Odds n' Ends

Baseball Cards
Although I appreciate the great UpperDeck cards that feature, among many other golfers, some of the Korean stars, I've always thought it would be neat to have a set of SeoulSisters golf cards that catalogued all the Korean golfers on the LPGA tour (or at least the exempt ones).

But then I had a twisted idea: what if I created a set of Seoul Sisters baseball cards? And that's just what I did. It so happens that I have a collection of shots of several Sisters throwing out ceremonial first pitches at various baseball games (Soo-Yun Kang even hit a pitch thrown by Shi Hyun Ahn in one case!). So in my bizarro world, imagine that the Sisters are celebrated for these feats of athletic prowess!

Enjoy! (P.S. - leave it to Kangsy to dress like she's going out for a night on the town when she shows up to hit a ceremonial baseball!).

Introducing Se Ri ... Park?
One of the oddest things I've found when surfing the web was this collection of photos. They were unlabeled, so I don't know exactly where this is. But I'm assuming that the good citizens of Daejeon, in honor of their favorite daughter Se Ri Pak, have erected a rather monumental park in her honor. As you can see from the photos, the shrine includes a nice statue of Se Ri hitting out of the water, just like she did at the '98 US Women's Open (in a nice touch, they put the statue itself into a real pool of water). She is looking towards a wall with all sorts of doubtless flattering info carved into it about Se Ri. As you can tell from the one photo, the name of this park is... Se Ri Park! (Or perhaps they just chose to anglicize her name that way, and that's not the name of the park at all! But I for one appreciate a good pun, so I'm going to assume they meant to name the park that way!).

So you tell me... does Annika Sorenstam have a neato statue garden like this? Does any woman golfer? Yay Se Ri!

The Ceremonial Garden was not enough
Of course, dedicating a nice statue garden to Se Ri is all well and good, but that is not nearly enough to fully celebrate how important the mightiest Seoul Sister is to the Korean people. So in addition, a set of commemorative coins were released in Korea to celebrate Ms. Pak. As you can see from the photos at right, the coins also use the US Women's Open, as well as her entire rookie year, as a theme for the set. I'm not sure what the occasion was for releasing the coins, but they sure do look, purty, don't they?

(And no, I unfortunately don't know how you can get a hold of your own set. But if I come across that info, I will surely let you all know!).

SeoulSisters Calendar
Briefly I had an idea of doing a Seoul Sisters 2006 calendar. It never got past a few mock-ups. But in case you are interested, here they are. The original idea was to present 12 photos of the Sisters in casual situations, as opposed to on the golf course. I threw the photo of JJ making the heart shape into February, because it just fit the Valentine's Day theme so well (Hee-Won and her hubby would also work). By the same token, I imagine that December would have been Se Ri in her Santa Claus attire. In any event, you can kinda see what a SeoulSisters calendar might look like.

Korean Magazine photos
A Korean news magazine called Siso Journal featured two big articles about Korean women golfers in their August 16, 2005 issue. The first article was about Jeong Jang, who had won the Women's British Open only a few weeks earlier. It talked about some of JJ's history, and revealed a few interesting facts. For instance, it said that JJ had always been well aware of her height, and was worried that it would limit her prospects as a golfer. Her father took her to watch Alison Nicholas give a clinic in Korea in 1997, shortly after Nicholas had won the US Women's Open. Nicholas, a British Woman, was virtually the same height as JJ. When Jang saw that, she decided that she, too, could be a successful golfer.

The second article was a general survey of some of the upcoming young guns in the game. Among those profiled were Kyeong Bae, Seon-Hwa Lee, Ji Ae Shin (an amateur who won on the KLPGA tour last year, and who won the 2006 Kosaido Taiwan-Japanese Friendship Tournament on January 21, 2006), and Jane Park. Below you can see what the pages of the article looked like by clicking on the thumbnails to enlarge.