By Corina Knoll
Photographs by Eric Sueyoshi
Makeup by Ra Beauty Core
Hair by Jin Hee Jang

You could say Angela Park is charmingly honest. The way 19-year-olds tend to be. You could say that, but you’d be beating around the bush, which is something the golfer just doesn’t do.

Take, for instance, our first phone conversation.

“I don’t want to spend my whole day there,” she says when she learns the details of our impending photo shoot and interview. “I still want to be able to do something fun.”

Got it. The call time is switched, and Angela will be freed two hours earlier.

The next morning we’re 35 miles outside of Los Angeles at Robinson Ranch Golf Club, and Angela is gussied up in a flirty cocktail dress. She’s the picture of angelic girlishness, but her spitfire mouth is running gleefully.

Gripping her favorite club head cover — a fuzzy version of that famous flying cartoon squirrel — she asks, “Did you watch ‘Rocky and Bullwinkle’? Are you that old?”

Later, taking notice of the photographer tripping over himself while multitasking, she points out, “At my last photo shoot, it was the photographer’s assistant who was doing all the running around.”

And when asked to hold a golf club like a baseball bat, she sighs, “I hate this pose.”

Then her giggle — let’s call it a nasal guffaw — kicks in, and a roguish grin appears.

“I’m really blunt.”

Duly noted.

***

This is how her caddie explains it, as well as her coach, her brother and even her first coach and his wife: Angela is direct. Angela knows what she wants, then pounces. Angela can be sweet and fun, but is unflinching.

The only person who doesn’t marvel over Angela’s tough-girl wit is Kyung Wook Park. Angela’s father.

He’s a rosy-cheeked man who sports a potbelly and spectacles, whose manner is pleasant, but words are brusque.

At Angela’s photo shoot, when one of the makeup artists tells him his daughter is a star, he laughs. “Is she?” he asks in Korean. “She’s not a star yet.”

See, Kyung Wook is all about tough love — maybe sometimes, too tough.

He thinks it has something to do with being born in North Korea at the height of the Korean War. The eldest of eight children, he served in the military, but then left for Brazil at age 24 in search of farming opportunities. In Sao Paolo he learned Portuguese, met his wife, opened an embroidery business, sent for his relatives and raised three boys: Alexander, Samuel and Paulo.

Then came Angela, six years after his youngest was born. “I think that’s why I’m a tomboy, because I was surrounded by these men,” she says. “My brothers treat me like a little boy. We always used to wrestle, things that guys do to guys.”

In 1994, the Parks decided it was time to head to America to give their children access to better schools. Angela was 9 years old. Her mother, Kyung Ran Lee, stayed behind to run the family business. She was supposed to join them when a new U.S. venture was established, but when that never happened, the next decade would find mother and daughter keeping in touch through long-distance phone calls and rare visits.

“I moved a lot the first couple years,” recalls Angela, who sometimes stayed at various hasukjibs, a living arrangement similar to a boarding house. “It was really hard at first, especially ‘cause I couldn’t speak the language very well. Every time I made a new friend, I would move.”

Her first memories of playing golf are bright, mostly because she liked meeting people on the course. She’d tag along with her brothers to the driving range after school until she began taking lessons.

“Physically, she was a very strong girl,” remembers her first coach, Jay Sinn, whose own daughter Pearl was already an LPGA member. “Her personality was very independent. She grew up with boys so she knew how to survive. And she handled her emotions. I never saw her cry.”

Jay’s wife, Sue, reached out to Angela, and would often whip up Korean meals for her after practice — even bought the preteen her first bra. “She always had tomboy clothes; she liked to eat everything; she loved the kimchi,” Sue recalls. “I have never seen a girl [with] such a strong mind; like, ‘If I don’t do it, there’s no one to look after me.’”

But as tough as Angela was, Sue worried Kyung Wook was tougher.

“You know how Korean fathers are: ‘If you don’t do what I tell you to do, that’s it.’ So every time we talk about Angela, that’s something that aches in my heart.”

