Michael Kim had two pars to open his second round at TPC Twin Cities on Friday, and nothing about the start suggested what was coming. By the time he reached the 18th tee, ninety minutes or so later, he needed a birdie to join a list of players who could fit inside a single Ryder Cup team room twice over. He got it, a 24-foot putt he said afterwards he was mostly just hoping would not lip out, and Kim’s 12-under 59 became the 15th round of 59 or lower in PGA Tour history.
The round was bogey-free and built on two separate bursts. Kim ran off five consecutive birdies from the third through the seventh, added another at the ninth to make the turn in 29, then found two more early on the back nine before the finish that mattered: four straight birdies from the 15th through to a closing par five, where 60 would have been a perfectly respectable score and Kim simply refused to let it stand. The 59 broke the course record at TPC Twin Cities and put him at 14-under through 36 holes, two clear of the field with the weekend still to come at a tournament that has, in its short history, developed a habit of rewarding whoever gets hot at the right moment.
Four Birdies to Close It Out
There is a particular kind of pressure that comes from knowing exactly what a single putt means, and Kim was candid about carrying it up the 18th fairway. “I kind of remember thinking on 18 that you have to go for it, 60 or 61 doesn’t really make too much of a difference,” he said afterwards, a piece of logic that only makes sense to someone who has already made ten birdies that day. When the putt dropped he threw both arms in the air and called the moment one that “feels like I’m part of the history books,” which, at fifteen names deep alongside Al Geiberger, Chip Beck and Jim Furyk, rather undersells the company he now keeps.
This putt for 59 ...
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HISTORY for @Mike_Kim714!
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What made the round more remarkable than the number itself was how Kim described living through it. “Yeah, funny enough, some shots I didn’t feel like supremely confident over, but that’s kind of golf,” he said, the sort of admission that separates a round players talk about for decades from one that simply looked tidy on a leaderboard. Even at 14-under and in complete control, Kim was already turning his attention to Saturday and the tournament’s most obvious threat. “That guy named Scottie Scheffler is probably going to throw up a good score today anyway,” he said, before Scheffler had even finished his own round. He was not wrong to worry. The world number one sits seven back after two days, well within range on a course that has already shown it will give up a low one to whoever is playing well enough to take it.
A Career That Took the Long Way Round
Kim’s name has topped a leaderboard like this before, though it has taken a while to happen twice. He won his first PGA Tour title at the 2018 John Deere Classic by eight strokes, a runaway that set the tournament scoring record and looked, at the time, like the start of something substantial for the Cal Berkeley product who had been Max Homa’s college teammate and the 2013 Haskins Award winner as the country’s best amateur. It was not, or at least not immediately. Kim missed nineteen of twenty cuts in 2019, lost his card entirely after the 2020-21 season, and spent two years rebuilding it on the Korn Ferry Tour before working his way back. It took until September last year, at the FedEx Open de France, for a second trophy to arrive, a one-stroke win sealed with a par putt from a bunker that ended a seven-year drought and made him the first American to win the French Open since 1972.
That is the context worth holding onto while he leads the 3M Open into the weekend. Kim is not a rookie enjoying one hot week so much as a 33-year-old who has already lost his career and rebuilt it once, currently playing the best golf of his life at a course that just told the rest of the field exactly what kind of scoring was possible. Whether it holds up against Scheffler on Saturday is a different question entirely. For one Friday afternoon in Minnesota, it did not need to.