The sport's advance into the Far East took a significant step last weekend with South Korea's first European Tour event, but watching the crowds slavishly follow K.J. Choi, the world No6, at the Ballantine's Championship in Jeju Island, onlookers were prompted to ask whether golf was taking over South Korea or if South Korea was taking over golf.

Koreans are adamant that Choi is merely the advance party of an invading army of top-quality players. Observers of the Asian Tour whisper of “cells” of young Korean golfers in Australia, the Philippines, New Zealand and the United States, ready to break out after years of intensive training. The women's game is littered with Korean names and the numbers are growing each year. Some 45 golfers on the LPGA Tour are Korean and this year there are as many rookies who hail from Korea as the US.

The speed of their progress has been attributed to the pressure South Korean parents put on their children to excel. Kim Young Kyu is one example. He qualified for the Ballantine's Championship, his first tournament, via a reality television show on one of South Korea's two golf channels. He first picked up a golf club at 13 and by 14 his parents had sent him to New Zealand to train intensively.

“After school I went to the driving range every day and I played a couple of hours every day except Sunday,” the 25-year-old said. “There were loads of other South Korean guys there as well.”

The culture gap is starkest with Anthony Kim, the “next big thing” of American golf, who was brought up in California, with all its distractions, by relentlessly focused Korean parents. “Koreans are hard-working people, so for me to have a day off or to be able to be a 14-year-old maybe wasn't as acceptable as it was for other people over in the States. It was tough, but it was a good experience and I'm glad I got through it,” Kim, 22, said last weekend, facing the Korean media wearing a personalised diamanté “AK” belt buckle and medallion.

The single-minded discipline advocated by South Koreans jarred with Kim, who was a talented American football and basketball player at high school. Kim thinks that the intensity is counter-productive. “The problem with the Korean golfers is that they peak too early and I think that comes from the earlier stages,” he said. “They were practising too much and not doing other things.”

The ethos of Confucian selfdiscipline extends to all sports, but in golf it is reinforced by a less spiritual motive: class. Ho Yoon Park, the general manager of the Korea Professional Golfers' Association (KPGA), said: “In Korea, the courses cost a lot more [to play on] than in the US and Europe, so if people are playing golf they improve their status. They believe that golf is a sport only for the chosen ones. The rise of golf is totally linked to Korea's development.”

The KPGA estimates that three million regular golfers visit the country's 250 courses - 32 of which are in the self-governing island of Jeju. The place of golf in Korean society was underlined two years ago, in a political fracas. Two months before John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister at the time, was pilloried for playing croquet while in charge of the country, Lee Hae Chan, the South Korean Prime Minister, resigned after refusing to break off a golf trip to deal with a national railway strike. North of the border, the golfing escapades of Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator known as the Dear Leader, are more fortuitous. He is reported to have once hit 11 consecutive holes in one.

Well-to-do Koreans' demand for golf is so insatiable that the Government was forced to introduce a raft of subsidies to encourage developers to build more courses to stem the exodus of businessmen on golf trips. It was affecting the country's balance of trade. Last week, one lawyer from Seoul on a trip to Jeju insisted that he did not go that often. “Only three or four times a year,” he said.

While golf is underpinned by a substantial domestic market, football is played in largely empty stadiums, which are a legacy of the building spree for the 2002 World Cup finals. A 42,500 all-seat stadium was built in Jeju, despite the island not even having a team at the time. A franchise arrived in 2006, but the games attract only 5,000 or so.

Interest has waned because of the national team's failure to build on the success of reaching the semi-finals of the World Cup in 2002 - a performance that Kim Dae Jung, the President, described as the finest moment in Korea's 5,000-year history.

Stars from the 2002 World Cup, such as Park Ji Sung, the Manchester United midfield player, failed to secure regular first-team places at European clubs and baseball's supremacy as South Korea's most popular spectator sport continued unimpeded. Crunch matches in the Korean League command up to 30 per cent of television audiences and the country's six dedicated sports newspapers follow the every move of Chan Ho Park, the pitcher who signed for the Los Angeles Dodgers last year.

But regardless of sporting preference, South Koreans seem unified in their belief that sport can help relations with their difficult neighbours to the north. Next week the national teams from both sides of the 38th parallel will travel to Shanghai in China, a neutral venue, for a World Cup qualifying match.

Meanwhile, a South Korean tour company is negotiating with counterparts in Pyongyang to organise trips to North Korea's golfing venue, the same track where the Dear Leader holds a daunting course record of 34.

Colin Montgomerie has played in 15 Masters tournaments since 1992, has a best finish of tied eighth and has not made a halfway cut in six years (Peter Dixon writes). Despite that, the former European No 1 is desperate to return to Georgia in four weeks’ time to have another crack at the Augusta National course, but he needs to be in the world’s top 50 to qualify. To make it, he must climb 16 places by finishing no worse than fourth at the WGC-CA Championship, which gets under way tomorrow at the Doral Country Club in Miami. It is a tall order, given his form and a field that includes 49 of the top 50 players in the world.