The Kuehne Triple Crown

Family Now Has Three Individual USGA Titles


April 3, 2008

By David Shefter, USGA

Southlake, Texas– Among the plethora of sports memorabilia Trip Kuehne has on display in his home is a small ceramic souvenir plate from the 1999 AT&T National Pro-Am.

Inscribed under the caricature of the late Oscar-winner actor Jack Lemmon are the words, “If I don’t make it this year, then next year.”

Kuehnes Meet Trophies: Hank (left), Kelli (center) and Trip Kuehne gather around their hardware in December in Texas. (John Mummert/USGA)

To Kuehne, those accomplishments were enough to validate a brilliant amateur career. But to his critics, he needed that USGA championship the way a college basketball coach can’t just be satisfied with reaching the Final Four. Kuehne craved the title.

Then came four weeks of pure golf bliss; a sequence of surreal events that can change the public’s perception from promise to champion. In a one-month stretch, he helped the USA retain the Walker Cup on enemy turf in Northern Ireland, shot a final-round 68 to give Texas back-to-back titles at the USGA State Team Championship in The Woodlands, Texas, and then capped it off by finally getting that elusive USGA individual trophy by winning the U.S. Mid-Amateur at Bandon Dunes on the southwest Oregon coast.

“It was a dream come true,” said the 35-year-old Kuehne. “It made all the hours of sacrifice of practicing and being away from the family all worth it. It was an incredible experience."

Kuehne paused while gathered with his siblings for a special photo shoot in late December. The shoot was to honor the only family in USGA history to have three different individual champions.

“And to join my brother and sister as USGA champions – I mean the odds for us to do it are astronomical – is unreal,” he added.

Said Hank: “It’s an amazing achievement. It basically says a lot about our family and a lot about our competitiveness.

“Now we [can] take a step back and look at [our accomplishments] collectively. I really don’t think you can put it into words. It’s never been done. I doubt ever seriously it will be done again.”

From A Major Low To A Major High

For Trip Kuehne, who in 2001 rededicated himself to playing at the highest levels of amateur golf, 2007 was shaping up like so many previous years. He qualified for the U.S. Open at Oakmont (Pa.) Country Club, arguably one of his favorite championship venues. Then he suffered major disappointment by missing the cut. That was followed by the high of being named to the Walker Cup team for a third time (he also played in 1995 and ’03). A second-round 83 on The Olympic Club’s Ocean Course to badly miss the match-play cut at the U.S. Amateur left him baffled.

The ink of Kuehne’s signature barely had time to dry on his scorecard before he landed in Dallas the next morning teeming with frustration. The Walker Cup was only two weeks away and his confidence suddenly was fragile. Kuehne’s high-end hedge-fund business – he operates Double Eagle Capital in Dallas – had kept him busy during the part of the summer when he normally focuses a lot on golf.

Feeling a little perplexed, he reached out to some close friends and business colleagues, including Oakmont C.C. member Stan Drunkenmiller. They told him that he had a lifetime ahead to focus on business and what’s six weeks in the grand scheme of things. Kuehne called instructors Hank Haney and Steve Johnson and went to work. Johnson and Kuehne hit the practice range. For a week, all Kuehne did was hit balls. He never ventured onto the course to play a round.

“We worked on fundamental things,” said Kuehne. “I had lots of lessons with Steve and kind of went back to basics. I changed putters and started making lots of putts. I gained some confidence.”

The test would come in Ireland . At the first Walker Cup practice at Royal Dublin, Kuehne beat the rest of his nine teammates. The next day, he did it again. The confidence was coming back. And although he went 1-2 in the Walker Cup, Kuehne played well, losing a tough Sunday singles match to Scotland ’s Lloyd Saltman.

Nine days later, Kuehne gave Texas a strong start at the USGA State Team Championship at the Club at Carlton Woods’ Fazio Course, shooting a 67. He closed with the 68 as the home-state team successfully defended its title. That gave Kuehne his first USGA championship, albeit a team one. Now he was headed to the U.S. Mid-Amateur on an upswing.

“You know the whole time [we were at the Walker Cup], Colt [Knost] was telling me I was going to win the Mid-Amateur,” said Kuehne.“You had this magical summer with the people from Texas with Cory [Whitsett] winning the Junior, Colt, Anna Schultz (USGA Senior Women’s Amateur) and a couple of [Texans] on the Walker Cup team. We had won all these tournaments and everyone was saying, 'Win it for Texas. Win another tournament for Texas. You are playing great.' I kept hearing this.”

It certainly was not new rhetoric. Kuehne had been hearing those words for more than a decade. He watched closely as brother Hank won the ’98 Amateur at Oak Hill. The two even kissed the trophy together.

In 2003, Kuehne was playing some of his best golf and it was validated at the U.S. Open at Olympia Fields, where he shot a second-round 67 that led to low-amateur honors. He geared up hard to win the Amateur that August at Oakmont, only to lose a heartbreaker in the second round to David Oh.

