Golf: Work ethic pays off for Chung

She may be just 15, but Enu Chung already has a golf game to make grown men weep with envy.

Chung's uncommon talents have earned her a handicap of plus 0.8 and seen her quickly mature from being a child prodigy to a young woman in a hurry to fulfil her dreams.

Korean-born Chung will achieve a career milestone in May when she makes her debut for the national senior amateur women's team in the Tasman Cup against Australia.

She will become the youngest female golfer to play for this country at senior level, and one week later will return to the country of her birth for the biennial Queen Sirikit Cup Asia-Pacific event as part of New Zealand's three-strong team.

Ranked No 2 in New Zealand, the Auckland teenager's promotion owes much to a ferocious work ethic, and marks a changing of the guard in the women's game.

She is at the forefront of a quiet revolution - which has already swept across many other countries and is now taking place here - of precociously talented youngsters elbowing aside the older generation.

Chung's success has not been gifted to her. Golfing legend Ben Hogan was said to practise so long and hard that his hands bled.

Chung doesn't like the sight of blood but she, too, works tirelessly on her game.

A normal week will see her rise each day at 5am for breakfast before starting a daily one-hour fitness session in a Newmarket gymnasium.

It's then off to the Manukau Golf Club, where she can be found from 7.30am to 4pm as she devotes her body, mind and soul to the pursuit of excellence.

Once home she buries her head in books for a minimum of three hours as she follows a correspondence course for her fifth-form NCEA qualifications, as well as studying for American Scholastic Aptitude Tests - examinations which she hopes will help her to win a scholarship to a US college in two to three years.

She took up golf soon after her family emigrated in 1997 from Seoul where her father John, a physical education schoolteacher, owned a driving range.

Cherry Kingham, a New Zealand selector, first set eyes on Chung in 1999 when as an 11-year-old, she was on duty for an Auckland junior under-19 side against Waikato.

What made Kingham, then an Auckland selector, stop in her tracks was the prodigious length the girl managed to extract.

"She could hit it a country mile. She got it right out there," Kingham said.

"She hit it so far she wouldn't know how far she hit it. She was forever chipping off the back of greens."

Over and above Chung's impressive length, Kingham was taken aback at the technical aspects of the youngster's swing.

"She sort of had a Kiwi swing as distinct to an Asian swing. "The Asians tend to step back off the ball - we call it swaying. They take the club back and their bodies go with them. There's a lot of upper body movement before the club comes down and sweeps through the ball.

"But Enu stood there, turned her legs and hit the ball, keeping a solid foundation and keeping her head over the ball."

Since that time Chung has been groomed for bigger and brighter things alongside the adults.

"We were running short of players within the Auckland district so the next time we went away, for a quadrangular event in Whangarei, we took Enu and another little Asian girl [Yu Jin Bang, who has since gone to the US] away with us," Kingham said.

Chung has been in the Auckland senior squad since.

In 2001 Chung, at 13, made her debut for Auckland at the interprovincial championships, and last year she played at No 1 for the province.

"She has the ability to go as far as she wants to go in the game," Kingham said.

That sentiment is supported by Geoff Smart, the coaching director for Women's Golf New Zealand.

"She's a tremendous talent. I've got a lot of respect for her. She's been very impressive since she was 13 when we first got her in our development programme," Smart said.

"She's performed very well in open company, which is encouraging for us."

Chung's latest assignment was the national strokeplay championships in Wellington where she finished a commendable fourth with a four-round card of one-over 293 last Sunday.

Chung's burning ambition is to make a living on the LPGA Tour in the United States.

Asked whether she was proud of herself after earning national recognition, Chung's response gave some hint of her priorities: "No ... not yet."

- NZPA