Kyung Wook has always been a strict father. He values discipline and despises laziness. But it isn’t because he wants his children to be successful or obedient. He just wants them to live with humility and earn the respect of their peers.

So at age 11, when Angela was playing amateur tournaments and beating everyone in her age group, Kyung Wook acted as if he barely noticed.

“Aren’t you happy that I won?” Angela would ask.

“You’re not that good,” her father would respond. “Be humble. This was lucky, God gave it to you. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

He wanted Angela to see the bigger picture. That a win today didn’t matter tomorrow. That discipline would move you forward, but smugness would keep you stagnant.

During those early years, the two traveled to American Junior Golf Association events throughout the year, supported by whatever income Kyung Ran was managing to pull in at the factory. Kyung Wook had attempted to start a business in the States, but it never took off. Despite the financial strain, the parents believed that amateur experience was invaluable to Angela.

With Alexander in college, Samuel in the Marines and Paulo headed for the Navy, the family was geographically divided. Except for father and daughter. Which meant there was ample time to work on a sport she was quickly rising in.

She had fallen in love with the game that stoked the fire of her competitive spirit, but there were days when her father’s words were just too much. She hadn’t practiced hard enough, she needed to wake up earlier, she shouldn’t waste time with her friends. Her father spoke to her in the same way he had to his military sons. With unsullied frankness.

“My dad was really straightforward and very Koreanized,” she says. “It made me feel like I don’t have any emotions — it makes me feel like a guy too.”

When Angela was around 15, it occurred to Kyung Wook that there was maybe a different approach. He didn’t have a rude awakening or a moment of truth. He just started going to church more regularly and took time to rethink his parenting technique.

“Raising Angela, I did a lot of reflection,” he says about the change. “How do you communicate with your daughter so the things I say will be effective, but also comfort her? It’s an ongoing struggle for me to try to communicate with her, but I realized my job is to comfort her in times of need. I’m trying not to be so strict. I have more life experience and I’m trying to teach her that, but at the same time, I don’t want to be a demanding type of father.”

Angela recalls the conversion. “He changed a lot and started treating me with respect, which I’m really thankful for because if he didn’t change, I don’t think I would still be playing. I probably would have quit.”

Now she calls her father her only mentor and the chillest dad on the Tour. And while her father has little knowledge about the sport itself and blends into the background of her tournaments and lessons, unable to communicate in English with her peers and coaches, she credits him with her success.

“Everything my dad has told me to do, at the time I was like ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to do this, Dad, are you joking me? It’s such a bad idea.’ But now that I look back, I can’t really complain about anything he’s told me to do. Which is amazing because he has told me to do a lot of things in my life.”

The relationship is still, however, all about tough love. Kyung Wook won’t stop being brutally honest.

Angela shrugs it off.

“My dad is really the aggressive type, he doesn’t really care if it hurts your feelings, he’ll just say it to you.”

Then she adds, almost proudly, “I’m like that, too.”

***

Angela announced she was going pro at 17 years old.

A junior at Torrance High School, she had started to get letters from colleges bearing shiny golf scholarships. Her mother thought she should take them up on an education. Her father said to choose between school and golf, and to do one of them well.

Angela reasoned that college was for those in search of a path. If she had already found hers, why bother?

The next year she found herself juggling her senior year with the Futures Tour, a grueling six months of competition where the top five moneymakers receive exempt status for the next LPGA season.

“I would go to a tournament and do my assignments throughout the whole week, then come back, turn in my assignments and take a test.”

She missed her prom, her graduation. She stayed late after every tournament, practicing under the last rays of sunlight. When she had time, she’d write letters to her brothers, two of whom were deployed to the Middle East. She was lonely, but focused.

And then she placed eighth in earnings, just missing the cut. Her only remaining chance to earn a Tour card that year was at Q-school, the LPGA’s final qualifying tournament, a 90-hole, five-day event.

