YE Yang's triumph at US PGA watershed for Asian golfers ?

[Richard Pascoe]

For more years than Asian tour professionals care to remember, their glory has been of the reflected kind.

They could point to the Indian ancestry of Fijian-born Vijay Singh, or to Tiger Woods's Thai mother, Kutilda, but never, until YE Yang hoisted his bag aloft on Hazeltine's 18th green, did they have a home-grown men's champion to cheer.

On Jeju Island, South Korea, YH Yang had stayed up all night to watch his little brother "reach the peak" of the sport, while in Seoul YE was already being celebrated as the "Tiger killer". The repercussions of a momentous day in Minnesota were not merely pan-Korean, but pan-continental. Yang's triumph was a watershed felt from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, a payback for decades of investment and frustrated expectation.

It was an accomplishment 38 years in gestation, from when Taiwanese journeyman Lu Liang-Huan came within one shot of beating Lee Trevino to win the 1971 Open at Birkdale. Golf belonged to a different world then, to a time when Taiwan was still known as Formosa and when Ryo Ishikawa had not even been born.

Ishikawa? He, you may recall, was the sharply-cropped, sharply-dressed 19 year-old poster boy for Asian golf who cut such a swathe across Turnberry last month. He was the figure, not Yang, whom all of Japan expected to end the long drought; indeed, when he found himself paired with Woods for the first two rounds of the Open there appeared to be more Japanese reporters on the Ailsa course than American.

At least in Yang, who only took up golf at 19 from a background of agricultural poverty, the legion of Japanese, Korea, Thai and Indian players competing on some of the world's courses, and demonstrating frightening levels of technical aptitude, now have a definite target to emulate.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/golf/uspga/6043908/YE-Yangs-triump...