Review: Swinging from My Heels

By Matt Cooper Last updated: 26th July 2010

If you want a sense of what you'll learn about Christina Kim in Swinging from My Heels: Confessions of an LPGA Star, flick through the photographs.

Normally that sort of instruction would be a slight on any book, but not in this case (or, at least, it isn't remotely intended to be).

Because in those brightly coloured, glossy pages is a taster of what's to come in the text: you'll see that Christina Kim can be wild, glamorous, barking mad, funny, loud and highly emotional.

If the photographs give that impression; the words paint an even more vivid picture.

The first chapter is typical because it doesn't so much introduce you to Christina Kim's world as hurl you in there head first with a raw and honest description of the breakdown of a relationship and the tearful effect it had on the start of her 2009 season.

For this (very) English reader it prompted me to undertake an extremely competent impression of Hugh Grant's favourite (or only) role: blushing, twitching, umming and erring, pulling at my collar and generally hoping that Kim would start writing about golf sooner rather than later.

Okay, I'm exaggerating, because, aside from anything else, it is Kim's candour that makes the book stand out from the crowd of sporting autobiographies.

And of course the alternative - a detailed factual analysis of the golfing season - is not what the reader wants (especially this reader who recently encountered an autobiography which logged the Greens in Regulation, and every other stat, for every round, in every year, throughout a 30 year career).

We do need the results, but to accompany them we don't need dull stats; we want the feelings, emotions and stories that surround and inform those results.

Which is why the extraordinary tale of Kim's introduction to the game is so interesting: when she was 11-years-old her father returned home with a club, threw down some astroturf and told her to swing the club. Once she had done it once, he told her to repeat it.

499 times.

And for the next month she, together with her brother and sister, spent two hours every evening swinging the club 500 times.

Only then did her father introduce her to a driving range: "It was like the clouds parted and the angels were singing and I finally understood there was a point to all of this."

What followed was a long and sometimes arduous father-daughter journey which ultimately led to a first LPGA victory - and to the final photograph in the book which shows Kim collapsing to her knees, her father alongside ready to embrace her.

The open way Kim talks about her family is reflected in just about every aspect of tour life: sex, body image, Korean golfers, friendships, slow play and poor etiquette (especially slow play and poor etiquette).

Many of these topics have been covered by other reviews but one hasn't and from a European perspective it is of great interest because late in the 2009 season she travelled to Milan for the Italian Open.

It was a period of manic activity and she threw herself into the culture of Rome, Florence and Milan.

Does the story of her spending "a full half hour staring at the Botticelli painting The Birth of Venus and the tears flowed" confirm or deny our preconceived notions of what Christina Kim is really like?

I think it is a bit of both - yes, a bit of a loony, but also a rather smart and educated one.

Once she had put the camera away and returned to the golf, she found herself, "like an anthropologist observing the differences between the LET and the LPGA."

Two aspects stood out: "the shorter workdays amongst the European players," and, when the pay cheque arrived, learning that "playing the LET full-time would definitely curtail my Gucci habit."

As it happens I read this book on a flight to an LET event in Tenerife and at the end of it I genuinely felt that I had spent three hours on a flight listening to Christina Kim (in the best possible way I hasten to add).

Whether readers genuinely need to "hear" Christina's voice is possibly a moot point (we probably just need to "think" it sounds like her) but, when I was in Tenerife, I asked a friend of hers if Alan Shipnuck had truly captured her spirit.

"Oh yes," she said, rolling her eyes a little, a knowing smile slipping across her face. "He did that all right."

It was as good a review as any.