She says that while many people assume that Japanese golfers are the same as Koreans in a practicing context, in fact, the two have relatively little in common.
At her first Japanese tournament, Shin picked up a bucket of 40 balls and devoted the first 30 to her chipping when her caddie intervened. "Aren’t you going to practice your long game?" he queried.
"What do you mean," Shin returned.
"Well," he explained, "you only have 10 balls left and it’s against the rules to hit more than 40."
The above, hazards the player, accounts for why the Japanese spend a higher percentage of their time in the gym.
On a rather different topic, Shin does not harbour any resentment towards Caroline Bivens, the former CEO of the LPGA who demanded that Koreans should learn English if they wanted to stay on the tour.
Though there were Westerners who were concerned that their CEO would make so discriminatory a remark, they did not disagree with the message. In particular, they concurred with Bivens’ comments about the Koreans not always pulling their weight in terms of giving pro-am partners a good day: they were using the occasions more as practice rounds for themselves.
"English is good for us," maintains Shin. "When you can speak it, you can make more jokes with pro-am partners and have more fun. Se Ri Pak helped us with this, telling us everything she learned in her early years on tour." Shin also helped herself by spending a winter in Australia polishing her chips and her English chat at the same time.
It was the mother of Korean-born, New Zealand amateur sensation Lydia Ko who, during the course of last year’s Ricoh Women’s British Open, advanced the idea that Koreans were particularly well-built for golf. She said as much during the storms which assailed the players in a week in which her daughter won the Silver Medal and Shin captured the championship itself.
Shin was not about to disagree: “We are well-built and small and we have good physical control,” she nodded.
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