“If he’s playing anyone else in that field, he wins,” says Hank Kuehne, now a member of the PGA Tour. “He has always run into that type of tough thing.”

Conquering Bandon

But a different Kuehne arrived at Bandon Dunes at the end of September. During practice rounds with longtime friend Danny Green, the 1999 Mid-Amateur champion noticed how well Kuehne was putting. Before he left Texas, Johnson told Kuehne, “I think you are going to make your dad cry this week.”

Said Kuehne: “My whole deal was make him cry. I never thought I was going to lose. Nobody is going to beat me this week unless I beat myself and I had never said anything like that in my life.”

Playing with resolve and confidence, Kuehne found himself in one of those heated battles that he had customarily lost in the past. Steve Sear didn’t miss a green for 19 holes and the two were all square going to the par-3 20th hole. Sear blinked and Kuehne grabbed the opening. A winning par sent him to the semifinals.

Against 2006 semifinalist Scott Hardy, the men’s golf coach at St. Mary’s, Kuehne was in a major hole. With five holes to play, Kuehne was 3 down and facing almost certain elimination. This is where his experience paid off. A calm came over Kuehne to the point where he won the next three holes. Hardy won No. 17, but Kuehne birdied 18 and 19 to post a remarkable extra-hole decision.

In the 36-hole final the next day, Dan Whitaker almost never had a chance. In the 29 holes that were played, Kuehne registered five birdies against no bogeys – with usual match-play concessions – for a whopping 9-and-7 victory. Some might have called it golf perfection.

“It’s like I have said, I am not as bad as the 83 I shot at Olympic … and I’m probably not as good as the five under par and no bogeys in the final of the U.S. Mid-Amateur,” said Kuehne. “I’m somewhere in between.”

And sure enough, the finals performance brought Kuehne’s father to tears. He had been there in ’94 and now he could shed some emotions of joy instead of heartache.

“Now I can die in peace,” said Ernie Kuehne, who now had an unprecedented triumvirate of USGA champions among his offspring.

Thousands of miles away in Florida and Texas, two siblings anxiously stared at their computer screens as they followed the finals on the Internet.

“I remember staring at that computer screen and I am screaming at it,” said Kelli Kuehne, five years Trip’s junior. “And I’m calling Dusti, his wife, and saying, ‘Dusti, we’re doing good.’ I’m sending her text because we didn’t want to jinx it. She didn’t want to watch because she was a nervous wreck. And I’m watching, we’re 1 up, 2 up, 3 up, and it’s like, ‘Go baby! Go baby go! Just keep going.’ And we get to 7 or 8 up and I’m texting [Hank] and I’m talking to my mom and I couldn’t do anything. I was basically paralyzed because I am staring at this computer screen and I’m begging for it to change because I want it to be over, I want it to be in the books and I want it to be sealed.

“When it was over, I am on the phone screaming, leaving him a message. And I was really gratified not for myself, but for Trip because it’s his blood that has been on the trophy before. He’s put his heart and soul into it. And not that Henry and I haven’t. We were just rewarded a lot timelier than he was.”

Added Hank: “I’m just happy that he finally had the opportunity and won. And to be honest with you, I would have loved to give him mine, just because of all the things and his commitment to amateur golf and his commitment obviously to the USGA and just golf in general, I don’t think you could have found a better ambassador for amateur golf than Trip Kuehne. It would have been a shame had he gone throughout his whole career and not achieved a championship.”

Lucky 13

For most people, the number 13 can generally be used in the same sentence with Rasputin. Many hotels don’t have a 13th floor for fear of jinxing its inhabitants.

But Kuehne will take 13 anytime, anywhere.

For some reason, 13 is perfect symmetry. It had been 13 years between appearances in a USGA final. His best round at the U.S. Open had also come on Friday the 13th in 2003.

It will also be 13 years in between Masters appearances, as the U.S. Mid-Amateur champion receives an invitation to the tournament. Kuehne is planning for this event to be his swan song in competitive golf. Well, at least for now. Some have compared him to a modern-day Bob Jones because he’s one of the few elite players who turned down the temptation to play professionally to focus on a business career and raising a family. Jones gave up competitive golf after completing the “Grand Slam” in 1930.

Ironically, the U.S. Mid-Amateur trophy is named the Robert T. Jones Memorial Trophy as it was donated by the Atlanta Athletic Club, Jones’ home club.

And if the Masters is truly his last hurrah, it will come at a tournament and on a course Jones created.

Kuehne hopes to play better at Augusta National than he did 13 years ago when he missed the cut.

But keep this in mind, the tournament concludes on Sunday, April 13.

Wouldn’t that be perfect symmetry?

And the ideal artifact for his collection.

David Shefter is a USGA staff writer. E-mail him with questions or comments at dshefter@usga.org.