Never Count Him Out

And the winner is--er, would you believe Tom Kite?

Of course you would. That’s dog-bites-man stuff. Tom Kite always wins, right? This is tournament victory No. 19 for him. If you think golfers nowadays win 19 tournaments, you haven’t been paying attention.

He won the U.S. Open last year. That’s almost as tough as 19 tournaments.

At the moment, Tom Kite stands in the role in golf that, say, a Nolan Ryan or Sandy Koufax took in baseball. Some years ago, rival pitcher Jim (Mudcat) Grant said of Koufax: “There’s Sandy Koufax--and then there’s the rest of us.” In golf at the moment, there’s Tom Kite--and then there’s the rest of them.

But Kite’s victory in the Nissan Los Angeles Open on Sunday was not so much a tribute to a guy who simply tow-ropes his field week after week, returning the game to the glory days when it had a king of the hill. Kite’s performance was a triumph of the spirit as much as the swing.

Kite is not only the best golfer out there these days, he’s indestructible. He’s golf’s Rasputin.

The old admonition, “When you shoot at a king, be sure you kill him,” applies in a sense here.

Late Saturday afternoon in the L.A. Open, when they knew it was going to be only a 54-hole tournament, Kite was sailing along three over par with about 27 holes left. He was about seven shots out of the lead and the game’s morticians were about to put a lily on his chest. The question was not whether he would win, but whether he would make the cut.

If you know golf, you know that your play on the tour in that situation calls for you to go through the motions, hurry along, slap the ball at the hole and get out of there.

Tom Kite doesn’t play that way. You have to kill him. He kept playing as if he were two shots in the lead.

He caught fire. He went from three over to three under. He fought through bogeys, birdies, pars. In a sense, he had a knife through his back, he had been poisoned and thrown in the river. But like that Russian holy man, he kept reappearing.

Then, Sunday, in the final round, the field went past him with a rush again. Names like Jay Don Blake, Jodie Mudd and Jeff Maggert began to appear on the leader board. Kite, on the other hand, dropped off it. He made two bogeys on the front nine. He dropped to one under while Blake went to six under.

Kite should have been wondering where he went to surrender. Someone should have told him he was meant to go through the motions. But when you have won 18 tournaments and a U.S. Open, you’re not playing for seventh place.

Kite is as undiscourageable as dandruff. He’s like a fighter who keeps getting up. He missed four putts of less than eight feet. Time to haul down the flag and retreat, right?

Not Kite. At age 43, he has been in enough tournaments to know there are times when the field backs up to you if you keep the wheels on and keep attacking. He went about his business. The eight-foot putts began to fall.

“It’s a maturing process,” Kite said, “a learning to be patient. Years ago, I might have gotten impatient. Instead, I got determined.”

That has been Tom Kite’s stock in trade--determination. Not too many of us roll out of bed with a repeating golf swing and a natural rhythm and Tom Kite was one of us. He had to work at it.

Hardly anybody works harder than Tom Kite. He refers to himself as a “grinder.” It’s not a glamour sport the way he approaches it. He’s like a guy who takes the bus to the factory every day for 40 years with a lunch pail and a hard hat. He shows up every day, pays his bills, learns and relearns his trade. In addition, Kite had another glitch to fight--nearsightedness. Tom has worn spectacles since he was 13.

Now, if you’ve ever tried to play golf with your glasses fogged by humidity, rain or sweat, if you’ve had to push them back up on your nose to read putts or even gauge yardage, you have some idea of the handicap Kite has had to put up with throughout his career. He’s the idol of every guy who ever flunked an eye test in junior high and went through life known as “Four Eyes.”

A six-foot putt is challenge enough when you have 20/20 vision. But when you have horn-rimmed glasses and a correction from 20/100 or 20/200, you have to feel as if you’re giving your opponents two strokes a side.

So, Tom Kite has been playing this pro game for 21 years, owl look and all, with a handicap that doesn’t show on the club roster.

He has become the undisputed No. 1 player on the tour, a guy who shoots 35 under on desert courses one week, but wins a U.S. Open at Pebble another and an L.A. Open at Riviera another, the finest tracks in the country.

Every guy who ever said “The hell with it” when he fell four shots off with only nine to play, who ever shrugged and said to himself, “Aw, I’ll get ‘em next week,” could take heart--and take a lesson from Tom Kite. Never mind how he holds his hands at address, where the Vees are pointing or how he manages the weight shift. How does he get his heart in position?

Everybody who plays this game is a victim. It’s merciless. Eighteen holes can be like an interrogation by the Gestapo.

But if you defy it, if you keep fighting back, sometimes it’s like all bullies. It folds quickly.

That’s Tom Kite’s secret. He hits the ball better than everyone else, but he defies the game’s effort to put him in his place. Kite knows his place is first. He doesn’t settle for less. His victory at Riviera was less a runaway than a great comeback. “Rocky” stuff. Riviera kept throwing its best punches at him. But he wouldn’t stay down.

He said that on the heels of his victory at Pebble Beach last year, he sent the flag from No. 18 to Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson to be autographed. “I’m proud to have won the Open where those great players won it,” he explained in the press tent Sunday.

Actually, Nicklaus and Watson should be sending one to him to be autographed. He has climbed a pedestal to be along with any great champion who ever played.

It wasn’t easy. But Tom Kite never expects it to be easy. That’s his secret.