Two things were riding on Tom Kim’s putt - an Asian Games gold medal and the course of his young life.
When the 24-year-old golfer sank it, he put his hands on his head, overcome with emotion. “It’s a crazy feeling. I’m just glad it’s over,” Kim said afterward.
He was talking about a tournament. But for a South Korean man in professional sports, everyone knew there was more to it.
Gold meant he could continue his career without the 18 months or more away from elite competition that comes with active-duty military service.
In popular language, he had won a “military exemption,” although legally medalists are classified as arts and sports personnel rather than simply freed from all obligations. They remain in that status for 34 months and must perform 544 hours of public-interest service using their professional skills.
Kim was careful about how he described his victory. He said he had tried not to think about himself and instead wanted to bring a medal home for Korea.
Others were less guarded.
Some members of South Korea’s Asian Games football team celebrated their fourth consecutive gold by openly talking about escaping military duty. Captain Lee Ki-hyuk laughed during an interview that he would not be going to the military. Yang Min-hyuk said he had played with the military benefit as his single goal. Park Seung-soo posted a photograph of himself wearing the cap traditionally associated with soldiers finishing their service.
Baseball captain Noh Si-hwan also drew criticism after responding dismissively to questions surrounding a team packed with professionals competing against a largely amateur Japanese side.
The comments were clumsy. For young Korean men putting university, jobs, relationships and careers on hold to serve, watching celebrated athletes parade military relief as another trophy was bound to grate.
But Korea should resist making the athletes themselves the main target of its anger.
The real problem is the system that has made avoiding military service such an enormous prize that it can sit beside a gold medal in an athlete’s mind.
If the state tells a 20-something athlete that one game, one race or one putt can determine whether he sacrifices a crucial year and a half of his professional life, it should hardly be surprised when that athlete feels extraordinary relief after winning.
That is especially true in careers measured in painfully short windows.
Kim has said that practice is effectively his hobby and golf consumes most of his waking life. Such devotion is hardly unique to him. An elite athlete may spend childhood and adolescence constructing a body and technique around a single sport, knowing that the difference between world class and merely very good can disappear quickly.
Golf offers particularly stark examples. A professional can leave the sport ranked among the world’s best and discover on his return that his swing, competitive rhythm and ranking have all moved on without him.
But that does not make athletes more deserving than other Korean men. It does explain why military service carries a different professional cost for occupations in which peak performance is fleeting.
And that is precisely where the present system becomes harder to defend.
South Korea created special military arrangements for athletes in 1973, when the country was still striving for recognition on the world stage. The official rationale was to reward contributions to “national prestige and cultural development.” The rules were eventually narrowed in 1990 to Olympic medalists and Asian Games gold medalists, which remains the core sports standard today.
The logic belonged to a different Korea. Half a century later, South Korea does not require an Asian Games baseball title to prove itself to the world. It is an advanced economy, a technological power and one of Asia’s established sporting nations.
More importantly, the very meaning of “national prestige” has changed.
If winning an Asian Games gold medal promotes Korea sufficiently to justify protection from career interruption, what of a musician filling stadiums across five continents? What of an actor winning international awards, a filmmaker changing the global perception of Korean cinema, or a scientist whose research gives Korea technological influence?
The BTS comparison is unavoidable, not because pop stars should necessarily have been exempted, but because their service exposed the inconsistency in the old rationale.
Few contemporary Korean athletes can plausibly claim to have raised Korea’s global visibility more dramatically than BTS. Yet all seven members served.
The question therefore should not be whether footballers behaved badly enough to lose public sympathy, or whether Tom Kim chose more diplomatic words.
It should be whether a rule conceived in 1973 can still distinguish fairly between whose career interruption constitutes a national loss and whose does not.
There is another reason to resist moralizing about the athletes. Many of the loudest reactions treat their relief at avoiding military service as evidence of weak patriotism. That is too easy.
South Korea asks its young men to accept a serious disruption at precisely the age when careers are being built. Most do so quietly. Recognizing that burden does not demean military service or the soldiers performing it.
Quite the opposite. If the obligation is important enough to be compulsory, exceptions should be exceptionally difficult to justify, and this is where the current Asian Games rule looks increasingly arbitrary.
An Olympic bronze medal qualifies. An Asian Games silver does not. An Asian Games gold in a competition weakened by second-string or amateur opposition can qualify. Extraordinary achievement outside the approved sporting or artistic categories may count for nothing.
The line is clear administratively. It is much harder to defend philosophically.
Korea therefore needs more than another round of scolding athletes after the cameras catch an injudicious comment.
It needs to decide what the military-benefit system is actually for.
If it remains a reward for exceptional national contribution, the criteria should reflect modern Korea rather than the developmental state of the 1970s. A broader and more transparent points-based system, encompassing sustained achievement rather than a single medal, deserves serious consideration.
Another option is to abandon “national prestige” as a basis altogether and design a narrowly defined alternative-service framework for people whose careers are unusually vulnerable to long interruption — applying the principle consistently rather than according to whether their profession happens to be baseball, ballet or K-pop.
Neither answer will satisfy everyone. Military service is inseparable from questions of equality because the burden itself is unequal: it falls overwhelmingly on young men, and the economic and professional cost differs dramatically from one person to another.
But that makes consistency more important, not less.
Tom Kim may have expressed himself more carefully than some of his fellow gold medalists. His enormous relief nevertheless told the same story.
For South Korea’s male athletes, the Asian Games are not simply about standing on a podium. A medal can determine whether years of painstaking career momentum continue uninterrupted. Too much weight is placed on a putt, a goal or a baseball game.
The athletes did not create that pressure. Korea did.
And rather than asking its newest gold medalists to hide how relieved they are, the country should finally ask whether the system giving them so much to be relieved about still makes sense.
*The author is the managing editor of AJP.
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