Reason To Smile

Choi has three top-10s in 2008, including a win at the Sony Open, his seventh PGA Tour title.

We talk about being a Christian in Korea and a Korean in Houston. We talk while David does figure 8s around the kitchen on his Wave Board, and while David is coached by his baseball instructor. The SUV becomes the Tank's tank as we cut through parking lots, veer around traffic and return to his house three times before noon -- all by different routes. After lunch at Carlton Oaks he leaves me in the grillroom with David and two paintball buddies because he has to pick Daniel up from school. Yet, from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., we never stop talking.

The language barrier holds Choi back during group interviews, but one-on-one, there are no lost words. He asks how often I spend days like this with a tour player, the circulation of Golf World and the relationship of Golf Digest to our magazine. He wants to know how old my daughters are, and what they're like. At David's baseball practice he warms up his son and shakes his hand when a throw burns into the soft part of his glove. The day goes off like clockwork, and after I leave for the airport, K.J. heads for a workout and his one-hour putting routine.

"He is with David as much as he can be when he's not playing golf," says Ray DeLeon, founder of the Banditos Baseball Club David is trying out for. "You can tell [K.J.] is trying to instill the work ethic in his kid that he has for himself."

Before Choi became an icon in his homeland, Wando Island was best known as the headquarters for Jang Bogo, a ninth-century sea trader whose private fleet and army dominated the trade routes in the Yellow Sea from their home base in Cheonghaejin. During lunch at Riviera CC in Los Angeles a week after we visited at The Woodlands, Choi explains through Yim that Wando has a 644-meter mountain as its landmark and that his parents owned a one-bedroom home in the foothills, where, from their rooftop, they could see the ocean five miles away. Byungsun Choi and his wife, Shilray Seo, were vegetable farmers, and when the weather turned cold, they would cast their nets and fish for red snapper and octopus in the same waters Bogo controlled more than 1,200 years ago. If he hadn't become a golfer, Choi believes he would have been a ship captain or an engineer, explaining that he is good with his hands, with a knack for mechanical projects. In grade school he was a powerlifter, squatting more than three times his weight. His nickname, though, comes from the way he methodically plows through a golf course, not because of his build. The 5-foot-8 Choi jokes that his two brothers and sister are taller because his spine was compressed when he did knee bends with a 350-pound barbell across his shoulders when he only weighed 95 pounds.

On March 5, 1985, his first day of 10th grade, a gym teacher picked him out of a line and told him he would be a golfer. Choi inititally asked: "What is golf?" But it was not long before he was hooked, even in the rudimentary conditions. Behind a cemetery he hit into a net that was 20 yards high and 70 yards long. Two friends of his father drove him across the bridge from Wando to Kwangju CC three hours away. They would leave in the middle of the night, so Choi could use every ray of sunshine. He would use a pullcart and play until it was dark. His personal record was 69 holes, and by July, he was a 7-handicap. He had no formal instruction, instead relying on interpreted versions of Nicklaus' instruction books. Twenty-two years later, after winning the Memorial, Choi said, "At the beginning, when I tried it the way [Nicklaus] told me to, it felt really good. So I told myself, if I get really good at it, there could be a bright future."