Tom Kim Fell In The Mud At The PGA Championship And Had To Take A Bath In A Creek

The 2023 PGA Championship got started on Thursday, and conditions at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, New York were extremely difficult.

The course was set up more like a U.S. Open than a typical PGA Championship, meaning birdies were hard to come by, par was a great score, and the most important thing to give yourself a chance at a decent number was keeping the ball in the fairway. The rough was much-talked about coming into the week, with the ball settling to the bottom of very thick rough that made it nearly impossible to control a shot, but it wasn’t the only deterrent on the golf course for wayward shots.

A creek runs throughout Oak Hill, including going up the length of the long, par-4 sixth. Off to the right of the creek on the sixth hole is a marsh area that’s dry enough in spots to potentially play out of, but very wet and muddy in others. Tom Kim learned the latter part of that the hard way late in his round, as he had pushed his tee shot right and tried to go see if he could play it. In the process, he fell in the mud, getting covered over his entire arms and legs, leading to one of the funniest two minutes you’ll ever see on a golf broadcast.

The ESPN broadcast was, likewise, rolling in laughter as Kim extricated himself from the marsh and proceeded to go take a bath in the creek to get as much mud off of him as possible — where it appeared he might’ve fallen in as well. He managed to, somehow, scramble to make a bogey on the hole despite the disaster in the mud and needing to take a drop, playing the rest of the way in just his quarter-zip with no shirt underneath. Kim’s adventure may serve as a lesson to the rest of the field that even if it looks playable right of the creek on 6, you might just want to take your drop rather than trying to play out of the hazard.

UPDATE: Tom had hoped his fall might have gone unnoticed, and had an incredible reaction to learning he had gone viral.