“The full 18 was never a rule. It was just the only format anyone offered you.” It is six o’clock on a Tuesday evening in Seoul. The city’s rush hour is just finding its second wind. But in Gangnam —…

“The best golf I ever played was three holes, no scorecard, a glass of something cold, and the right company.” There is a persistent lie at the heart of golf’s participation problem, and it goes like this: the game is…

It is 9:47 on a Tuesday night in Gangnam. The bars are filling. The restaurants are clearing their second sittings. And in a glass-fronted bay on the third floor of a building that also contains a nail salon, a convenience…

On 7 July 1998, Se Ri Pak won the US Women’s Open at Blackwolf Run in Wisconsin. She was twenty years old. She was the first South Korean woman to win a major championship. She won it in a sudden-death…

Korea took golf seriously from the inside in 1998, when Se Ri Pak’s victory produced a national investment in what Korean golf could become. Japan had been taking it seriously from the inside since the 1970s, through the quiet luxury…