A cautionary tale for Tom Kim: Korean golf star served in the military and has never been the same

The Sunday of last week’s Presidents Cup had the potential to deliver one of the greatest moments of Tom Kim’s life. If his International team could build on the three-point lead it forged over the first three days at Medinah Country Club, he would have been the firebrand who led an enormous upset because his four points earned were the most for either team.

We’ve seen the excitable Korean pump his fist, wave his arms and cup his hand to his ear in these competitions. Imagine what he’d do in a winning ceremony with a bottle of champagne in his hand. Remember the bubbly comically shooting out of captain Ian Woosnam’s nostrils at the 2004 Ryder Cup? Picture something like that.

Except that was never going to happen, even if the Internationals won (and we know that didn’t happen after the Americans staged a willful comeback on Sunday). The point being, Kim didn’t get to mourn that loss with his teammates and would have missed the joy of a win because he had to be on an early evening flight out of Chicago to Japan.

Why would he possibly let an opportunity like that slip away? Because, in the scope of his life and career, there was a far more important task to tend to—one that could greatly affect his continued path in professional golf.

As first reported by the Associated Press on Saturday night of the Presidents Cup, Kim scheduled himself to leave the United States for Japan on Sunday so that he would have preparation time for the Asian Games that begin on Wednesday night (U.S. time). The games are held every four years and include golf for men and women.

For every male competing in the games, there is a prize more valuable than a medal: Event winners as either individuals or on teams become exempt from South Korea’s requirement that every able-bodied male serve for nearly two years in the military. The requirement has been in place since 1957, and men are expected to fulfill the service between the ages of 18 and 35.

The only other way for an athlete to forgo the service: win a gold, silver or bronze medal in the Olympics, and in Kim’s first appearance in 2024 in Paris, he tied for eighth.

Kim is only 24 and after a resurgent 2026 PGA Tour campaign in which he won the Genesis Scottish Open and finished 14th in the FedEx Cup, the last thing he wants is to get a letter in the mail from the government telling him he needs to report for service.

The scary thing is, it could happen, and there’s a cautionary tale for all Korean golfers in the sad case of Sangmoon Bae, a 16-time worldwide winner.

In the early 2010s, Bae was among his country’s best professional players and rose to a career-high 26th in the world in 2011 with three victories that year in Asian events. He got on the PGA Tour in 2012 and only a year later won the Byron Nelson over runner-up Keegan Bradley. In 2014, he added another victory in the Frys.com Open and made the International Presidents Cup team in 2015. His was a career in full bloom.

But all of those accomplishments didn’t keep the South Korean government from telling Bae to report for duty, and after a court battle that he lost, he started his service in November 2015, only weeks after playing in the Presidents Cup, which the U.S. narrowly won, ironically enough, in South Korea.

"You know, I just hope I will play good when I come back," Bae told Golf Digest in 2015. "Because I really love golf and playing on the PGA Tour."

Bae, who was 29 at the time, would serve 21 months in the South Korean army, with many of his fellow soldiers being a full decade younger than him. He was made a rifleman even though he’d never held a gun before he began his service, and he rarely had time to practice golf.

When he finally returned to professional golf late in 2017 at an Asian Tour event, Bae was blunt about his time spent away: "From the day when I was a private second class, a private first class and even the last day of the service, I wanted to be discharged from the military. I wanted to play in tournaments, I wanted to sleep at home and I wanted to drive."

The two years gone would prove devastating to Bae’s golf. When he left for the military, he was ranked 88th in the world; when he returned, he was 1,869th. And whatever competitive edge that Bae felt before his service, he lost it. Bae returned to the PGA Tour fulltime in 2017 and made only five of 17 cuts. Midway through that season, he lamented to the Associated Press, “I’ve kind of lost my feel how to play golf. Not how to swing—I forgot how to play golf.”

Remarkably, in one of only three starts in 2018 on the Korn Ferry Tour, Bae won in Boise, Idaho, but he lost his PGA Tour card after the 2018-19 season and has seen his chances to play in the States dwindle every year since. This season, he got a single start on the PGA Tour—in the Corales Puntacana Championship, in which he shot 77-75 to miss the cut.

Nearly all of Bae’s appearances this year have come in Asia, where he’s played 13 times across three tours and currently is on an unfortunate streak of five cuts missed. There was one promising finish for the now-40-year-old—a tie for third in the 68th Korean Open.

We will never know what Bae’s path would have been without the military duty, but we know this: It’s a road Tom Kim would very much like to avoid.