KLPGA: Where the Action Is

The KLPGA, the Korean domestic women's golf tour, has generally been thought of as the launching point for Korean golf stars over the years. When a Korean golfer gets good enough on that tour, she goes over to try her luck in America, where she either tries to qualify for the LPGA right away, or joins the Futures Tour to get further practice. Even some past great players from the KLPGA, like Seon Hwa Lee (pictured), have gone to the Futures Tour before moving on to the big leagues. There were many reasons why the KLPGA was considered in many eyes merely a stepping stone. For one, there just wasn't a lot of money to be made on that tour. A decent LPGA golfer can pocket 300-400 thousand dollars in a season; that's more money than almost anyone has ever made in a year on the KLPGA. Also, the number of tournaments on the Korean tour was always far smaller than in America. Even as recently as last year, the league had fewer than 20 events all season. By contrast, the LPGA has more than 30 events in a year, and the Japanese LPGA (or JLPGA) has well over twenty as well. For Korean stars who did not want to travel all the way to America, the JLPGA seemed another good option, and several Koreans have made quite a living there over the years. Most recently, Bo Bae Song, who was the KLPGA Player of the Year in 2004 and 2005, decided to skip America and try her luck on the JLPGA tour. She has done decently there. Players like Ji Hee Lee and Mi Jeong Jeon have also become top players in Japan.

The KLPGA has not gotten a lot of respect from the international golf community, either. The Rolex World Rankings do not reflect well, in general, the successes of the top golfers on the Korean tour. Whereas the top Japanese players have tended to find themselves in the top 20 on the world rankings, the top Korean players were not similarly elevated.

But a funny thing has happened in the last few years. The KLPGA has become a hotbed for great Korean golfers, and those golfers are not necessarily jumping on the next plane to Florida once they get that way. Although most of the top players in Korea still dream of playing on the LPGA, the golfers who play full time in Korea have shown that they can compete with the best the world has to offer. And while they have been waiting for their ticket to America, they have spent their time playing on their domestic tour, not necessarily on the Futures Tour or in Japan. As a result, the competition in Korea has never been better, with world class battles between top players becoming an almost regular occurrence.

Part of this can be attributed to the strength in the new KLPGA schedule. The tour now has 18 regular season events, as well as several more events it co-sponsors with other tours, such as the Kolon-Hana Bank Championship, the LPGA event in Korea. The purses have also started to go up in the events; a top tier tournament like the 5th KB Star Tour event now boasts a purse of 500,000,000 won, or roughly $500,000. That's hardly LPGA territory, but it is a lot more than a player is going to earn on the Futures Tour, where top tournament purses are more in the $100,000 range. The events are for the most part televised, either on network television or on one of the many sports or golf cable channels in the country. And perhaps most interestingly of all, the top KLPGA players are finding themselves invited to more of the premiere women's golf events in the world than ever before. Just this year, KLPGA stars were invited to participate in three of the four women's Majors and the Evian Masters, and the top KLPGA player also gets a chance to represent Korea in the Women's World Cup of Golf. So if you can be successful in Korea, you can also qualify to play in some of the greatest international events your sport has to offer.

The top KLPGA players have taken those opportunities and run with them, producing some truly eye opening results in the past few years. Until Momoko Ueda won this year's Mizuno Classic, the only women who had won LPGA events in the past ten years without being members of that tour had one thing in common: they were all KLPGA golfers. And they weren't even the top players on that tour, unlike Ueda, who is the top Japanese player right now. Shi Hyun Ahn (pictured) got the ball rolling when she won the CJ 9 Bridges Classic in 2003, beating a field of LPGA golfers including former world's number one player Laura Davies, and Korean legend and defending champion Se Ri Pak. Jee Young Lee duplicated the feat by winning that same tournament in 2005, while last year, Jin Joo Hong made it three KLPGAers who captured that event in its five year history. Lee has gone on to the LPGA tour, where this year she sits in the top ten on the money list, while Ahn won the 2004 Rookie of the Year award on the LPGA and has been perpetually a top thirty player when she has been healthy. Hong also played on the LPGA this year, although it is a mark of how strong Asian tours have become that, even after earning her LPGA card, she hesitated about coming to America, wanting to go play in Japan instead. KLPGA stars have also won other tournaments with LPGA stars in the field, notably the Korean Women's Open, which saw KLPGAers win both this year and last year, defeating top LPGA talent like Cristie Kerr in the process.

