CHAOS/Controversy Flares as Anthony Kim accuses Marc Leishman for Cheating at LIV Golf Miami to win
CHAOS/Controversy Flares as Anthony Kim accuses Marc Leishman for Cheating at LIV Golf Miami to win
Just as you must peel back the layers of an onion to get to its core, the same has been true of Anthony Kim, LIV Golf’s newest recruit, as he has reassimilated to the professional game.
Every week or two, it seems, golf fans get a new piece of the back story behind Kim’s mysterious disappearance from the public eye — but not all of it. The first tightly scripted snippet came in late February in the form of a couple of short-form videos pushed on LIV Golf and Kim’s social channels. Then came insights from LIV CEO Greg Norman, when Norman visited the booth during Kim’s LIV debut in Saudi Arabia. Earlier this week, LIV published a Kim sit-down with David Feherty, in which Kim spoke of “bad people” and “scam artists” with whom he has associated. Then, on Thursday morning in Miami, Kim finally faced the media in his first pull-up-a-chair-mic-in-hand press conference.
Over the course of 30 minutes Kim was humble, honest and largely answered questions head on and from the heart, which is more than you can say for many of his LIV peers, at least when they faced thorny questions in the nascent days of the controversial league. Kim spoke of how the premature birth of his daughter Isabella, who is now a toddler, made him realize he needed to pull his life together so he could be there for her emotionally.
He spoke of the waning days of his former playing career when he was so distracted by poor life choices that he didn’t “think about golf” when he was on the course. He spoke of the injures that he assumed had ended his Tour days for good and how he was “completely okay with that.” So much so that Kim unloaded all of his golf gear: “I actually had a Saturday one weekend a few months after I got done playing, and I had probably three or four rooms full of golf stuff, hats, gloves, balls, shoes, clubs, and I texted a hundred people and I said, ‘Just come — whoever gets here fast on Saturday gets to keep it all.’”
