Y.E. Yang’s famous victory at the 2009 PGA Championship, when he became the first player to fight from behind and defeat Tiger Woods at a major, is still largely understood through the context of Tiger himself, and that’s understandable. That year represented perhaps the most vulnerable Tiger has looked, largely because of the surgery that had kept him out for large chunks of 2008 and 2009. And not long after his loss to Yang, Tiger’s life blew up in the most spectacular way imaginable, in a story that came to include multiple affairs, a car crash, a sex addiction clinic, and an eventual rehabilitation that began the second half of his career. Lost in all that, though, is the winner himself: Yang Yong-Eun, from the island of Jeju in South Korea.
Is Y.E. Yang's 2009 come-from-behind victory against Tiger the greatest in @PGAChampionship history?
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MORE: First the win for Y.E. Yang, now the windfall
The language barrier can make it difficult for us to get to know Asian players as well as we know Americans and Europeans, and in fact even if his post-round press conference that day, Yang’s English was weak enough that he used an interpreter, but if you do the hard work of digging around, what you find is incredible: Here’s a man, for starters, that never hit a golf ball until he was 19 years old.
To understand how rare that is, you only have to look for other examples in the world of professional golf, where you’ll find a handful throughout history and no more: Larry Nelson, Calvin Peete, Thongchai Jaidee. It takes an incredible amount of athleticism and hard work to skip the early years of muscle memory development and still become elite, but that’s what Yang did. This son of a farmer and one-time aspiring bodybuilder went from those first few swings at a driving range all the way to the top of the sport, where on a summer day in Chaska, Minnesota, he stared down and beat the best player to ever pick up a club.
On this week’s Local Knowledge, we explore the life of Y.E. Yang, and try to remove the veil that obscures his fascinating story from the minds of western golf fans, all leading up to that phenomenal round at Hazeltine, capped by one of the most impressive clutch shots of the 2000s. Listen below, or wherever you get podcasts.
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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
