Sports fans love comeback stories, athletes who had had the world on a string at one moment, lost it all somehow, then crawled all the way back to winning status.
Baseball, football and basketball all have their comeback stories, but so does golf, a sport that shouldn’t deal with dramatic physical declines or players who disappear in their prime. But that’s just what happens in the game. With Anthony Kim’s win at the LIV Tour in Australia last weekend, his first win of any kind in 16 years, the question is whether Kim has crafted the sport’s greatest-ever comeback.
Here are a few candidates for that title:
Ben Hogan
For all the talk of other comebacks in the sport, this remains the greatest. In 1949, Hogan was driving a car that collided with a bus on a foggy Texas highway. Hogan sustained injuries including a broken pelvis, ankle and collarbone, and the injuries to his legs would curtail how much golf he could play in the future after doctors doubted he would even be able to walk again. Hogan not only walked and played golf but won the 1950 U.S. Open, one of six major titles he won after the bus accident, including three majors in 1953. It is without doubt the greatest comeback in golf history.
Tiger Woods
Woods is tied with Sam Snead for the most wins in PGA Tour history at 82, but starting in the 2013-14 season, Woods finally started to see his results curtailed by a body that was betraying him. A series of surgeries left him winless for five seasons before he finally won another title in the 2017-18 season. But the comeback was capped when he rallied from two shots back at the start of the day to win the 2019 Masters, his 15th major title but the first since 2008. Woods hasn’t won since, dealing with more surgeries after a 2021 single-car accident. That 2019 Masters win might be the last we ever see from Woods, who turned 50 in December.
Anthony Kim
Kim’s career seemed to come to an end in 2011 when, after thumb surgery and an Achilles’ tendon injury, he simply walked away from the game after three PGA Tour wins. Kim disappeared from public view, and the details of the problems he faced with addiction and being tangled with the wrong kind of people may never be fully known. Kim popped up again in 2024 on the LIV Tour, but was a complete non-factor for two years. There were signs of a turnaround at the end of 2025, but no one imagined Kim would find the winner’s circle again with a final-round 63 to win LIV’s Adelaide event in Australia. It was his first win since 2010. Kim’s comeback might have been from self-inflected damage, but it was remarkable just the same.
Phil Mickelson
This was more a comeback against age rather than accident or injury. Mickelson was 50 years old in 2021 and hadn’t won a PGA Tour event in two years. He hadn’t won a major championship since 2013, when he won the British Open. It was easy to see the end of Mickelson’s winning days in the rear-view mirror, but for four great days. Mickelson again played major championship-caliber golf at Kiawah Island in the PGA Championship. Edging out Brooks Koepka and Louis Oosthuizen by two shots, Mickelson became the oldest golfer to win a major. It was the last time Mickelson would win a major and was his last win on the PGA Tour.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Was Anthony Kim’s LIV win the greatest comeback in golf history?
Reporting by Larry Bohannan, Palm Springs Desert Sun / Palm Springs Desert Sun
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
