‘Do it for Thomas the Tank Engine’: Joohyung ‘Tom’ Kim steamrolls field for first PGA Tour title at 2022 Wyndham Championship
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.”
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 in 2008. But his putter cooled off in the third round. He took 30 whacks with his short stick, making just 48 feet of putts in all as he posted a 2-under 68.
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 (287). His win qualified him for the playoffs – he’s projected No. 34 in the point standings – becoming the first special temporary member to win on Tour since Collin Morikawa at the 2019 Barracuda Championship.
“It’s been a dream of mine to play here full time,” Kim said.
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 Matt Wallace, who also missed the cut, was the odd man.
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.
“I still have so much to learn and so much to be better at,” he said at the 3M Open last month. “Just looking at the guys who are dominating on the PGA Tour and you see how good they play, it just motivates myself to be at their level and try to get better every day.”
