. Homa has tasted victory twice more – at the Genesis Invitational and Fortinet Championship.
But like Kim, McIlroy, Fowler, and Ernst before him, Homa will never forget his first win. With nine first-time winners already this season through the WGC Dell Technologies Match Play in late March, it would come as no surprise if the Wells Fargo Championship’s first-time winner’s club were to add a new member during its one-year hiatus at TPC Potomac Farms in Potomac, Maryland.
Any contenders may want to remember these words from Homa after his arduous journey to being a Tour winner: “I felt like I was going to throw up, but my hands felt unbelievable on the club.”
Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in the 2022 Wells Fargo Championship official tournament program.
As if we needed any further confirmation, Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee says Anthony Kim always had swagger.
Everyone misses Anthony Kim. It’s hard to believe that a full decade has passed since his last victory at the 2010 Shell Houston Open. One year earlier, the then 23-year-old put on a show at the Masters, carding a tournament-record 11 birdies in shooting an unforgettable round of 65 at Augusta National Golf Club — in just his second competitive round there.
Golf Channel’s Jaime Diaz and Brandel Chamblee were reminiscing about that wild round that included a double bogey and two other bogeys on their podcast when Chamblee told a story about the first time he ran across Kim.
Anthony Kim was a three-time PGA Tour winner who had three starts at the Masters, making two cuts.
“He was 11 years old. He was on the back of the range hitting golf balls at PGA West and I was on the back of the range practicing myself,” Chamblee explained. “I walked over and stood behind this kid — I didn’t really know who he was.
“I just heard the sound of his shots and saw how fast he was swinging the club — and after, I don’t know, the 10th in a row that never left the flag, he turned around and looked at me and said, ‘Who’s going to beat me?’ Well, I was like, ‘Certainly nobody who is 11 was going to beat you.’ I don’t know if I could have beat him at the time and I was on the PGA Tour at the time.”
Kim, who was known for his blinged-out belts and late-night partying, won three times on the PGA Tour between 2008 and 2010 and was a Ryder Cup hero in 2008 before injuries to his hand and surgery to his Achilles tendon in his left leg stalled his career. Kim last played in the 2012 Wells Fargo Championship and withdrew. A.K., we hardly knew ya, but even at 11 you always had swagger.
