PGA TOUR: Cameron Champ leads Fall Swing’s most dominant players
By Bill Felber
Si Woo Kim is a 23-year-old who joined the PGA TOUR full-time during the 2016 season, and has steadily built a competitive reputation. Playing in more than 30 events in each of his first three seasons, he has annually exceeded $2.2 million in earnings and won two events, the 2016 Wyndham Championship, and the 2017 THE PLAYERS Championship.
His four fall tour performances were notable mostly for their stability. He did not contend for the title in any of those starts, but beat the field average three times and performed most credibly at the CIMB, where he shot 269 to tie for tenth, seven strokes behind Leishman. His 269 turned out to be 1.16 standard deviations better than the field average of 277.6
Kim needs that stability because he is not likely to either overpower a course or slay it with precision. His 290 yard driving average and the 37.5 foot proximity average on approaches are both below the 2018 tour norms for those skills. He may, however, have markedly improved his short game. A mediocre performer on the greens in 2018, Kim leads the PGA TOUR in Strokes Gained putting for the fall tour at 2.455 strokes. (That is based on scant data, so some degree of reversion to the mean is probably likely.)
Still, his ability to step up at key moments has already brought him more than $8 million in career winnings, much of it attributable to those Players and Wyndham championships.