A legend grows the longer it is removed from reality, and few golfers have garnered cult status quite like Anthony Kim. The American was the breakout star of the PGA Tour in the late 2000s, with the bristling confidence to shoulder-barge Ian Poulter and the magnetic talent to thrash Sergio García 5 and 4 a day later at the Ryder Cup in 2008. Kim was only 23 years old then, the youngest member of the United States team and touted as an heir to Tiger Woods in terms of crossover appeal. Less than four years later, he had vanished from the spotlight altogether.
A litany of injuries and a lucrative disability insurance policy, allegedly worth upwards of $10 million (now £7.8 million), had always deterred Kim from making a comeback. Now though, nearly a dozen years after his career was suddenly derailed, the 38-year-old will make his competitive return at this week’s LIV Golf event. Random sightings of Kim walking his dog in Hollywood or at a bar in Dallas helped to fuel the mythology in his absence. For all the conspiracy theories, though, few could have imagined a scenario in 2012 where Kim would make his comeback in Saudi Arabia to a sport deeply divided.
Whispers of Kim’s comeback were inevitably greeted with scepticism, a virtue of false dawns in the past, but his representatives are understood to have been in discussions with officials from both the PGA Tour and LIV since last year.
• Partying, rumours and a prodigious talent – the mystery of Anthony Kim
The fascination with Kim meant he would almost certainly be guaranteed several sponsors’ exemptions on the PGA Tour, but he ultimately opted to sign with LIV, who offered him a spot as a “wild card” entrant into all the remaining 12 events of its season, starting with this week’s $20 million tournament in Jeddah.
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That is a safety net of sorts, with few assurances about Kim’s form, but he will need to finish inside the top 24 in LIV’s individual standings or receive a captain’s pick to ensure a longer-term spot.
Some critics will deride Kim’s return as a gimmick, and interest will quickly wane if the rust accrued since 2012 cannot be shaken. LIV had made a concerted effort to pursue younger players in their primes such as Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton this winter, but Kim’s return is a calculated gamble that will increase eyeballs on its product, however briefly, at a time when the prospect of peace between golf’s warring factions has stalled. What ability remains is unclear, but Kim will create talking points either way.
It has been that way ever since Kim emerged as a standout talent at the University of Oklahoma, where college team-mates and rivals routinely declared him the most talented player they had seen. Kim rapidly started to fulfil that potential on the PGA Tour, becoming only the fifth player in three decades to win three events by the age of 25. He was ranked inside the world’s top ten before a boisterous debut at Valhalla, where Kim took 2.5 points from four matches, and a second round featuring 11 birdies at Augusta National in 2009 even managed to prise the crowd’s attention from Woods.
History has a tendency to gloss over the pitfalls too, though. Kim finished third at the Masters the next year and registered another top-five finish at the Open in 2010, but the trajectory of his star dipped before his vanishing act. Kim’s penchant for partying, which included tales of college debauchery and a rumoured failed drugs test, aided his cult status.
“These rumours tainted my reputation,” he once said. “And I didn’t have a great one to begin with.” However, his form had deteriorated badly, with five missed cuts and four withdrawals in ten starts preceding his departure in 2012. “This was the start of my career. Hopefully, I can start a new one here,” Kim said before the Wells Fargo Championship, where he had won his first PGA Tour event four years earlier. After an opening round of 74, it instead proved his last event. Two years later, when asked about Kim’s whereabouts, his agent said: “He’s not living under a bridge.”
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Kim’s supposed insurance policy assured that was not the case, even if the manner of his exit ensured rumours abounded. He deliberately avoided the media but did give one brief interview to the Associated Press in 2015 in which he described his injury plight. “Golf is a fond memory of mine,” Kim said. “I’m going to step away from the game for a little while and get my body pieced together,” he said. “I’ve got so much ground to make up from injuries — rotator cuff, labrum, spinal fusion, hand injury. I’ve had six or seven surgeries in the last 3½ years.”
When Kim was spotted by one keen-eyed fan in California in 2019, he told them his golf was “non-existent”. A picture of Kim with his former coach Adam Schriber two years later, captioned “2021 is going to be special”, might have indicated a turning point in recapturing his desire, while Kim’s former caddie Eric Larson recently confessed to them discussing his return.
The long-winded timeline only makes Kim’s comeback a more interesting turn of events. “I miss Anthony Kim,” Rory McIlroy said in 2019. “The tour was a better place with him in it. He was exciting.” And while the myth often proves more powerful than the reality, discovering the truth more than a decade after Kim’s disappearance will satisfy curiosity at least, one way or another.
