Tournaments depend on Kim to know score

By Bill Kwon

In golf's give-and-take world, David Kim is a giver. He volunteers his services to keep the scoreboard in more than 25 golf tournaments a year, including the Sony Open and the Turtle Bay Championship, two PGA Tour events.

David Kim, shown during last year's Sony Open in Hawai'i, will be back to keep score after he was recently sidelined by a kidney stone attack. Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser

Fortunately, despite spending several nights in emergency care, Kim didn't need surgery to remove the kidney stones. But the attack did keep him from doing his scoreboard duties in the season-ending Amatour championship and the Sony Open qualifying last week.

"I'm OK now. It's a matter of making an adjustment in my diet," said the 63-year-old Kim, who plans to show up for the Sony Open next month. Kim says he's ready to resume his score-keeping duties in the media center at the Waialae Country Club.

From then on, it'll be one tournament after tournament as usual for Kim, who keeps the scoreboard at the Hawai'i State Open, State Amateur, Rainbow Open, Manoa Cup, Maui Open, Waikoloa Open, Hilo Open, Oahu Country Club Invitational as well as the Army, Navy-Marine, Hickam and Barbers Point amateur championships.

Doing so is a labor of love for Kim, who works in the Honolulu Advertiser press room. Except for traveling expenses to the Neighbor Island tournaments, he does it for free.

It's because of a love of the game of golf. Neat printing penmanship also helps.

"To me, it's a service to the players. And they appreciate it," he says.

The love of golf didn't come easily at first for Kim, whose father, Say Young Kim, was a president of the Korean Golf Club in the late 1940s.

"I hated golf. As a kid, he used to drag me out on weekends to caddy for him at Moanalua," recalls Kim, who finally took up the game as a student at Iolani School

After his ninth grade year, he transferred to Roosevelt High School, where he met his wife to be, Amy. They were married on Jan. 14, 1959. It's a date he'll always remember because that was the date he was hired by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Kim played golf with the guys in the press room and got his handicap down to a six. Then he began working part-time at the Pearl Country Club in the cart shop in the early '80s.

That's where Kim first met golf official Norman Crowell, who kept the scoreboard for local tournaments such as the Manoa Cup. When Crowell died, Kim was asked to take over a lot of his scoreboard duties.

In much the same way that Crowell took over for Babe Carter, Kim is now continuing the local scoreboard-keeping tradition in which the only reward is a simple "thank you."

The Kims have two daughters, Christine and Wendy. Now retired, Amy also helps, reading the scorecard as Kim records the numbers for each player. In the Sony Open, it's 144 names for the first two rounds.

Kim has a lot of memories over the years, but one that will always stay with him, he says, is when Tiger Woods had his only O'ahu sighting as a member of the Stanford golf team in the John Burns Intercollegiate Invitational at the Kane'ohe Klipper.

"I got to see an up-and-coming superstar. That was nice," Kim said.

But recording scores for the nonsuperstars remains important to him, too.

Reach Bill Kwon at bkwon@aloha.net