Tale Of A High-flyin' Kite

"The basis of his game is to be repetitive—to do the same things on Sunday that he did on Thursday," says Kite's caddie, Mike Carrick. "When play is slow in a tournament, he walks extra slow so he won't have to stand around. We find if you walk fast you'll swing fast. The tendency is to get pumping and be too fast in everything you do. There's a fine line—you want to keep the momentum going, but you don't want to get too far ahead of yourself."

Kite decided to put three wedges in his bag after he and Christy carefully studied his shotmaking over a six-month period. Christy, a former junior high school math teacher and Arizona State varsity golfer, kept stats of every tournament shot he played and where it was played from, and Tom plotted them on a chart. This led them to the conclusion that Tom needed a special club for 60-yard third shots into par-5 holes that he couldn't ever reach in two blows like the Nicklauses and Watsons—and Crenshaws. Thus, he carries a regular sand club, a regular pitching wedge, and a third sand wedge for fairway pitch shots. While he may have left out the one-iron and two-iron, he's not exactly without long irons. His three-iron is bent to a two-iron loft, and his four-iron is bent to a 3�-iron, and there is a joke among the other players on the tour that his five-iron is bent to a 2�-iron.

This rejiggering of his equipment to suit his own particular need was accomplished by Kite himself in the club-repair shop he and his father built in the basement of Kite's home in Austin . Other golfers may list "hunting and fishing" as their interests in the tour guide; Kite says "club repair."

If 3�-irons sounds like analytical overkill, it's nothing compared to how Kite prepared himself to go out there with the big guys in the first place. Soon after turning pro, he went to Bob Toski , one of the game's better teachers, and told Toski he wanted a new golf game. He wanted to get rid of the dinky hook, he wanted to learn how to get the ball "up," he wanted a new grip—the works.

"He wanted everything changed," Toski remembers. "His posture, his playing position—a complete overhaul. I told him there weren't any shortcuts, and he said he didn't want to take any shortcuts. I think all the work he put in is why he's so consistent today."

"Christy didn't know me then," Kite says. "She didn't know how I used to look or swing when I was an amateur. One night I was showing a film at home and I said this player on the screen was runner-up to Wadkins in the National Amateur, and he's on the tour now. Who is it?"

Christy didn't know. It was, of course, Tom Kite .

And it was—hold the "of course"—Kite who won last month's Bay Hill tournament, when he got into a playoff with Nicklaus and a South African named Denis Watson in typical Kite fashion, by hitting a beautiful bunker shot on the 72nd hole to save a par. He then took the playoff by chipping in for a birdie on the first sudden-death hole. But if you say Kite was lucky at Bay Hill, you would also have to admit he was terribly unlucky earlier at both Palm Springs and Inverrary. He was a sure winner at Palm Springs until Ed Fiori holed a 35-foot putt in the playoff to beat him. Then at Inverrary he was the only player staying out of trouble while George Burns and Hale Irwin were getting into it, and another playoff involving Kite seemed a certainty. That was before Irwin hit a seeing-eye shot out of the trees and up onto the 18th green and near enough to the pin to put in a winning birdie.

"I don't think it's exaggerating to say I should have won twice this year, and I could have won three times already," Kite says. "It happens to other players. I hope it's going to start happening to me."

Last year's Memphis Classic may have been the biggest heartbreaker of all. For all four rounds Kite played the finest tee-to-green golf of his life. But Jerry Pate got to dive in the lake.