The PGA Tour plans to restart its season June 11 after halting due to the coronavirus pandemic. Each day until then, we'll highlight key moments, people, or facts relating to where we are in the countdown.
It's the greatest round of golf ever recorded.
No, it's not Johnny Miller's 63 at Oakmont to claim the 1973 U.S. Open. And it's not any of the iconic final rounds at Augusta to win the Masters.
Rather, the best 18-hole performance in golf apparently belongs to former North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, who fired a 38-under-par 34 with five aces in his first-ever round.
Let that sink in for a second.
The score, obviously, comes with a giant asterisk, but the most shocking part of the late dictator's epic day on the course is the fact that it wasn't part of an elaborate scheme or cover-up story to promote Kim. Instead, it was simply a misunderstanding of how scoring in golf works, reports Golf.com's Josh Sens.
Whoever was in charge of Kim's score marked down a "1" for every bogey that was made and a "2" for every double-bogey, the club manager of Pyongyang Golf Course told Sens. While it's not the conventional way to add up a score, this relative-to-par system does make sense.
However, once the scorecard fell into the hands of North Korean media, Kim's score drastically improved. According to Sens, the news agency reporting on the dictator's score read the five "1s" as hole-in-ones and the day's total as 34.
Once this news got out, nobody inside North Korea was going to argue otherwise. You could even make the case that the actual recorded score of 34-over for Kim's first-ever round of golf was unrealistic in itself.
The scoring slipup provided two things: the belief within North Korea that Kim Jong Il was the greatest golfer of all time, and a story to give the rest of the golf world a good laugh.
