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It has brought them glittering trophies and million-dollar deals, shattered marriages and broken bodies. Even as the game inflicted so much pain it remained the common bond among them.
"The thing about my family is that no matter how bad it's going for one or two of us, someone, somewhere, is usually doing something pretty special," says Trip, the reigning U.S. Mid-Amateur champion. "I think that's what keeps all of us going — we take turns inspiring each other."
Trip has been the family star of late, with a run of victories last year that culminated in his triumph at the Mid-Am, punching his ticket back to Augusta. The Masters will be the last stop on a journey that began at the finals of the 1994 U.S. Amateur, when Kuehne (pronounced "KEY-nee") had Tiger Woods five down with 12 holes to play only to watch it all slip away, a comeback that signaled the start of Woods's considerable legend.
Two careers changed forever that day at TPC Sawgrass. Kuehne was everybody's All-American when he played at Oklahoma State, but that heartbreaking loss helped convince him that golf was too fleeting to become his life's work.
"It was devastating," Trip's father Ernie Kuehne once said. "He learned that you can play your best and it might not be good enough. It took a lot of the love of playing golf out of him."
With an MBA in his pocket Kuehne spurned the bright lights and easy money of the PGA Tour to remain a well-rounded amateur with a happy home life and a thriving career in finance. But when Kelli won the U.S. Women's Amateur in 1995 and '96, and Hank snagged the U.S. Amateur in 1998, Trip became driven to win a USGA title of his own and complete the family trophy case.
All these years later he's finally done it, and now Kuehne is ready to walk away from the game. The Masters will be his farewell to big-time golf, as he has vowed to give up competition in favor of focusing on the money-management firm he started in 2005, and on his wife, Dusti, and 8-year-old son, Will. In a culture that deifies professional athletes, Kuehne made the uncommon choice to follow his heart and not give in to the pressure of chasing someone else's dream.
It is poetic that his farewell will come at the Masters, a tournament that doubles as a monument to Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur golfer of all time and a man who, like Kuehne, stubbornly did it his own way.
To understand the Kuehne kids, you must first understand Ernie Kuehne.
The family patriarch was born in Otto, Tex., a no-stoplight, no-hope hamlet stuck in the black-soil country of the Lone Star state. Half a century ago, Otto had a population of about 100. Education was Ernie's way out of Otto, and he went on to successfully practice law while making a fortune on the side, at various points owning a gold and silver trading firm, two banks, and an oil and gas company, and has held interests in a horse-racing syndicate.
He is a hard-driving, blustery personality who has never tried to hide his tough-love approach.
"The way I grew up you learned how to persevere and how to survive," Ernie said. "Some people are winners, some people aren't. And we're winners. Let's put it this way: I don't think my kids are competitive by accident."
The hard-charging family ethos propelled all the Kuehnes to early success but their golf careers suffered as their adult lives became more complicated.
Kelli, a 5'3'' firecracker known in the family as "Li'l Kel'," took her second straight Women's Amateur in 1996 and was an LPGA winner by her sophomore year on tour, in 1999.
Though she was unable to win again, Kelli played well enough to make the U.S. Solheim Cup team in 2002 and '03.
But her career was derailed by a protracted divorce from her college sweetheart Jay Humphrey, a 6'6'', 300 lb. teddy bear whom she met at the University of Texas, where he was a starting offensive lineman for the Longhorns.
Humphrey wanted a wife who would be home for dinner every night, but Kuehne was not ready to give up on golf.
"Jay and I spent a couple years trying to figure things out," says Kelli. "(But) working on your marriage while trying to play a golf tournament is not ideal. With golf, if you're not 100 percent prepared, the game will knock you flat on your ass."
No one knows that better than Hank. He is the most naturally gifted athlete of all the Kuehnes, but for most of his life he struggled to keep up with the lofty accomplishments of his talented siblings. His attention deficit disorder, mild dyslexia and an inability to comprehend aural language would not be diagnosed until he reached college.
By that time, Hank was regularly getting drunk as a way to escape from his problems, including the withering expectations of his old-school father. Hank finally hit rock bottom in 1995 as a freshman at Oklahoma State, when he crashed his car on a back road, smashing four ribs.
"At that point in my life I didn't care whether I lived or died," Kuehne told me years ago for a Sports Illustrated feature. "I really didn't. I was just a waste of human life, a piece of s---, really. Honestly, there were times when I really thought it would be better to just get rid of me, so that I wouldn't have to deal with any of this anymore, and so my family wouldn't have to deal with me."
He entered rehab a week after the crash and with a new sobriety began putting his life back together, earning a degree at SMU and then launching a pro career defined by his jaw-dropping, titanium-denting length off the tee.
In 2003, he collected four top-10 finishes on the PGA Tour and earned a cult following with his tee-box pyrotechnics. His driving average of 321.4 yards set a record that still stands and that ended John Daly's eight-year reign as king of the long ball.
