Anthony Kim’s comeback is officially underway.
The LIV Golf Tour officially announced this week that the pair had cut a deal for the 38 year-old to play in its remaining slate of 2024 tournaments, starting at this week’s Jeddah event. It’s a fascinating science experiment, of sorts. How will a formerly top player fare after 12 years on the sidelines?
Kim’s career was halted, initially, by injury, so like most golf swing nerds I’m interested most in how his action looks all these years later. We got precious few glimpses of it in recent years, but between various hype videos leased by LIV this week, the golf swing footage floodgates opened this week. And what’s perhaps most interesting is how remarkably similar his comeback swing is.
You can watch my quick breakdown of it right here…
Anyway, there are a few classic AK traits in there, notably how he chokes down on the grip (a holdover from his junior golf days). But perhaps the most interesting similarity is at the top of his backswing.
Back in 2009, Golf Digest featured Anthony Kim in an instruction feature where Kim broke down a few key moves in his swing. One of those was the importance of a short arm swing.
“The most important thing for me is to keep the club short of parallel at the top. If it gets long for me, I hit it all over the place because it’s so hard to square it up at impact.”
That short arm swing, Kim wrote, prevented his lower body from racing too far ahead of his upper body, which wrecked his accuracy.
“Growing up, my biggest problem was hooking my drives. When I was little, to compete with the bigger kids, I knew I had to hit the ball with a closed clubface to get any distance on my tee shots.”
But as he got bigger and stronger, Kim said he began realizing the value of a more compact golf swing, which allowed him to turn both his upper and lower body through aggressively. Kim called it his “consistency key.”
“The downswing starts from the ground up, but as I approach the ball, I want my body and arms turning together toward the target. Amateurs are usually all arms in the downswing, and pros often get the lower body too far ahead of the rest of the body. Syncing is a key to hitting drives that are powerful and straight.”
It was a big key for him then, and it seems to be now, too.
You can read that full Anthony Kim article in our Golf Digest archive right here.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
