Golf Is Ace in the Hole for Tustin Standout Lee : Athletics: Dedication is the strategy in classroom and on the course.

Jimmy Lee is the first to admit competitive golf can be nerve-racking, but Lee has felt worse pressure.

Try studying for five high school honors classes at once, knowing that anything less than an A is unacceptable. In the bleary-eyed vision of late-night cramming, English, French, physics, pre-calculus and government assignments can start to blur.

“There are times when it gets so stressful that you don’t know how you pull it off sometimes,” said Lee, a senior at Tustin High.

So far Lee has no bogeys in the classroom. He has a 4.83 grade-point average and an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy to prove it.

If his accomplishments on the golf course aren’t as impressive yet, they are catching up. Lee, averaging one-under par, has been the medalist this season in all 11 of Tustin’s nine-hole matches.

Last season, he finished in a tie for ninth at the Southern Section individual championship and fourth at the CIF-Southern California Golf Assn. championship, No. 1 among players from Orange County.

Tustin’s golf team doesn’t have much of a reputation, but Lee aims to change that. Most of his teammates play golf regularly only during the three-month high school season; Lee prods them to make it more of a priority.

He seems to be making some progress. After winning one match in Lee’s first two seasons and five last year, the Tillers are 9-2 this season. Tustin moved to the Golden West League from the Sea View this season, giving the Tillers their first realistic chance of qualifying for the postseason.

Tustin Coach Charles Causer gives much of the credit to Lee. Besides his obvious skill, Lee goes out of his way to help younger players.

“He’s a really inspirational kid,” Causer said. “Give me five like him and I’ll win the State every year.”

Lee’s strength as a player is his consistency and his temperament. He seldom misses fairways and when he does, he doesn’t get flustered. At 5 feet 8 and 140 pounds, he doesn’t have the frame to be a big hitter, but he compensates with accuracy.

“When he wants to play a draw, he hits a draw,” Causer said. “When he wants to fade, he can hold a fade. When he wants to hit it straight, he hits it straight down the middle, and he can back up a ball on a green like a professional.”

Things haven’t always gone smoothly. The fall before his junior season, Lee was struggling. All the time spent on academics, his top priority, was cutting into his practice time and he was rusty.

In November, 1993, he started taking lessons with Mike Cotton, a teaching professional at Costa Mesa Golf and Country Club. At first Cotton wasn’t impressed. “When I first met Jimmy, I thought, ‘This kid has no talent,’ ” Cotton said.

Cotton figures he gave Lee about 60 changes to make in his game. Lee made them all--quickly. “I didn’t ask why,” Cotton said. “I was just wondering, ‘How in the world did he do it?”

Now, Cotton said, Lee has a well-rounded game, which is especially sharp within 100 yards of the flag. “It’s not only mechanics,” Cotton said, “it has to do with creativity, feel and touch.”

Lee hopes he is good enough to play professional golf, even though many tell him to lower his sights. Some of the advice has an ethnic dimension: You’re Korean American, think of golf as a hobby.

“There’s always that little burden of people, a lot of them Koreans, saying, ‘There’s no Korean on the PGA Tour, Koreans are not strong enough to endure four rounds of golf,’ stereotypes like that,” Lee said. “I don’t listen because I feel anyone has a chance to play on the PGA Tour if they work at it hard enough.

“It’s 500,000-to-one odds for anyone making it, but I think everyone has an equal chance.”

Lee believes his chances might be better because of the mental toughness learned from his father. James Lee, a former member of the South Korean national table tennis team, taught his son to never give up on himself.

He was encouraged to run and do push-ups. When he runs five miles, Lee said he doesn’t take a breather, no matter the pain.

Lee said his father usually took a hands-off approach about golf, except when he made mental errors or didn’t concentrate. Then, Lee said: “He’d chew me out, and the next day he’d make me run and do a lot of hard exercises.”

The drill seems to have been effective. James Lee, a former architectural engineer who owns a golf pro shop in Garden Grove, says he’s proud of his son.

“When I see him in a tournament, no matter if he did good or not, if he tries his best, I’m really satisfied,” James Lee said. “If he lost and he got angry, I don’t accept that. Most of the time he has a good attitude.”

Lee, 18, plans to major in history or political science at Army and go to law school if his PGA dreams don’t pan out. He turned down recruiting trips to Cal, Stanford and UCLA, out of a sense of duty.

“My dad and I just felt that it was kind of an obligation to serve the country that gave our family the opportunity to succeed,” Lee said. “When the possibility to go to West Point came up, I kind of felt I had to go there.”