In a Class of Her Own

There is nothing remotely unmannerly about Park. The next thing to impress about her modus operandi at St Andrews was how, in the wake of her anticlimactic 69, she stayed around for as long as the media and the TV people wanted her and signed autographs for half the town. Not only that but she did it all again after a lacklustre second-round 73

She made the cut easily enough but finished outside the top 40.

There are Asian women golfers who, though they spend most of their time plying their trade in the States, can tell you little more about themselves than that they play golf and they shop, usually for jewellery and handbags. Miki Saiki, who spent much of the week on the leaderboard, is an example. She at one point owned to taking 50 pairs of earrings to every tournament - a fact which had people thinking that club selection must pale into insignificance against choosing the right pair of lobe accessories on any given day.

Park, thanks to her parents’ foresight in realising that she would enjoy her golfing life on the LPGA Tour more if she could converse in English as well as Korean, enjoys so much more than merely her very lucrative career.

Media and public alike are always going to concentrate on her putting - it is nothing short of phenomenal - than her personality. However, there is no shortage of that, whatever anyone might tell you.

How is this for a nice touch? In the week after she had won her first title of the year in Thailand, her sister competitors opened their lockers in Hawaii to find she had left each of them a handsome box of chocolates. True, her family owns a cookie company in Hawaii and she herself has won close to US$8 million, but she had made all the arrangements herself.