Top-Flite coughed up big money to make Kuehne the centerpiece of the company's ad campaigns. But the turbulence of his personal life soon followed him onto the course. Hank's third round at the 2006 Pebble Beach pro-am was interrupted when a man shoved a wad of papers over the ropes — he wasn't an autograph seeker but a process server, informing Kuehne that his wife had begun divorce proceedings, which subsequently kicked off a flurry of nasty charges and countercharges that would be aired in the press.
Debilitating back and neck pain and a subsequent hip surgery wiped out most of Hank's 2006 and '07 seasons. He has taken solace in helping to raise his son Henry (he has joint custody) and in his romantic relationship with tennis star Venus Williams, who, after winning Wimbledon in 2007, publicly thanked Kuehne for all of his support.
Hank has always been the Kuehne's lone free spirit, and whether he will ever be focused enough and healthy enough to be an on-course force again is an open question. Trip has a fatalistic view.
"The game owes you nothing," he says. "We all know that."
And so Trip is the only Kuehne who has made an uneasy peace with golf. All he had to do was decide to leave the game behind.
For Trip Kuehne, the road to the 2008 Masters began last January at the National Senior-Junior Team Championship, in Jupiter, Fla., where he began his metamorphosis from a part-time golfer to a Masters competitor.
Kuehne's rust was obvious throughout the round at host venue The Dye Preserve, but so too was his talent.
"Trip's ballstriking has been the quality of a top touring professional since he was in high school," says his boyhood instructor, Hank Haney, who now tends to Tiger Woods.
On the 17th hole, a 240-yard par-3 playing into a stiff wind, Trip pulled out his 2-iron — an anachronism in this era of hybrids — and produced a strike so pure you didn't have to see the shot to know it would be good.
"It's a different sound, isn't it?" said Kuehne's friend Barry Van Gerbig, the former president of Seminole Golf Club who was monitoring the action from a cart. "When he's playing a decent amount Trip is by far the best amateur in the world."
"The best" is an epithet that Kuehne has long been accustomed to. A five-time AJGA All-American, Kuehne won two Texas state championships as the top player on a powerhouse Highland Park High School team that included future Tour player Harrison Frazar, and in 1995 he led Oklahoma State to the national championship and won the Ben Hogan Award ("the Heisman of college golf," he says).
But there has always been more to his world than golf. As an undergrad he maintained a 3.87 GPA while also courting and marrying Dusti Stuart, a vivacious blonde who played on the Oklahoma State women's basketball team.
"Being a Tour pro was never my dream," says Trip, which is short for Triple, which is short for Ernest William Kuehne III. "I wanted to win tournaments, yes, but I had other priorities too: doing well in school, relationships, other sports. Guys who were my contemporaries — Phil, Justin, David Duval — being on Tour was what they wanted. If you take two guys of equal ability and one is living his dream and the other isn't, there's not much doubt about who will be successful."
After earning his MBA, in 1997, Kuehne eschewed a life of hotels, airports and driving ranges in favor of settling in Dallas as a hedge-fund analyst. The game was not his priority, especially after Will was born in 2000.
"I dabbled at golf," he says. "I wasn't committed to it, and looking back I was being disrespectful to the game. God gave me a talent to play the game of golf, and by not giving my best effort I was wasting my time, and everybody else's, too."
Summer 2001 was a turning point for Kuehne's golf career. Motivated in part by his siblings' pro success, he toyed with the idea of rolling the dice at the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament. With the help of Tiger Woods's trainer, Keith Kleven, Kuehne reshaped himself from a 200-lb. desk jockey to a 165-lb. jock, his body fat dropping from 12 percent to less than 5 percent. He hit balls for three hours every day, while also playing at least 18 holes.
That summer saw some of the best golf of his life, but he found the experience strangely joyless.
"I knew I'd have to work that hard to succeed, but I couldn't keep up the pace," he says. "I needed more in my life."
At the end of the summer he took a job in equity sales. With the brief flirtation of playing for a living now over, Kuehne began to refocus on making the most of his amateur career. The results were almost immediate.
He was the low amateur at the 2003 U.S. Open, thanks to a dazzling second-round 67, and he made that year's Walker Cup team. He was also the medalist during the stroke-play qualifying at the 2003 U.S. Amateur at Oakmont, but lost in the second round of match play to an unknown kid with a hot putter.
That upset was typical of Kuehne's luck at the Amateur, which was fast becoming his white whale — a tournament he obsessed over but could never reel in. Despite the annual disappointments at the Amateur, Kuehne continued his run of good play, qualifying for the 2005 U.S. Open and helping the United States win a bronze medal at the '06 World Amateur Team Championship in South Africa.
