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"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.
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