Four-time PGA Tour winner Si Woo Kim is having the best season of his career, and it still hasn’t put a dent in Scottie Scheffler’s lead. Ahead of the Tour Championship, a reporter asked Kim jokingly to put a dollar figure on how much he’s lost to Scottie Scheffler in 2026. The South Korean didn’t hesitate before turning the question into one of East Lake’s better one-liners this week.
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“I can’t say how much I lost, but I think I’m paying for his second son. All the diapers,” he says, matching the humor, laughing.
It’s a clear joke, but it has a calculation behind it. Kim arrives at the Tour Championship, number five in the FedEx Cup standings, his best regular-season finish of the year. Yet he’s still nowhere near Scheffler’s financial orbit. Scheffler earned over $20 million in official on-course earnings before the postseason. He then locked up a $23 million FedEx Cup bonus after his eight-shot romp at the FedEx St. Jude Championship. Kim’s bonus, on the other hand, for finishing fifth, sits at $5.4 million, a strong number by most standards but a fraction of what the world number one has collected.
The bigger story at the press conference was why Kim is even in the position to make that joke. Answering a reporter’s question as to why his results lagged in the previous year and what changed in 2026, he said,
“I think I played good last year too, but I was struggling with putting yips pretty much the last 10 years. Some weeks going, some weeks coming back, like shaking hands during putting. So I was struggling with that. So I was using a broomstick. The first year I got the broomstick, I won the Sony Open after the Presidents Cup. Now, without the putting yips, I think I can play good.”
With his inconsistent putting and challenges capitalizing on fairways, Kim struggled on the course last year, making only 22 cuts out of 30 starts. Moreover, he had only 1 top-five finish and 3 top-ten finishes. Kim battled putting yips for 10 years, shaking during strokes, until adopting a broomstick putter after the Presidents Cup.
“After that, totally got out of the shaking hands,” he had said.
Further, when comparing his climb to last year, Kim entered the 2025 Wyndham Championship ranked 46th in FedEx Cup points, needing a top-30 finish in FedEx Cup standings to qualify for the Tour Championship. Although he finished tied for 14th at 8-under par, it didn’t improve his FedEx ranking much—bringing it down to 41—making him ineligible for the Tour Championship.
This week’s appearance alongside countryman Tom Kim marks the first time since 2023 that Kim has played his way back to East Lake. Now, whether he can close the gap further with Scheffler remains to be seen.