The Top 5 Asian Players - Number 3 Masashi Ozaki and Number 4 K.J. Choi
Number 3: Masashi Ozaki
On number 3 we have another Japanese player; the great Masashi Ozaki. Ozaki is unarguably one of the best players that the Japan Golf Tour has ever seen. He has set a record by leading the money list a grand total of 12 times.
Jumbo, a nickname due to his tall frame, has won the Japan Tour an unbelievable 94 times. This figure is 40 more than the second highest tally. Ozaki has a total of more than 110 tournament wins throughout his golfing career.
What many people do not know is that Ozaki, until 1967, was a professional baseball pitcher with the Nishitetsu Lions. However, he turned to playing professional golf at the age of 23 and won his first Japan PGA Championship the following year.
Although Jumbo was a huge success in his homeland, he was never able to translate this success on an international level. The reason behind this remains to date one of the biggest mysteries of golf. Perhaps Ozaki was simply not playing anywhere but on his
home turf. Anyone who has followed the great player’s career would agree with us when we say that his absence on the international scene is a great loss to the game of golf.
Masashi “Jumbo” Ozaki, 63, still plays on the Japanese tour and although his last victory was in 2002; he still remains the player with the most wins.
This year it was announced that the golfer will be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2011; he was voted in through international ballot. Jumbo has only one victory outside the Japanese border and expressed his regrets over the fact in his recent
press conference. “My only regret is not playing more outside of Japan, but I dedicated my life to Japanese golf and am extremely grateful the voters thought I was worthy of this honor.”
Ozaki is the fourth Japanese player to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. He has two brothers, Joe and Jet, who also play professional golf.
Number 4: Choi Kyung-Ju
K.J. Choi garbs the fourth place on our charts. The golfer’s actual name is Choi Kyung-Ju and is the most successful South Korean male golfer.
K.J. comes from very humble origins (his father was a fisherman) and picked up his first club at the age of 16. Like his predecessor on this list Jumbo, K.J. also did not start out as a professional golfer. Known as “The Tank”, Choi was originally a weight
lifter. In fact he was so strong that at the age of only 13 he could squat an amazing 330 pounds.
The story of K.J. becoming interested in professional golf goes a little something like this: His PE teacher thought the young boy was too small to be a lifter and saw a golfer’s body instead. He gave the young Choi a book on golf telling him “If you become
a professional golfer there's a good future ahead of you”.
The Tank credits most of his success to this incident and the little book that changed his life. What book was this? It was Jack Nicklaus’s “My Way” about the games fundamentals of the game and Choi has never looked back since that day.
His first professional victory was at the Korean Open in 1996. His two Japan Golf Tour victories in 1999 cemented his place in the world of golf. He qualified for the PGA tour in the same year becoming the only Asian among the world’s top 10 golfers and
the only South Korean to win a PGA Tour card. It was in August 2007 that he reached the top 10 of the Official World Golf Rankings for the first time.
After he won his 7th PGA tour in 2008, Choi donated $320000 out of his earnings to the families of the victims of a warehouse fire in Seoul, which claimed the lives of 40 people. This is not the first time the golfer has given donations to a charity;
he has been doing charity work since he joined a Christian Church in 1996.
March 2008 saw Choi reaching the fifth place in the rankings and he won his fourth title on the Asian Tour in Malaysia the following year.
K.J. “The Tank” Choi is married to his longtime sweetheart Kim and the couple has three children. They live near fellow South Korean and PGA player Yang Yong-eun in Southlake, Texas.
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