For the first time in 13 years, Anthony Kim is rising up the Official World Golf Rankings and it’s the biggest jump of his career.
Kim made the cut in this week’s Asian Tour International Series event in Qatar and fired a final round 71 to finish in a tie for 37th Sunday.
That may sound like much, but it’s Kim’s first made cut in his comeback that started earlier this year. Kim’s comeback has primarily been in LIV Golf events, which not only do not feature a cut but also do not award OWGR points. The only other OWGR-recognized tournament Kim has teed it up this season was the International Series Macau event in March where he missed the cut.
Thus, the .36805 points Kim earns for the finish this week are the first OWGR points he’s earned in 12 years, since a T42 finish at the 2012 Honda Classic. The 1.63 points he garnered that week were actually not enough to keep him from falling from 115th to 116th in the rankings that week, but while he earned just more than a fifth of the points this week, the resulting jump in ranking was far more significant.
When the new ranking comes out on Monday, Kim will see his ranking, the 4595th-ranked player in the world entering the week, jump 2,281 spots to No. 2,314. While his ranking is still way off his peak from 2008 when he reached No. 6 in the world after the Tour Championship, the jump is still one of the largest in the rankings history.
During his numerous comebacks, Tiger Woods has routinely made several-hundred spot jumps after some of his first events back. Earlier this year, Nick Dunlap made a OWGR jump of more than 4,000 spots when he won in his first PGA Tour made cut as an amateur, the largest jump in the history of the rankings.
For Kim, it’s the first time he’s improved his ranking since 2011, his last full season on the PGA Tour.
Kim disappeared for 11 years from competitive golf, developing a cult-hero-like status before he resurfaced in March of this year, signing a deal with LIV Golf as one of the league’s Wildcard players. The 39-year-old played in 11 LIV Golf events this season, with his best finish coming at LIV Golf Greenbrier with a 36th-place showing in a 54-man field. He earned no points in the season-long standings.
The six-time PGA Tour winner’s contract with LIV was reportedly for one year.
