Kite Finds That Boring Can Be Fun

Golfers dream of being boring. That’s the ultimate. Perhaps Ben Hogan was the ideal: the same swing, the same result, almost every time. Straight and long enough. Under control. No heroics. Just an efficient river of pars with a few almost accidental birdies. Precious few men ever reach that dull perfection. Even fewer give it up on purpose.

“I played like that for almost three years,” said Tom Kite when the subject of Hoganesque golf came up on Tuesday on the practice green at the Kemper Open, where Kite is the defending champion. “Tell you what, I was boring. I was so damn good it was monotonous. God, that was fun.”

Did Kite appreciate those blessed seasons of 1981, 1982 and most of 1983 when he won two Vardon Trophies and a money title? Did he know what he had when he had it?

“No,” says Kite. And he gets quiet.

“No matter what you do, you always have somebody saying, ‘Yeah, but

“With me, it was ‘Yeah, he makes every cut and finishes in the top 10 a lot, but he doesn’t win enough tournaments. Yeah, but he doesn’t win any majors.’ ”

Did Kite listen to the ‘Yeah, buts’ ”?

“Didn’t I,” he says. More silence.

“I tried to get longer. I tried to hit it higher. I tried to be more aggressive. I changed my whole game. God, I’d love to get back to where I was then.”

Does he have films? Has he studied?

“Do I ever ... I’m trying to get back there. But it’s hard. Habits get in your game and they won’t get out.”

What bothers Kite is that, even now, he wonders if he’d have done anything differently if he had it to do over. He also wonders if he wasn’t caught in what might be called the prototypical trap of the 1980s American golfer -- a never-ending quest for impossible levels of self-improvement.

“You figure if you don’t improve, you’ll stagnate. It’s not just fans or press who’re saying, ‘Yeah, but.’ It’s the people you trust with your game,” says Kite. “You ask them, ‘What’s the deal? Why haven’t I won more? Is something wrong with my game?’

“Instead of saying, ‘You’re playing great. It’s just hard as hell to win out here,’ they can’t resist trying to improve you. There’s nothing wrong with their intentions. It’s just that, once you reach a certain point, only a couple of things can help you and a lot of things can hurt you.

“The easiest thing in the world is to let other people set your expectations for you. It’s always ‘Yeah, but,’ until you feel like you never catch up.”

Almost nobody in golf would pick Kite as an object of pity. He is -- you can win a lot of bar bets with this one -- the third-leading money winner in the history of golf behind two gentlemen named Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson. The cash register is at $3,686,029 and counting, with $241,021 this year. Since the period when he was the quintessence of boredom, Kite has “slumped” to 9th, 5th, 14th, 7th and 8th places on the annual money list. No other man on Tour has won a PGA event in each of the last seven years. In short, Kite has been, by a clear margin, the most consistent American player of the ‘80s.

With the years, Kite has realized that he was one of the first casualties of the vast improvement in PGA Tour play in the ‘80s. We might call Kite’s generation The Tour Victims.

“In golf terms, ’81 seems like eons ago,” says Kite, who was player of the year then. “Scores have gotten so low that Ian Woosnam, who won more money than anybody around the world last year, comes over here and can’t even make the cut. Can’t make $1.

“Last week at Muirfield, Jack Nicklaus did everything, except mow the fairways at 30 yards and let the rough grow to six inches, to prevent the kind of low scores (his) Memorial had the last two years. And it took 14-under to win. So what’s the low score going to be on a vanilla country club course? Start at 20 under.”

Kite suspects the Tour has produced a unique hybrid golfer who can do amazing things -- within a narrow definition of the game -- but who can feel lost under other conditions. “We play a standardized game,” Kite says. “Every week, the fairways, greens and roughs are the same height. Almost every event asks for the same shots, even if the course wasn’t built for that.”

You better be able to beat the ball 200 yards in the air out of middling rough, get it to clear a bunker, then stop on 20 yards of rock-hard green if you want to play the Tour way.

That, however, is not what is required at the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open. “The Tour doesn’t prepare you for the majors,” says Kite.

The 5-foot-8, 150-pound Texan wonders if the European and Asian tours, with their variety of course and weather conditions, prepare players like Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman, Sandy Lyle and Berhnard Langer better for the winds of Scotland or the haylike rough of the U.S. Open or the vast chip-and-run greens at the Masters.

“I once asked (teacher) Mr. (Harvey) Pennock, ‘Is there any way that a player these days, if he worked hard enough, could learn to play all the shots that Sam Snead does? Harvey said, ‘No. Because you never encounter the kind of conditions that forced him to learn those shots.’

“He’s right. On all our courses, all those bad lies are lined off. In the ‘40s, they just played.”

Norman, Ballesteros, Langer and Lyle also “just played” as they developed.

In addition, they had the experience of winning against weak fields, while Kite and his peers beat out each other’s brains -- or at least their confidence. “The more you do something, the easier it is to do it again,” says Kite. “And that includes winning.”

For Kite, it’s too late to go back. To his old swing or the confidence he had before 500 tournaments in 17 years -- and just 10 wins -- forced him to face a reality that players like Norman are just beginning to grasp. No amount of will and work can insure the greatest victories. A Bob Tway or Larry Mize can hole out from off the green. Or, as happened to Kite when he was co-runner-up at the ’86 Masters, a Nicklaus can shoot 30 on the back nine at Augusta.

“Certain things you remember forever,” said Kite, who missed a playoff with Nicklaus when his 10-foot birdie putt at the 72nd hole hung on the lip. “I’ve dreamed about that putt many times. Every time, I see it go in. No point reliving it if it’s not going to be right.”

At 38, time is running out for Kite. On the other hand, he still has a few of his best years left before him. His quest to be, once more, the most boring golfer in the world is not quite over. As for that one final putt that haunts his dreams, giving him a major title and an answer to every “Yeah, but” that he’s ever heard, Kite keeps the faith.

“One of these days,” he says, “it may go in.”