While one player at the 3M Open was busy losing a hole-in-one to a golf ball with a mind of its own, Michael Kim was a few groups over quietly playing the best round of his life. He needed all of it — a bogey-free 12-under 59 that’s now the 15th official 59 in PGA Tour history.
Kim opened his round at TPC Twin Cities like he had somewhere to be, ripping off five straight birdies from the 3rd through the 7th. He added two more in a row on 9 and 10, another on 12, and then closed with a back-to-back pair on 15 and 16 for good measure. Twelve birdies. Zero bogeys. Zero drama, until the very end, when there was suddenly a lot of it.
On 17, he faced a 17-foot birdie putt with golf history sitting a shot away and drained it without much fuss. On 18, needing one more to seal a Michael Kim 59, he rolled in a 24-footer that shot him to the top of the leaderboard at 14 under. It’s the kind of finish that turns a very good round into a career-defining one — Kim entered the week having missed the cut in his last three PGA Tour starts, and left it as one of sixteen players to ever card a sub-60 round on Tour.
For context: the outright PGA Tour record is 58, held by Jim Furyk, so Kim finished one shot off the best round golf has ever officially seen, and somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand shots better than whatever most of us carded at our home course last weekend.
Two players, same tournament, same day, completely opposite golf stories — one got robbed by his own golf ball, the other got the round of his career. That’s the 3M Open for you. That’s golf, period.
This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through our links we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. See our affiliate disclosure for details.
For more info: ESPN