Washing up and drying off is normally reserved for after a long day of golf.
However, Tom Kim had to find time to clean up after falling into a muddy creek during his round on the sixth hole Thursday of the PGA Championship at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, N.Y.
ESPN's television coverage was fixated on Kim after the mishap left most of his pants and some of his shirt covered in mud. With Semisonic’s “Closing Time” song playing, the cameras did not leave Kim’s sight throughout the entire fiasco which lasted several minutes, even when he disappeared from the shot to wash the mud off with some clean water.
This certainly vaults to the top of Kim’s most memorable moments at the PGA after missing the cut in 2020 at Harding Park in San Francisco, and in 2022 at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Okla.
The 20-year-old was told his ball crossed the water and was in the mud. Knowing how high the stakes are at a major, retrieving the ball was of the utmost importance in order to avoid a potentially disastrous result.
“Like when, as soon as I went in, it was kind of sketch, but I mean, it's a major championship,” Kim said. “I'm fighting for every single stroke I have and then it got dark, like once my foot got in, I was like, there's no looking back.”
Kim did confirm he was washing up when the cameras lost track of him as he went down into the creek. Kim would eventually make bogey on the hole.
“You couldn’t get any worse so I mean I was wet enough, so I thought I might as well just go in the water and wash myself off, and that's exactly what I did,” he said.
With three holes remaining, Kim hit a green-in-regulation on each hole, making par three consecutive times. It is that never-say-die attitude that helped Kim, literally, get it out of the mud.
He shot 3-over 73 and is tied for 63rd place.
