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 It would be difficult to find anybody, anywhere, who works as hard at his profession as Tom Kite, the venerable Texas-born Hall of Fame golfer. On his way to 19 wins on the PGA Tour—including the 1992 US Open Championship at Pebble Beach—and 10 victories on the Champions Tour, Kite has beat more balls and spent more time on golf courses and putting greens than perhaps anyone since Ben Hogan. Known as one the game’s most tireless workers, Kite grinds but he
insists he is not a grinder. “I’m someone who loves the game,” he says. “If you drop a 12-year-old kid at the golf course in the summer time, and he’s out there from 7 am until 5 pm, playing 36 holes and practicing and chipping and putting, people would say ‘Boy, he really loves the game.’ Well, so here I am, at 60 years of age, doing the same thing.”
His love of the game has paid off handsomely: Kite spent 175 weeks in the top-10 of the Official World Golf Rankings between 1989 and 1994. He was the first player in PGA Tour history to reach $6 million, $7 million, $8 million and $9 million in career earnings; he was the Tour’s leading money-winner in 1981 and 1989.
He began playing golf at age six and won his first tournament at age 11. He was coached at the Austin Country Club by the legendary Harvey Penick, and there are statues of the two of them—Penick ever the teacher, Kite always the pupil—near the club’s putting green.
At the University of Texas, he captained two NCAA championship teams and was co-medalist at the 1972 NCAA Tournament. He competed on seven Ryder Cup squads and served as the captain of the 1997 team. Kite holds a unique record of making the cut at every US Open held at Pebble Beach, in 1972, 1982, 1992 and 2000—and he’ll try to qualify for the 2010 event to be held again on the Monterey Peninsula.
Now a member of the Champions Tour, 2009 was not one of Kite’s best as a player, with his highest finish being second at the AT&T Championship in San Antonio. Still, he claimed seven Top 10 and 17 Top 25 finishes, earning nearly $850,000 in the process.
“The issues I was having with my left shoulder kept me from swinging as well as I wanted to and needed to, and my ball striking really suffered,” Kite says. “All my stats suffered from the shoulder issues I was having, but now that I have had it operated on, hopefully things will get better.”
TG caught up with Kite recently at his home in Austin just after he celebrated his 60th birthday.
Texas Golfer: Does being 60 feel different from being 50?
Tom Kite: I hope it feels different than being 59…2009 was a rough year golf-wise for me, as I was struggling with a shoulder injury and consequently my year was very up and down. I didn’t play well except for a couple of weeks. It was one of the worst years I have had in a long time. I am hoping 2010 will be a year that I can play injury-free and healthy for the first time in a couple of years and allow me to really attack the golf courses.
You’ve talked about how turning 60 begins a third stage of your career—after the PGA Tour and the Champions Tour. How will things change?
I am anxious to see how well my game responds. At some point in time—it happens to everyone and it will happen to me—your game just doesn’t stand up anymore. I got to the point where my game couldn’t stand up to the PGA Tour. Thank goodness there was the Champions Tour for me to move to. And there will come a time when I will not be competitive on that tour as well. I want to keep playing well into my 60s, and there have not been very many players who have been able to do so. Very few tournaments have been won by players that are above 60, and I want to be one of those. I have always taken pride in the fact that my career has had longevity and consistency and I believe that I should be able to win at a later age than most of the guys out on our tour.
Aside from winning the US Open and being inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, you’ve stated that captaining the 1997 Ryder Cup team was your biggest thrill in golf. But it was hard for you, wasn’t it?
It was a difficult time, there’s no question about it, because it was a totally different venture than I had ever done. To play really good golf at the professional level you have to be somewhat selfish—it’s all about you for you and me for me and everyone is doing whatever they can to win the golf tournament. You are not really focused on the trials and tribulations that the other guy is working through, you are just concerned on what YOU are trying to do. In that concern it is a very selfish sport. Even people who are givers and very outgoing are usually very selfish because you just have to be.
When the PGA honored me by naming me captain of the 1997 Ryder Cup team, it was no longer about just me—I had to form a team and was spending a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to do that. I started paying more attention to the players who were playing well than I was to my own game. That becomes distracting. I was fortunate in that, in 1997, I played well. I finished quite high in most of the major championships that year. A lot of that was spurred by the fact that I knew if I played well in those tournaments, I would have a chance to play with and watch some of the guys that were going to be on my golf team.
And you struggled to regain your edge afterward?
When the Ryder Cup matches came around, our team didn’t play as well and we ended up losing to the Europeans by one point over in Spain—which was disappointing to us all.
Coming out of the Ryder Cup experience it was hard for me to shift gears back to me, to thinking about Tom Kite, because for the two years leading up to it I was focused on other players and trying to learn how to captain a team and how to coach, things I had never done before. Then in 1998 and ’99 it was all about me for me again, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Davis Love and Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson and Duval and Stricker and all those guys. I played very poorly those two years. Thankfully, the Champions Tour was there for me. I turned 50 in December of 1999, and I was eligible for the Champions Tour the following season. Making that transition gave me focus again and I played very well for most of the first 10 years on that tour.
You are becoming recognized as a talented golf course designer. Will the design business be more of a focus for you in the coming years?
I am proud of Liberty National, that’s the best one I have designed so far. The redesigns at Baltimore Country Club and Gaillardia in Oklahoma City have been well received, and I always get a lot of great comments about Comanche Trace, down in Kerrville.
The problem with the design business right now is that the majority of new courses are being built overseas, and traveling overseas and sitting on a plane for 14, 15 or 20 hours is not something a 60-year-old body is built to do. That kind of travel is not something anyone looks forward to. I have to figure out how big a commitment I want to make to designing golf courses outside of the United States, away from someplace easy to get to. I will also be working hard to play and be competitive on the Champions Tour at 60 years of age as my skills are not as good as they once were. Putting these two things together is the real puzzle. I want the design business to take a larger role, but I am going to be selective as to the projects I go after because I don’t want to beat myself up too much.
You have done some renovation work as well, correct?
The course renovation business is a wonderful opportunity that we are looking into as well. Both the redesign of the Baltimore Country Club’s West course with Bob Cupp, and the work I did with Roy (Bechtol) and Randy (Russell) at Gaillardia up in Oklahoma City turned out very good, and I think there are some great prospects on that front. There are a lot of clubs that haven’t really done much for a long time and there is a need to upgrade their facilities and refresh them to bring them in line with the advances in today’s equipment and players. I think there will be a pent-up demand for that kind of design work because there are not a lot of new courses being built in the US.
The statue of you and Harvey Penick at Austin Country Club…tell us about that.
It’s an embarrassing honor to have a statue of me next to Harvey’s, really. Harvey was such an essential part of the Austin Country Club and to so many people he was the Austin County Club and was golf in Central Texas. He had such a great legacy there. Having just one person he is shown teaching and having that person be me…well I have never been really comfortable with it.
When the statue was unveiled it was a great day, but I told the members of the club that they should envision themselves up there because every one of those members had taken lessons from Harvey Penick. He was always on the driving range teaching somebody. They had to have somebody be the pupil and they chose me, but I would have been very comfortable if they had chosen somebody else or just some generic person that no one knew as the pupil.
Certainly Harvey deserves all the accolades and recognition that he has been given and I really do miss him. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him. A lot of times when I am on the golf course or on the practice tee working on my game I ask myself, ‘What would Harvey tell me right now?’ Every once in a while I go back and remember some of his old lessons, and it will have a positive effect and I will hit a good shot. It’s those times that I think Harvey is smiling down at me, and it’s a good feeling. n |
