Caddie leads team to back-to-back championships…”We have a great personality and will continue to grow”
Jung Yoon-ji in 2022 and Bang Shin-shil in 2023.
No player has ever lost two in a row or won two in a row at the E1 Charity Open. In its 11th year of competition, there have been 11 winners. However, there is a caddie who has won two years in a row. This year’s caddie, Jin Sung-yong, 19, backed by Bang Shin-shil, 23, shared the trophy with Jung Yoon-ji, 23, last year after a five-game tiebreaker.
Jin was working with Bang for the first time at the tournament, and he is known as a hard-nosed caddie in the golf world. He has famously backed Ahn Song-i and Jang Ha-na, and last year he backed Jung Yoon-ji to her first win.
The conditionally seeded Bang hadn’t hired a professional caddie until now, but he was so desperate to win that every tournament was an opportunity, and he reached out to Jin in his search for a professional caddie.
“His dad called me right before the tournament, and by my rough count, I’ve played about 10 tournaments this year, and he asked me if I’d be willing to caddie for him, since he’s playing with another player, so I said I’d just caddie for him, because I didn’t want him to have to go out without a caddie if things went wrong.”
There’s also a connection between Bang and Jin that she didn’t realize. He is a 23rd-year student at Sungkyunkwan University. Mr. Jin is number 94 in the same school and department as Bangshinsil. They are two years ahead of each other in college. That’s why Bangshinsil is very protective of Mr. Jin.
“When I give him a club or a ball, he gives it to me with both hands. People looked at me strangely, so I told him not to do that. But he said, ‘I learned this from my dad, so you can feel comfortable,'” she laughs.
For Bangshinsil, Jin’s biggest contribution to their chances of winning was mental care. Having already missed out on the title twice, he was nervous heading into the final round. It’s not surprising that a player with a chance to win the title would feel anxious.
“Since I was in the lead for one or two rounds, I might have doubts about whether I can really win, or I might imagine how great it would be to win,” says Jin. But those thoughts can make it worse. The last time I talked to him yesterday, he said, ‘Don’t think about anything, don’t worry, trust your uncle, just think about one hole, one hole.’ But he was so much calmer on the course than I thought he would be,” he recalled.
“It wasn’t until I hit my second shot on the last hole that I was like, ‘My heart is about to burst. I asked her, ‘Did your other sisters feel like this?’ She said, ‘Of course, we’re all the same, we’re all the same, and it’s not like you can make a bogey and still win,'” he added.
Meeting Bangsinsil was also a turning point for Jin. “At the beginning of this year, things weren’t going well and I thought about quitting caddying. But then I met Shin-Shil. After the first round, my wife called me. She said it was the first time I smiled on the course this year. I thought to myself, “This is why I caddied in the first place, to have fun.토토사이트
“He’s such a nice, polite player. I wondered if it was because of his good heart that he didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to win.” “He would have won even if someone other than me had caddied for him. When I first saw her from the side, I thought, ‘If she’s so good, why hasn’t she won?’ It’s not all about distance, but she’s one of the coolest girls I’ve ever seen,” he said, giving her a thumbs-up.
“After I won, she called me again, like, ‘Thank you,’ and I was like, ‘Don’t act like we’re not going to see each other again, we’ll see each other next time.’ And she was like, ‘Are you still going to be my caddie?’ I was like, ‘Of course. We’ll go together this year.” And he thanked me again, but I was actually more grateful to him.”