Kim opens with 6-under 66 at Valero Texas Open

SAN ANTONIO -- If you want to engage South Korea's Si Woo Kim in conversation, don't ask him about golf; ask him about soccer. He's a rabid Manchester United fan, adopting the team as a teen because of Ji-Sung Park, soccer's most successful Asian player and current "Man U" team ambassador. About the only thing Kim likes more than rooting for his team is holing putts by the bucket load.

Kim had his flatstick dialed in during Thursday's opening round of the Valero Texas Open, pouring in five birdies in a six-hole stretch on his back nine en route to a 6-under 66, his lowest score in 11 rounds at TPC San Antonio AT&T Oaks Course and the first time he's broken 70 here.

Kim ranked second in Strokes Gained: Putting of the 72 players in the morning wave and credited his 105+ feet of putts made to using the Aim Point system for reading greens. Kim said he first took a green-reading class in Palm Springs five years ago, but hadn't used the AimPoint system in the past four years.

Kim is experiencing a breakthrough season on the greens. He's ranked No. 118, 179th and 151st in SGP the previous three seasons and has always lost strokes to the competition in the category. But this season his putter has been more friend than foe -- he's +.491, No. 29 on TOUR and top 10 in putting average (4th) overall putting average (3rd) and one-putt percentage (7th). Nevertheless, he said his putter had gone cold in his previous three starts and he toyed with using AimPoint on Wednesday for the first time in years.

"If I'm reading good," he said of the greens, "I can putt it well."

Easier said than done. Using the popular system, Kim determined a numerical value for the slope of the green and held up that many fingers less than an arm’s distance in front of his face to pick the line. If he feels like the putt will break left, he measures his fingers beginning at the right edge of the hole. It worked on Thursday morning. He made four of his eight birdies from more than 10 feet, the longest a 19-footer at No. 3. Kim's 6-under 66 led J.C. Poston by one stroke among the morning finishers.

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Kim, 23, is playing more consistent than in 2017, when he notched his last of two TOUR victories at THE PLAYERS after missing the cut in his previous seven starts. He recorded a T-4 at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in February and backed it up with a third-place finish at the Genesis Open. He's made 10 of 13 cuts this season, but his three previous pedestrian results had dented his confidence -- a missed cut at the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, T-56 at THE PLAYERS and bounced out of pool play at the World Golf Championships-Dell Tech Match Play.

Kim was just plodding along at even par through his first eight holes when he hit his stride. He made birdie on eight of his next 10 holes.

"You never know with him," said Bobby Brown, Kim's caddie for nearly two years. "When he's on, he makes the game look so easy."

And which version of Kim showed up on Thursday?

"It was one of those days where I just stayed out of his way because he was feeling it," Brown said.