Two months before the competition, Angela and her father relocated to Orlando to prepare. Cards were available to the top 15 finishers in the field of 138. Angela was rock steady. She placed fifth.

“People get nervous because they know that they’re not ready for Q-school,” she says. “But when you come prepared and you come well practiced to the battleship, you’re not nervous because you know you’re going to do well.”

Afterward she visited LPGA headquarters and saw the list of Rookies of the Year. She jotted down her first goal for the season.

“I was like, it’s not a coincidence that everyone on that list has become successful, at least a majority of the people. I told myself I want to be on that list.”

The following February, Angela found herself in Hawaii on the north shore of Oahu teeing off as an official LPGA member. She stuck close to fellow rookie and friend Inbee Park, and pretended she didn’t feel nervous or awkward.

But there was a moment when she looked at the club in her hands, at the crowd behind the yellow rope, at the fairway stretched out ahead of her, at Se Ri, at Lorena, that she became acutely aware of where she had come from and what it meant to be on an island playing golf for a prize.

Then Angela did something she never does. She cried.

***

She got everyone’s attention at her second tournament. After the first round, she was tied for first with a 6-under-par 66. At her post-game interview, she looked out at the inquiring journalists and said, “I feel like Tiger Woods. He does this all the time, right?” They laughed, scribbled in their notebooks, and wrote about her when she finished tied for third.

Four months later, they would write about Angela again when she was leading after the first round of the U.S. Open, an LPGA major. She would eventually take second, tied with Lorena Ochoa and just edging out Se Ri Pak. It put her in major contention for Rookie of the Year, an honor she ended up winning by a landslide, with nearly double the points of her runner-up.

“People say, ‘What do you think (has made you so successful)?’ I’m like, probably the nine years I practiced my butt off. I mean, duh!”

When the season ended, Angela had missed only one cut, garnered six top-10 finishes and earned close to $1 million. Some of it went to pay for her brother’s college tuition and a chunk of it will probably be put down on a house for the family.

“My parents put a lot of money into me,” says Angela who doesn’t have an agent. “It’s my turn to try to help them out.”

Her mother will finally be able to leave the business in Brazil to follow Angela on the Tour, while her father will search for a different startup business in Los Angeles.

The living is easier now, but Angela heeds the words of Samuel, the brother to whom she feels closest. Samuel is sometimes as hard on her as her father. He’s the one that calls to harp on her performance. He wants her to play like there’s no money in the bank.

“Golf is a different crowd,” he explains. “I just want to make sure she remembers she came from working class. You always gotta remember where you came from.”

When she accepted the Rookie of the Year award at last month’s LPGA reception in Palm Beach, Fla., Angela’s speech demonstrated that she understood. In a black dress with polka dots, she addressed an elite crowd in English, Portuguese and Korean.

“This year was a culmination of a group effort. I am here because of my family,” she read. “I stand before you a humble daughter who is thankful for the love, sacrifice and affection of two parents who I dearly love. I am Angela Park, daughter of Lee Kyung and Park Kyung.”

Her caddie, Mike Hobbs, watched with pride from the audience. “She was definitely emotional about it,” he says during a phone conversation afterward, noting that Angela has the best attitude of anyone he’s ever worked for. The next day he e-mails this afterthought: “It takes someone special to be the best in the world. Angela is, without a doubt, one of those people.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by her current coach, Don Brown. “She can be as good as she wants to be,” he says. “She’s always been so far ahead of her time mentally — her composure on the golf course, the way she carries herself. She’s got a game of someone who’s been playing for 30 years.”

Not to mention a swing that’s pirouette pretty. PGA legend turned NBC sports analyst Johnny Miller calls it the best swing in golf, and predicts it will propel Angela to No. 1 in a few years.

Angela hasn’t dreamed that big yet. First, she’d like to add yardage to her drives and win a tournament. But she basks in Miller’s words. She knows it’s not just gratuitous color commentary.

Miller’s known for being blunt, too.

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