Turning 40 Is a Major Event : Tom Kite, Still Winning, Defends His L.A. Open Title This Week at Riviera

The prevailing theory on the PGA Tour is that you must accomplish as much as possible by 40.

If goals haven’t been attained by then, they probably won’t be.

All that’s left, presumably, are 10 years of missing cuts against steadily improving fields while trying to keep your game together for the Senior PGA Tour.

The exception is Tom Kite, defending champion in the Nissan Los Angeles Open, who turned his game up a couple of notches when he turned 40 four years ago.

If Kite comes close to performing this week at Riviera Country Club the way he was playing a year ago, he can become the first player to win consecutive L.A. Opens since Arnold Palmer did it at Rancho Park in 1966-67 and the first to repeat at Riviera since Ben Hogan in 1947-48.

Kite left his mark on the Southland last winter. He opened with a second place in the Tournament of Champions at La Costa; won the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic at PGA West in La Quinta in mid-February with a 35-under-par 325, a record for a 90-hole tournament; and two weeks later won the rain-shortened Los Angeles Open with a 54-hole score of seven-under-par 206.

Kite opened in Los Angeles with a 73, but bounced back with a 66 and a 67. On the last day, he came from behind with a 31 on the back nine with a demonstration of precise iron play to beat defending champion Fred Couples, Payne Stewart, Donnie Hammond and Dave Barr by three strokes.

Not bad for a guy everybody was feeling sorry for in 1988 and ‘89, when he was known as the best player never to win a major.

Kite was particularly proud of the streak he had going into ’88. He had won at least one tournament seven years in a row. But it had been nagging him that none of the victories were in major championships. Then that year, he earned $760,405 without winning a tournament.

He had one final chance to extend his winning streak in the Nabisco Championships at Pebble Beach, the last event of the year. But he lost a sudden-death playoff to Curtis Strange.

At 38, Kite’s streak of winning at least one tournament annually came to an end.

He promised himself that Tom Kite was not through, that he had merely stumbled on a bump in the road.

If that was a bump, his loss in the 1989 U.S. Open at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, N.Y., was a brick wall.

You don’t get many chances at winning a U.S. Open, and Kite had a golden one. He had a one-stroke lead going into the final round and increased it to four with 14 holes to play.

Then came a disastrous fifth hole on which he twice hit into water and wound up with a triple-bogey to bring Strange and the rest of the contenders back to him.

He still had the lead, but after bogeys at the eighth and 10th holes, Kite felt it slipping away.

He was a stroke behind when he double-bogeyed the 13th and went on to shoot 78. He could have won his first U.S. Open with a two-over-par 73.

At 39, that could have been the end of his serious major championship aspirations.

But Kite wasn’t thinking that way. He came to the press tent and told what it felt like to blow a U.S. Open. “It’s just a U.S. Open,” he said. “I will survive it. It was a fluke. I’ll come back and contend in more majors, I promise you.”

It was a brave moment, even if the promise seemed hollow.

He was about to turn 40, and even the great ones have had problems after 40.

Jack Nicklaus has won only four PGA Tour events since his 40th birthday.

Arnold Palmer, who won 41 times as a 30-something golfer, won only six after reaching 40. Two of them were in team events with Nicklaus as his partner.

Lee Trevino added five victories to his regular-tour ledger after 40; Raymond Floyd won only four more times.

Kite, 44, has already won six tournaments, one of them a major, since turning 40.

That elusive major championship came in 1992 in the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach.

It was an extraordinary performance under grueling conditions as Kite battled strong winds off Carmel Bay and demon thoughts that kept popping into his head.

The turning point in his round of 72 on the final day came at the 107-yard seventh hole. After the wind blew his tee shot into the rough, Kite hit a flop shot from 20 yards that carried a bunker and rolled into the cup for a birdie on a hole that was yielding mostly bogeys and doubles.

Kite remembered the wedge shot Tom Watson had made from the rough at the 17th to set up his U.S. Open victory on the same course in 1982, but this one was different: Watson had one hole to play; Kite had the toughest part of the course ahead.

For the remaining 11 holes, Kite battled the course and negative thoughts of previous disappointments.

When it was over, and he was the U.S. Open champion, he would finally admit: “It was bugging the living daylights out of me.” Tom Kite was no longer the best player never to win a major.

Now that he has one major to his credit, he thinks about winning more.

Why not? He still believes he is improving, and has a record that backs him up.

In an interview in Golf Digest last September, he was asked if he had to work harder after he turned 40 to keep his competitive edge.

“I can’t work harder,” he said. “I have always worked hard.”

Kite added that players who thought they had to work harder might not have worked hard enough in the first place. He questions whether golfers who don’t like to practice are really trying to be as good as they can be.

Some players cut back on their schedules when they get older because they want to be fresher for each event they enter.

Kite is unwilling to experiment with this. His way works and he sees no reason to change.

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Jack Nicklaus, satisfied with the way he is striking the ball, has entered the Los Angeles Open--his first appearance in the tournament since 1978. Riviera is one of the few great courses on which Nicklaus has never won.

One of Nicklaus’ sons, Gary, 25, will also play after getting one of seven exemptions. The others were granted to professionals Bob Burns of Valencia, Mike Donald, Yoshinori Mizumaki and Bobby Wadkins, and amateurs Ted Oh of Torrance and Chris Tidland of Placentia.

Festivities begin today with a celebrity-amateur round, then the professionals will arrive and begin practice rounds Monday. The Merrill Lynch nine-hole Shootout is the Tuesday feature, followed by the pro-amateur Wednesday.

The four-day tournament begins Thursday.