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BRUCE LOWITTK.J. Choi is a hero in his homeland and is his nation's only winner on the PGA Tour.
K.J. Choi is to South Korea's golfing community what Tiger Woods is to most of the golfing world. He stands on a pedestal.
Choi is his nation's only winner on the PGA Tour, not bad considering that Wando, a quiet little island off South Korea's southeastern coast where Choi was born and raised, doesn't have a golf course.
"The PGA Tour is on the rise in Korea, and it's all because of K.J.," Michael Yim, Choi's manager with Seoul-based International Management Group, said last year after Choi won the Compaq Classic of New Orleans.
South Korean TV scrambled to televise live Sunday's final round which, back home, ended in the predawn hours of Monday. He would have owned the headlines outright had South Korea not advanced for the first time to the second round of the men's World Cup soccer tournament the same weekend.
In South Korea, Choi Kyoung-ju (his given name) is an idol. In Palm Harbor, he is a returning champion. Twenty weeks after his first American tour victory, Choi won his second one, the Tampa Bay Classic. His seven-stroke winning margin over the Westin Innisbrook Resort's Copperhead course on Sept. 22 was the biggest on last year's tour.
He has yet to win on the PGA Tour this year, but he has come close, tied for second - eight strokes behind Ernie Els - at the season-opening Mercedes Championships in Hawaii. Also, in his Masters debut this year, Choi birdied the first three holes, the best start by a first-year player since 1953.
And Choi has won a bit closer to his hometown this year. His 10-foot birdie putt on the second playoff hole beat compatriot Shin Yong-jin in the SK Telecom Open, the Asian PGA Tour event in Seoul. In September he won the German Masters on the European PGA Tour. He also won the 1996 Korean Open and two 1999 tournaments in Japan.
Wando, where he grew up the son of a rice farmer, has one practice golf range. About 70 of the island's 600,000 people play the game. He didn't even see a golf club until he was 16.
"Ever since I was very young, I was into sports and very athletic," he told golfweb.com. "At school, at that time, weightlifting was the biggest sport. If you were a weightlifter at my school, you were a star."
At 16, Woods already was a two-time U.S. Junior Amateur Champion and had played in the 1992 Nissan Los Angeles Open, At 16, Choi was about to try golf. A high school coach pushed him, saying he had the right build for it. Choi studied videos of Jack Nicklaus, spent hours on the island's lone practice range, played golf, liked it, improved rapidly and gave up weightlifting. He turned pro in 1994; two years later he won his first Korean Open.
After making Jacksonville his home base for a year, Choi moved to Houston. It has a large Korean population and, he said, it is easier to fly to and from all PGA Tour events. He is 33 and lives with his wife, Hyunjung Kim, their son, David, 6, and daughter, Amanda, 1.
In 1999 Choi became the first Korean on the PGA Tour, earning his card by finishing tied for 35th at Q-school. He failed to win enough to keep it ($305,745 for 134th overall; 125th is the cutoff) and survived Q-school again in 2000, tying for 31st. He got his first top 10 finish that year, tied for eighth at the Air Canada Championship.
His tie for fourth at the 2001 Greater Greensboro Chrysler Classic helped him win $800,326 (65th) that year and keep his card. Last year was Choi's breakout season: $2,204,907 in earnings, 17th on the PGA list.
He ran roughshod over the field at the Tampa Bay Classic, taking the lead with an opening-round course-record and tournament-record 63. He joined Woods as the only players to lead all four rounds of a 2002 event.
It was an extremely hot weekend at Innisbrook. Choi was sweating profusely. So was everyone else. Only after winning did he find out his problem wasn't just the heat. Back in Houston the next day, Choi underwent an emergency appendectomy.
- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.