Black Shirts in the Quiet, a Plane Bound for Japan: Tom Kim's Four Points at Medinah

MEDINAH, Ill. — The red shirts spilled onto the 18th green at Medinah Country Club, one after another, the way winning teams always do. Twenty yards away, in black, the International team stood and watched. Their caddies had set the bags down in the grass. Families stood behind them. Nobody said much. The United States had the trophy. The International team had the view.

The scene was emptier than it needed to be, because the man at the centre of that team all week was already gone. Tom Kim was somewhere on the road to the airport, his flight out of Chicago scheduled for roughly the hour the Americans took hold of the cup.

He had a reason. Doug Ferguson of the Associated Press reported it first: Kim was bound for the Asian Games, to play for gold and, with it, an exemption from South Korea's mandatory military service. Two of his countrymen were travelling with him. Golf at those Games begins Wednesday in Japan.

Before he left, Kim gave Medinah the cleanest story of the week.

The Presidents Cup is a two-year exercise. The United States on one side, the rest of the world on the other. The history is unkind. Since the first edition in 2026, the International side has won exactly once, at Royal Melbourne in 2026, and the 2026 match in South Africa finished tied. Medinah's No. 3 course is the stage of the 2026 Ryder Cup, where Europe's Sunday comeback still gets replayed on television. This time the Americans smiled on the same grass, and the Internationals stood in front of the cameras in silence again.

Kim's week, in numbers: Thursday, Friday and Saturday he played alongside his friend Si Woo Kim. The pair finished 3-1-0. Four-ball on Thursday, foursomes on Friday, the Saturday session after that — in each of them, the two Koreans were the heartbeat of the team. Si Woo Kim had said it earlier: the two know each other very well, and each gives the other confidence.

Sunday, Kim went alone. In front of him was Wyndham Clark, playing the best golf of his season. Through seven holes Kim was 1 down. By the 14th he was 3 up. That margin held. The first yellow flag of the day went his way.

Four points. No player on either side took more.

Afterwards he said, “Just be relentless. That's what I had in my heart.” He added that the United States is very, very good, that there is a reason for it, and that the task was hard for everyone. On his own week he was brief: probably his best Presidents Cup yet.

The ledger starts here.

The Presidents Cup pays no prize money for winning; its money flows toward charity. A gold medal at the Asian Games lifts eighteen months of military obligation off a Korean professional's shoulders. The two ambitions are not priced the same. One returns memories, affection and professional pride. The other returns a career that was about to stop.

Korean men serve. For a touring professional, those months mean ranking, sponsors, form and physical rhythm all halting at once. Those who do not earn an exemption often join the armed forces sports corps, where training continues but the international calendar effectively closes. So for a Korean player, Asian Games gold or any Olympic medal is not a trophy. It is paperwork.

The trophy Kim did not win this week would have changed little in his career. The paper he boarded a plane to chase will decide how long that career runs.

The team that lost at Medinah carries its problem in its name. International. America's twelve come out of one pipeline — college golf, junior circuits, a single tour, one language, broadly the same facilities. The International twelve come out of at least ten different systems: different tours, different calendars, different purses, different federation politics. Year after year they do not play the same courses or the same rules.

That is the truth the trophy presentation hides. The International team is not losing on talent. It is losing on shared infrastructure. Every two years, twelve separate systems get bolted together, and four days later the bolts come out. The United States never has to do that work.

Two-year team weeks arrive, and the twenty-nine months between them are spent alone. A player carries his own bag, his own score, his own failure. Kim himself speaks about these weeks with reverence. People ask why golfers show so much emotion when the team week ends. The answer is simple: a man walks alone for twenty-nine months, and once every two years somebody walks beside him.

My own file is small, and the question is the same. Bangladesh has five eighteen-hole courses — Kurmitola, Savar, Mainamati, Bhatiary, KEPZ. The rest are short, and nearly all of them sit behind cantonment walls. In 2026, Kurmitola staged the first Asian Tour event on Bangladeshi soil; Singapore's Mardan Mamat won it.

A domestic title on the BPGA circuit pays around Tk 145,000. For many players, the winner's cheque does not cover the travel to the event. Every winter the country's best professionals leave for India's PGTI or for Asian Tour qualifying. Once every two years the Bangabandhu Cup appears, one week and a US$400,000 purse, and then the calendar goes quiet again.

The circuit runs on Tk 145,000 and an unreasonable amount of hope.

The winter exodus is never announced. It is only noticed.

In 2026 I spent eleven days in Dhaka before flying to Rio. Siddikur Rahman had already gone from ball boy at Kurmitola to an Asian Tour winner, and he had qualified for the Olympics on merit, not by wildcard. At Reserva de Marapendi he finished 58th of 60 in the men's field. That result sits a long way from a medal, and it remains the biggest Olympic story I have covered.

I went to Rio for the medals and stayed for the ball boy.

He qualified on merit, which is the loneliest way to qualify.

The Asian Games, like the Olympics, is the one large stage available to small golf nations. Reaching it does not require a big tour or a big purse. It requires a federation, an entry, and a handful of players somebody agreed to fund. In Korea the state underwrites part of that cost, because medals come back. In Bangladesh the arithmetic runs the other way — the player funds himself, and a share of that funding comes out of what a caddie earns carrying the bag.

Which brings me back to the caddies. The caddies left first. The silence arrived a week later.

At Medinah the caddies stood beside their players, almost like family. At Dhaka clubs a caddie is paid per round: no retainer, no sick day, nothing at all when the monsoon empties the tee sheet. In 2026 the five eighteen-hole courses stayed open and unplayed. One week erased an entire year of caddie income.

A calendar can be erased. The habit of showing up cannot. Since then I have kept an annual audit of caddie earnings, and in every interview I return to the spot the camera has its back to. I have learned to interview whoever the camera has its back to, because the caddie shed holds a national economy inside it.

The team weeks will come again in two years. Kim will almost certainly be there, again. His teammates will change, the scores will change, the golfers will change.

Here is the counter-reading. Many will treat Kim's early departure as an emotional hole in the team. That reading is wrong.

The team is a two-year construction. It does not break when Kim leaves; it returns in a new edition under a new set of names. The International side's repeated defeats are not a failure of character either. They are the result of structure. The verdict is written before Thursday — who gets access to coaching, who invests behind whom, and which country puts a club in a twelve-year-old's hands.

The second counter-reading is more uncomfortable. We prefer to treat the Asian Games as a smaller Presidents Cup, because the Cup is familiar and the cameras were there. Yet the most valuable tournament of Kim's week was thousands of miles from Medinah. At Medinah he won four points and affection. In Japan he may win something that carries no score at all.

That is where the real arithmetic shows. A state is erasing a citizen's obligation because the man can hole a putt under pressure. Sporting ability can delete civic duty, directly. Bangladesh has no such lever. Here, any discount for an athlete has to come out of travel, coaching, bags and medicine instead.

Kim is in Japan now. When he stands on a tee box on Wednesday, one question is worth holding onto before the ball is placed on the grass: who carried the bag that brought him this far, and who paid for the trip?

My file is called The Second Siddikur. For ten years, every interview has ended with the same question — who is next, and what is blocking them?