CROMWELL — Tom Kim turned his back on the hole, walked a few steps, looked up and down.
Then he walked a few more feet away, and looked up and down again.
“I do AimPoint when I putt,” Kim said. “So just to kind of make sure — some times with undulation it kind of changes the direction that you’re going. So just that’s the only purpose.”
AimPoint is a fairly new green-reading technique, Adam Scott, Justin Rose and Stacy Lewis are among the adherents. “It marries physics and feel to get a consistent read on the greens each and every time,” according to golf.com.
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Eventually, Kim tapped the 7-foot, 1-inch putt and rolled it in. The read was perfect, the putt was perfect and it capped, on the eve of his 22nd birthday, a near perfect, or at least a breakthrough round of golf.
Kim shot 62, his best round of 2024, to take the first-round lead into the clubhouse at the Travelers Championship on Thursday.
“It’s getting sharper and sharper,” Kim said. “And I feel like I’ve been playing like this kind of the last few months, but to kind of keep it sharp and to keep maintaining, I feel like that’s why I’m on my eighth week, to kind of just keep it going. It is just kind of nice to see those rounds come together and the next three days kind of keep that same game plan whether good score or not. Just kind of keep it together and keep that sharpening.”
Kim, who turned 22 on Friday, is 26th in the world rankings, has been a high as No. 11, and he is playing for the eighth week in a row. When you’re that young, chasing excellence well, things like heat and fatigue are not as apt to catch up.
“I felt like my game was there,” Kim said. “But it wasn’t really showing in tournaments. I kind of sat down and I’m like, ‘You know what? It’s almost the last stretch of the season. I feel like I’m playing good, I just can’t, for some reason I can’t show it off in golf tournaments.’
“I think that’s the reason why I’m playing a lot more than I normally ever would is because if you keep getting reps in in tournaments you kind of keep sharpening, sharpening, sharpening and that’s what’s happening. So I’m glad to kind of see it actually come out though.”
Kim and Scottie Scheffler, the top-ranked golfer, who turns 28, actually share the same birthday and traditionally celebrate together. That required a trip to New Haven for Sally’s Pizza Wednesday night, and a happy birthday serenade from the customers lined up outside on Wooster Street, as requested by Scheffler’s caddie, Ted Scott.
“I had a lot of pizza,” Kim said. “So I kind of told myself, no matter what, I wouldn’t do that in a tournament, but it’s my birthday and it’s kind of a tradition, you know, me, Scottie, we have the same birthday, so I we had an early birthday celebration.”
That, too, didn’t catch up with Kim as he made his way up and down the TPC as the temperatures hit the 90s in mid-afternoon.
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Kim finished tied for 38th at the Travelers in 2023, his best day a 64 in Round 2. Generally, the changes at the TPC River Highlands were having the desired effect of keeping scores and birdies under control. There were 603 birdies in the first round in last year, with 156 players in the field. This year’s field of 72, which included nearly all of the top 50 players, produced 265.
But Kim made eight birdies, no bogeys, to come in 8-under, two strokes ahead of the pack in second place, three ahead of Scheffler. His bogey-free round included five birdies on the back nine, including 17 and 18.
“I just hit the ball in the fairway a lot,” Kim said. “Obviously this course, if you start hitting the ball in the fairway, you can kind of go at some pins and have some good opportunities. Obviously I putted well. When you shoot 62s or 64s, you’ve got to putt well, and I took care of that opportunity.
“My targets overall, like I picked really good targets out there with my approach shots. When you have 8-irons in, sometimes you want to go for the pin a lot, but at the same time you just kind of go into this head space where, okay, I have, this is where I need to pick my target, I don’t feel like I need to push or anything and just sticking to that game plan.”
His green-reading paid off with birdie putts of 14 feet on No. 17, 2 1/2 feet on holes 12 and 13, 15 feet, 11 inches on No. 10, 10 feet, 9 inches on No. 8, 18 feet on No. 6, and 10 feet, 9 inches on No. 3.
“I think my birdie on 8 was (the highlight),” he said. “It’s a tough par-3, you can really feel that wind and I picked a really good target and I executed it perfectly to leave myself a perfect 12-footer uphill.”
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The South Korea-born Kim turned pro in 2018, and has 12 professional wins, three on the PGA Tour, and rose to No. 11 in October 2023, after top 10 finishes at the U.S. Open and The Open Championship last season. This season, he has had his ups and downs, trouble cracking the top 10. With rounds of 66 during the Masters and PGA Championship, he showed the flashes of what his game can be. Last Sunday at Pinehurst, he shot a final-round 76 to finish 6-over for the U.S. Open.
“A tough day on Sunday, I’ve had a few, like two of those bad rounds but wasn’t like I was playing terrible,” Kim said. “It was just a few things kind of didn’t go my way and I couldn’t really adapt to it and really couldn’t score well. I think the thing was that, okay, it wasn’t a bad week, but a bad round cost me the week. But at least like it’s only 26th, 25th, it’s not like I’m finishing 50th or missing the cut. It shows me (even with the bad weeks) that actually I am playing well and just trying to keep riding this momentum.”
