Tom Kite

Tom Kite is a professional golfer and golf course architect, born on December 9, 1949 at McKinney in Texas. His full name is Thomas Oliver Kite Jr. At the University of Texas he shared the individual title at the NCAA Championship of 1972 with his team-mate Ben Crenshaw. He turned professional in that same year of 1972 and won 19 times on the PGA Tour. His major was the U.S. Open of 1992, played at Pebble Beach. He was the PGA Tour’s leading money winner in 1981 and again in 1989, and he was the first player to pass six, seven, eight and nine million dollars in career earnings. He played in seven Ryder Cups and captained the United States side in 1997. On the senior Champions Tour he won ten times, among them The Tradition in 2000, and he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2004.

He works as an architect through his firm, Tom Kite Design. His best-known course is Liberty National Golf Club at Jersey City in New Jersey, designed with Bob Cupp and opened in 2006. It looks out on the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline, has staged PGA Tour playoff events such as The Northern Trust, and was the venue for the Presidents Cup in 2017. According to the firm’s site, more than 90 possible routings were considered and it took ten years to obtain the permits. With Cupp he also designed Vanderbilt Legends Club at Nashville in Tennessee. Among the other completed courses the firm lists are Legends on Lake LBJ at Kingsland, Texas, built with Roy Bechtol and Randy Russell, Comanche Trace at Kerrville, Texas, Somersett Country Club at Reno, Nevada, and Eagle Ridge Golf Club at Garner, North Carolina, opened in 2000.

On his approach to design, Kite says on the official site that playing the great courses of the world brought him into contact with traditional, classical design principles and shaped his own thinking. From that, he says, he wants to give golfers of every standard an experience that is enjoyable, stimulating and challenging. It is the firm’s policy to take on only a small number of projects at a time, so that he can be involved at every stage of the design himself. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Kite.

See the other golf course architects here.

Photo: Ted Van Pelt（Flickr） / CC BY 2.0