In the past, there have always been one or two world class players on the KLPGA at any given time, but perhaps at no time in its history have there been so many stars on the tour who have shown they can compete with the best in the world. Hee Young Park is a young player who has been among the top players on the KLPGA since she joined at age 18 in 2005. Na Yeon Choi, who recently won the LPGA Q-School sectional she participated in, is another young player who has focused on the domestic tour for her first few years as a pro. Hyun Hee Moon, Da Ye Na, Ran Hong and Hae Jung Kim are a few more of the promising talents on the tour. But without a doubt, this year three names have separated themselves from the rest on the KLPGA. Indeed, until Na Yeon Choi won the Shinsegae Cup in mid-September, these three women had won all the events contested that year. Second year player Sun Ju Ahn drew first blood when she captured the first (of a series of five) KB Star tour events on tour; this was the season opening event of 2007, after a co-sanctioned event in China. Ahn has continued her magnificent play most of the year, winning twice more. Her season highlight doubtless came when she beat Cristie Kerr and a top field of golfers to capture the Korean Women's Open in May. It is not very often when any player wins three events in a single season in Korea, let alone when a player does it and is not even the top player on tour. The second star is a third year player, Eun Hee Ji. Ji was not much of a force in her rookie year, 2005, but she became a player to watch in 2006 when she managed four top tens. That year, she also was also the Player of the Year on the fledgling Ladies Asian Golf Tour. But nothing prepared folks for her brilliance this year. She has won twice on tour, and looked poised to win three straight events, something only a few players in history had ever done before. She fell just short of that achievement, but has been perennially a factor in many of the events she has entered since. Besides her two wins, she has accumulated (as of The fifth Star Tour Event) seven additional second place finishes, and 13 total top tens.

But as impressive as Ahn and Ji have been in 2007, they both pale before the true superstar of the KLPGA, a player who has shattered records almost every time she tees it up, and who is perhaps the first player since the late nineties who truly deserves the title of "The Next Se Ri Pak". That player is Ji Yai Shin (pictured). Shin, though only a second year player, has already accumulated a staggering resume that matches up well with her idol Se Ri. She won her first KLPGA event while still a high school amateur, the 2005 SK Enclean tournament. She turned pro at the end of that year and promptly won the Hong Kong Open. In her first season on the KLPGA, 2006, she shattered several records. She won three times that year, which in and of itself is somewhat rare. But in the process, she also broke Se Ri Pak's ten year old record for most money ever earned in a single season on tour. As if that weren't enough, she also became the first KLPGA golfer in history to finish the season with a sub-70 scoring average. Ji Yai Shin had certainly started her professional career with a bang.

But all of that was just a warm-up to what she has accomplished in 2007. In the first part of the year, she was actually overshadowed somewhat by the accomplishments of Eun Hee Ji and Sun Ju Ahn. But like the true champion she is, she responded to this tough challenge by raising her game even more than before. In the second half of the season, she became nearly unstoppable. While Ji fell short of winning three events in a row, Shin accomplished that feat, the first player to do that since Mi Hyun Kim in the nineties. After she returned from a few overseas events, she continued her winning ways. She became only the second player to ever win five times in a season, then bettered that, collecting her sixth, seventh and then eighth wins. She already has more career wins on the KLPGA than Kimmie or Se Ri Pak, and is aiming for the all time league record of 20 career wins held by Ok Hee Ku. She is once again scoring under 70 strokes per round, and has nearly doubled her record setting money total from last season. It seems like week in and week out, Ji Yai Shin is either winning the tournament or is right in the hunt to do so.