A Steady Progression for 'The Tank'

From Humble Beginnings, Choi's Rise to the Top Is the Result of Digging In and Not Looking Back

Two days after his breakthrough PGA Tour victory at the Wachovia Championship in Charlotte, Anthony Kim walked into the posh locker room at the Players Championship in the Jacksonville, Fla., suburbs and immediately spotted his friend K.J. Choi sitting on a nearby bench preparing to put on his golf shoes. Kim walked over, bowed to the older man and smiled broadly as Choi patted him on the back and congratulated him.

"He is such a great guy," said Kim, a 23-year-old Korean American born and raised in the Los Angeles suburbs. "He's been very helpful and very supportive of what I've been doing. But I think he really appreciates the fact that I'm working a lot harder than I was last year and not taking it for granted. I don't know if there are too many guys that work harder than K.J. out here."

Choi, a 38-year-old native of South Korea, has reached the pinnacle of professional golf after a childhood living on a farm on Wando Island at the southern tip of his native country. He was raised in a one-bedroom house, and his parents grew vegetables in the warm season and went down to the sea five miles away when it got colder to fish for red snapper and octopus in the Yellow Sea.

His journey remains one of the more remarkable stories on the PGA Tour, where he remains as diligent on the job as he did while working the fields or casting his nets back home. It has paid off handsomely for a deeply devout Christian who has spent most of the past two years in the top 10 of the world golf rankings. He's also one of the most popular players among his peers, even if he says he remains somewhat uneasy speaking English.

Last season, Choi won on two of the bigger stages in the game. First, he prevailed at the Memorial, Jack Nicklaus's signature event, a triumph that was particularly meaningful to both because Choi taught himself how to play golf in high school by reading Nicklaus's instructional books and watching his videos.

A month later, another golf icon was handing him a trophy on the 18th green at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda. Aided by a holed-out sand shot at the 71st hole on the way to a final-round 68 on Sunday, Choi became the first champion of the AT&T National hosted by his friend, Tiger Woods. Entering the final round he was two strokes behind 54-hole leader Stuart Appleby. Choi won by three shots and beat Woods, tied for sixth place, by seven, something neither man has let the other forget.

"I kid him about it all the time," Choi said through interpreter-agent Michael Yim in a recent interview. "But we are good friends. We joke around a lot."

There obviously will be no payback this year from Woods, who can't play this week because of a torn ligament in his left knee and two stress fractures in his left tibia. But Woods clearly was pleased that if he couldn't win his own tournament in its first year, at least one of his favorite players on the PGA Tour could.

"I always give him a hard time about winning it," Woods said in a recent interview. "I give him a hard time about everything. Let me tell you: He also understands a lot more than you think he does, because he gives it back as much as he gets. But the guy's got a big heart, and he's a great player. If you look at the times he gets into contention, he doesn't go backwards.

"The other thing about K.J. is that he's always fiddling around with his equipment. He'll win one week, and there might be 14 new clubs in his bag the next week. He won a tournament in Korea with a driver he bought in the pro shop the same week. It didn't matter what the loft was, the shaft flex, anything. The guy hits the same shot anyway no matter what's he's using, that same fade shot after shot. He's a hell of a player."

On the tour, Choi is known as "The Tank," and not, as some believe, because he was a powerlifter in grade school and junior high and still has the body build to prove it. He was given the moniker by CBS golf analyst Ian Baker-Finch during a telecast five years ago because he said it looked as if Choi was moving through the rest of the field like an armored vehicle.

"I like the meaning that's in it," Choi said last year at Congressional. "It's similar to what I think, how I've lived my life. It's never looking back, just move forward like a tank. Just progress."