It was one of the most remarkable stretches of golf by any player ever in the desert, an 11-day span of superb play.
First it was a 66 in a CIF-Southern Section team regional in Beaumont that, while strong, didn’t get the golfer’s team to the next level. Five days later was another 66, this time to earn medalist honors in a U.S. Open local qualifying event at Ironwood Country Club in Palm Desert. Six days after that came a third 66, this time at Canyon Country Club in Palm Springs to win the CIF-SS individual title on the same course Tiger Woods had won that same title a few years earlier with a 68.
Those rounds of 66 were all shot by Anthony Kim when he played at La Quinta High School. Kim was a sophomore and just 15 years old that spring of 2001.
Twenty-five years later, Kim has done something perhaps even more remarkable. After disappearing from the competitive game for a dozen years while going through personal struggles and lows we probably don’t really want to know, Kim won a professional golf event this weekend. Kim won the LIV Tour’s event in Adelaide, Australia, shooting 9-under 63 in the final round to beat two-time major championship winner Jon Rahm by three shots. If there was a comeback of the year award for all sports, Kim might have just clinched that title.
Anthony Kim could always play brilliant golf. That sophomore season was the end of his high school golf, as he decided to focus on playing against better competition. He later was a star at the University of Oklahoma, then quickly became a star on the PGA Tour.
In 2008, just seven years after he was torching Coachella Valley courses, he won twice on the PGA Tour. He was named to the U.S. Ryder Cup team and beat Sergio Garcia in singles. In 2009, he made 11 birdies in a single round at Augusta National at the Masters. In 2010, he won on tour again and was a strong third in the Masters. He did it all with a reputation for enjoying the good life, maybe the wild life. But no one could say Kim wasn’t an elite player.
Then in a flash, Kim was gone. Injuries to his wrist sidelined him for much of 2010 when he had surgery on his thumb. In 2012, while out of action on the tour again, he had surgery for an injured Achilles tendon. He never played on the PGA Tour again. He was a little like golf’s version of Bigfoot, a mythical creature who people wanted to see, but no one ever did. He was also like Bo Jackson, who was a brilliant two-sport athlete who never reached the Hall of Fame in football of baseball because of career-ending injuries.
In 2024, Kim came out of hiding, if that’s what it was, and joined the LIV Tour. His play was very un-Kim-like and he floundered at the bottom of LIV leaderboards. He hinted at what had been a rough and painful decade of his life, with too many wrong people in his life too much of the time. Those stories belong to Kim until he decides to fully share them, and maybe the best thing for everyone is that he keeps those details and stories to himself.
But Kim could always work hard, and he has a solid support system now with a wife and a child that gave him perspective about live and golf. In recent months, his game improved, showing sparks of his old brilliance. Now he is a winner again, and that’s remarkable 16 years after he last played serious competitive golf.
Okay, maybe you don’t care for the LIV Tour or the caliber of golf there. Maybe you are one of the people who has ignored and will continue to ignore LIV’s television broadcasts in the United States. But Anthony Kim is a winner in a professional golf event again. Golf fans can lament what they missed with Kim’s rocket ship of a career ended all those years ago. They can now ponder, with LIV getting Official World Golf Ranking points, if Kim might actually play his way back into the major championships.
Either way, this is a great golf comeback story, one that shows there is still a lot of that 15-year-old phenom from 25 years ago still ticking inside Kim’s 40-year-old body.
Larry Bohannan is the golf writer for The Desert Sun. You can contact him at (760) 778-4633 or at larry.bohannan@desertsun.com. Follow him on Facebook or on X at @larry_bohannan.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Anthony Kim crafts one of golf’s great comebacks with LIV victory
Reporting by Larry Bohannan, Palm Springs Desert Sun / Palm Springs Desert Sun
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
