Game Over 
Sports
The Links That Bind
For Texas’ Kuehne kids, excelling at golf is par for the course—and the least their father will accept.
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Pam Kuehne smiles warmly on hearing this, comfortably aware, it seems, that Ernie is a force in this family even when he’s a few thousand miles away. With a jock’s pedigree of her own—she played basketball and tennis in high school, and her father was a baseball coach—Pam is an important cog in the Kuehne family machine, which approaches the solitary sport of golf as a kind of five-person team game. Mom is in charge of lugging drinks and bandages, coordinating cellular communication and score updates when the kids are playing in different tournaments at the same time, and keeping everyone’s schedule in color-coded markers on her master calendar. Under her tutelage, with Ernie in Hawaii, the family seems to have a lighter, more playful feel.
Hank, who escorted Kelli to the deb ball, heads out to the covered stalls of the driving range to powder some white spheroids with Kelli’s boyfriend, Jay Humphrey, a starting offensive lineman on the UT football team. Unlike the massive Humphrey, whose stiff passes at the ball produce a series of wicked slices, Hank, who’s six feet three and about two hundred pounds himself, has a rhythmic, limber motion, a long, fluid swing, unusual for someone his size. He has a bit of John Daly in him: the explosive sound the ball makes when he hits it, the gentle way his large hands cradle the club, the slightly mischievous, deceptively easy-going manner he cultivates.
Hank’s first drive curves gently to the right, but his second rips dead-straight through the dreamy flurries, reaching toward the distant Central Expressway as if it were bound for Waco. “If he can keep it straight like that,” Kelli says, “he can make it on the pro tour.” His next effort screams out, hangs a left, and crashes into a faraway grove of trees.
“Hank’s a very imaginative player,” Pam Kuehne says. “If Kelli’s ball is in a tree, she just takes her penalty stroke and goes on, but Hank will try to hit it out of the tree. Of course, he gets into a lot more trees than Kelli.” And not just on the course. While his siblings appear to glide through life in fairy-tale fashion, Hank has made a series of crash landings in school (where he’s struggled with attention-deficit disorder and dyslexia, as well as depression), on the course, and after hours. Two years ago Hank crashed his car into a tree, “on my way to another bar,” as he confesses, leaving him with four broken ribs and shaking him up enough to confront what had been his deep, dark secret: He’d been a heavy drinker since he was fifteen. In a move the family says was solely Hank’s, he checked into a Hazelden clinic in Minnesota for rehab.
Hank has a gentle voice, a slouching posture, a tentativeness the others lack. He was described as “a laid-back free spirit, a party animal” in one story, but the truth about him probably runs deeper. Though he has trouble assuming the never-in-doubt mask of his father, there’s an admirable bravery in the way he talks about his problems. “I’m not ashamed I’m an alcoholic,” he says. “I’m just built a little bit differently from everybody else. Last Monday was my anniversary. I’ve been sober for two years.”
When I ask if he’s planning to turn pro, his siblings answer before he can. “He’s there!” Trip says. “He’s going for it.” