Crowned the PGA Tour of Australasia Order of Merit winner in his rookie season, Kiwi Kazuma Kobori now has the world’s best in his sights
I’m looking forward to playing in the Open Championship because I don’t really know what it’s going to be like. I’ve never played golf in Scotland or up in that part of the world, so I’m going to take it as it comes and have a blast.
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I hope Tiger’s playing; that would be pretty cool. I would like to see a bit of Cam Smith chipping as well. I just want to see these guys like Jon Rahm, ‘DJ’ (Dustin Johnson), Jordan [Spieth], ‘JT’ (Justin Thomas), Patrick Cantlay, Xander [Schauffele], Collin Morikawa; I just want to see how good they are. I’m just looking forward to playing with some seriously good golfers and then improving my game from there.
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I remember a little bit of growing up in Japan. I rode a lot of dirt bikes. My dad, Ryo, used to ride dirt bikes for a living, cross-country-type thing. I started riding when I was 2, loved that. It’s so fun but it’s a tough one because if you get injured, you get injured pretty good. Can’t really afford that when I have a heavy schedule on, especially with the Open Championship coming up.
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I was a good junior golfer, but I wasn’t like a superstar. Until my last year of amateur golf, I was never really a world-beater so it’s pretty good to see that the work I have been putting in has paid off.
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My dad has coached me and my sister (Ladies European Tour player Momoka Kobori) since we were little. He was really intense early on, but he was able to understand that he can’t do everything. Right now, we’re in a real good sweet spot where he overlooks my golf every day when I’m home and if we have a real technical problem that we need to figure out – which doesn’t happen often – I have another coach, Jay Carter, who coaches the New Zealand national team.
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My sister would get angry because she thought my dad was way harder on her than he was on me. She always brings this up. But I think that’s probably why her fundamentals are so solid. Her swing’s mint. I swing it crap compared to her.
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Momoka used to be a bit rigid. She would zap the flag, have 135 and go, Bang! That’s an 8-iron. She’s starting to get the idea that you have to incorporate external factors like wind, weather, temperature, altitude, firmness of the green and then the shot shape you’re hitting. That’s something I have kind of helped her with and she’s starting to understand it and implement it. She’s fundamentally probably way better than me, so if she gets that down, she’s going to be a pretty good golfer, too.
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When I’m playing my best golf, I’m seeing multiple shots and then picking the one that sets up well with the misses, too. That’s kind of how I play the game.
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Winning the NZ PGA in 2019 changed things in a massive way. That was my last year of high school, and I was such an underdog. One of the boys at the golf club told me that I wasn’t even on the TAB! That’s how much of an underdog I was and then I ended up winning. It doesn’t matter how you feel, what you think, what the other players are doing, you’ve always got a chance and that’s something that I still carry to this day.
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I wasn’t too nervous that week because I had nothing to lose. I was an amateur, so everything was a bonus. I Monday-qualified at the event, got in and shot 65-67 the first two rounds, which were my best-ever scores up to that point in my life. It’s a cool memory.
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Turning pro after that was in the discussion because I had a winner’s category. But because it was in the back end of the season, if I were to turn pro, I had another six months to play with. I was still in school so if I was going to turn pro it was going to be after that, maybe at the start of 2020.
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I played the Asia-Pacific Diamond Cup in Japan a couple of months after winning the NZ PGA and got absolutely smoked. That was my realisation of where I was at. I actually played OK that tournament and I just wasn’t ready for what was coming. Rough was thick, course was long, greens were fast, and it was nothing like I had experienced before.
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When you’re a kid, when you just start golf, you’re like, I want to make it on the PGA Tour. But then, as you keep playing golf, you soon realise the reality is that 0.003 per cent of golfers make it onto the PGA Tour. You go from, I want to do this to, This is actually going to be pretty hard. There was definitely a realisation and a bit of doubt of, Can I really do this?
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I like to have the odd game of poker. It’s very similar to golf. There’s so much strategy and then there’s an element of luck, too. You could hit a mint shot, hit a sprinkler head and send it flying out the back and make double. It’s the same with poker. You can make all the right plays, but you could get unlucky and end up in a bad position. But if you keep making the right plays, over time, you’re going to be a winning player.
