When Angela Park accepted this year’s award for LPGA Rookie of the Year,  it capped a decade of family separation and personal sacrifice to support her dream. It also meant that those thousands of disciplined practice rounds on the course had come to fruition. And with a stellar swing, nerves of steel and the mouth to back them up, this 19-year-old is just getting started.

 

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.