DALLAS — Anthony Kim hasn't played competitive golf in 12 years.
Yet few golfers -- Tiger Woods and a few select others, if that many -- can generate as much social media buzz by simply being than Kim can.
The former rising star golfer, who has lived in Dallas (and maybe still does?), is rumored to be mulling a return to the game's top level, either on the LIV Tour or the PGA Tour.
That's according to Golf.com's Dylan Dethier, who reported on Thursday that Kim -- known as "golf's Yeti" because of the lore that surrounds his mysterious exit from the game in 2012 and the subsequent sightings of him that always seem to catch like wildfire on golf social media circles -- is now planning a return to professional golf.
Dethier reported that Kim has "spent the last few months in discussions with the PGA Tour, LIV and potential sponsors as he plots a way back," according to multiple sources.
That report, naturally, set Golf Twitter ablaze with the kind of buzz that might only be exceeded by a Tiger Woods return from injury.
Of course, if you're new to following the game -- or you're not a golf fan and wondering how Kim's name floated near the top of ESPN's homepage Thursday -- then you likely need an explanation about what the heck is even going on here.
Kim, now 38, is originally from La Quinta, California, just outside of Palm Springs. He played three years of college golf at the University of Oklahoma before turning pro in 2006.
He hit the ground running once turning pro, too: Playing on a sponsor's exemption in his first event as a pro at the Valero Texas Open, he finished in a tie for second place. He continued to establish himself on tour in 2007, and notched his first win in 2008 at the Wachovia Championship. Then he won again two months later at the AT&T National, and finished in the top 10 at the British Open. That help Kim earn a spot on the 2008 U.S. Ryder Cup team, where he beat Sergio Garcia in a crucial singles match on the final day.
Another win on tour then followed in April 2010 at the Shell Houston Open, and that was capped by a solo third finish at the Masters.
Kim's popularity at that time maybe wasn't as much about his results as it was how he got there. The guy played with flash and style, and he was among the up-and-comers signed to Nike Golf back during Tiger Wood's peak there.
Then, in his mid-20s and in the prime of his career, it all disappeared -- almost literally.
Kim played the first round of the Wells Fargo Championship in 2012, then dropped out with an injury. He hasn't played a competitive round since. An Achilles injury sidelined him for the rest of 2012, and he never returned to the game. Not professionally, anyway, and not near any cameras, at least.
He's so rarely been seen or heard from, something of a legend has grown around him. And questions abound, always.
Why'd he walk away? What's he doing now? Will he ever return to the game?
Reports on Kim -- including in Dethier's report this week -- have always included some version of the same story: That Kim had an injury insurance policy on his career that paid out an estimated $10 million, but that would prevent him from ever playing competitively again, lest he wanted to pay back an eight-figure sum to his insurers.
As Dethier reported this week, that long-rumored insurance policy has been a "central issue in negotiations" when it comes to Kim exploring a return to the game.
But the insurance policy hasn't told the whole story, at least according to what Kim told the Associated Press in 2015. He acknowledged at that time that he was getting paid monthly from the insurance, but he said then the policy wasn't why he wasn't returning to the Tour.
“I paid well into the mid-six figures for the policy,” he told the AP. “They wouldn’t have paid me every month had I not been to the doctors, showing them all my X-rays, doing all the treatment, the acupuncture, twice a day for physical therapy.”
In any case, even if Kim fully recovered physically in the last decade-plus -- which appears to be the case, given this week's reports -- he has still never returned to golf.
What he's done -- or not done - in the time since has only fueled the mystery and intrigue.
He's allegedly been spotted out in about in Dallas and California on multiple occasions. He's said to own a popular food hall in Oklahoma City. And if you ask around with enough avid golfers from across North Texas, you'll likely find at least one who claims, true or not, to have seen Kim beating balls on a lonely range somewhere. (Or something like that.)
When Kim last spoke publicly -- in that AP interview from 2015 -- he described golf as "a fond memory of mine."
At the time, he said that some of the young stars who were then fresh out of college -- including Dallas' Jordan Spieth -- were drawing his interest back to the game, and making him start to miss the competition.
Spieth, who turned 30 last year, is still a big name in the game. He's just not so young any more.
The same might soon be said again about Kim.