Kuehne's career-capping run began at the 2007 Walker Cup, contested on the glorious linksland of Royal County Down.
In the weeks before the Cup he overhauled his game, tweaking his action with Hank Haney disciple Steve Johnson and committing to a new face-balanced, heel-weighted putter that left him reborn on the greens. Kuehne found himself taking all of his teammates' money during practice rounds, a much-needed confidence boost.
He contributed a crucial foursomes victory during the final day of the U.S.'s one-point victory, and by hoisting the Walker Cup after two previous losses he was able to scratch another item off his to-do list. Less than two weeks later he shot a final-round 67 to lead Texas to a one-stroke victory at the 2007 USGA Men's State Team Championship.
Kuehne finally had his name on a USGA trophy but was now hunting bigger game. As he left in September for the U.S. Mid-Am at Bandon Dunes, the 27th USGA championship of his career, Johnson offered a prediction: "You're going to win the tournament, and you're going to make your dad cry."
While not as prestigious as the U.S. Amateur, the Mid-Am — for players 25 and older — is still a big deal, conferring a Masters exemption on its winner. As Kuehne marched through the draw, those who cheered for him were girding themselves for the freakish upset that had always tripped him up in USGA events.
After surviving sudden-death in the quarterfinals he was three down with five holes to play in the semis versus Scott Hardy. Kuehne can run hot on the course, and he swears he wasn't sweating it.
"That was the single calmest I have ever been on a golf course," he says.
He won the next three holes to square the match, but chunked two wedges on 17 to give away the hole. This should have been the end of him, but Kuehne summoned a different kind of resolve and birdied 18 to force sudden-death, then put away the match with an 18-footer for birdie on the first extra hole.
In the finals he channeled a career's worth of experience into a near-perfect performance, winning four of the first six holes against Dan Whitaker. Ernie was the only family member who had roadtripped to Bandon, leaving everyone else to watch the scores slowly update on the Internet.
"We were all dying," Kelli says. "I was pacing around my house in Dallas, Henry was pacing around his in Florida. We were acting like lunatics!"
Kuehne didn't make a bogey en route to a 9-and-7 victory, and his father did cry, right on the final green. If achievement has always been the defining family trait then Trip's inability to win a USGA event surely nettled Ernie more than any other Kuehne.
Says Kelli, "Trip didn't need that trophy to validate his career. We all know what a great champion he is. But it completed my dad."
Back at Bandon Dunes, Trip, too, was overwhelmed with a sense of closure. During the trophy ceremony he whispered to Ernie, "I've got one more big tournament to play, and then I'm done."
Ask Trip about his first Masters, in 1995, and he says with a laugh, "I played great in the practice rounds."
The highlight of the week came on Tuesday. After a morning 18 he found himself hitting range balls with Tiger Woods. They were friendly even before their epic tussle at the Amateur the year before, and they couldn't resist a rematch.
"It was supposed to be nine holes, but it got pretty intense," says Kuehne, "so we kept going."
The course was all but deserted that afternoon. By the back nine a fleet of mowers zoomed around the duo as they played their grudge match.
"We weren't saying the score out loud, but both of us knew exactly what was happening," says Kuehne. "We were both playing great, and it was back-and-forth the whole way — he was 1-up, I was 1-up. There were about 25 people following us and they started calling out the score."
They played the 18th hole in the twilight, with Woods' birdie taking the match. "You got me again, dog," Kuehne told him as they shook hands.
Kuehne shot a 43 to start the tournament and missed the cut. In 2002, when he decided to rededicate himself to amateur golf and wrote out his goals, returning to Augusta topped the list. Yet now that another drive down Magnolia Lane nears, Kuehne says, "Sometimes after work my car doesn't want to go to the course. It wants to point home. If I'm having any trouble motivating (myself) to practice for the Masters, I know I've made the right decision."
Waiting for him at home is Ernest William Kuehne IV, a bright, athletic kid with a mischievous streak. Says Trip, "I have been very fortunate to have so many people support me. Now it's time for me to give Will the same kind of opportunity to succeed."
Of his parents, who divorced last year, Trip says, "The game of golf took a huge personal toll on them. For 20 years they devoted themselves completely to our careers. One day they looked up and didn't know who the other person was. That's one reason I'm ready to stop playing — I don't want that to ever happen to Dusti and me."
The Kuehnes have already rented two houses in Augusta for what Kelli says will be a "big ol' party." Even as Trip exits stage right his influence will endure through his brother and sister. Kelli was so inspired by the Mid-Am that last fall she started grinding on her game again, reclaiming her LPGA card with a gutsy final-round 67 at Q School.
Hank, too, has cited Trip's renaissance as motivation to return to his former glory.
"I hope they get back to where they were," Trip says. "I don't want them to be beaten down by golf. I'd like to see them leave the game on their own terms."
Just as he is about to do. At long last.
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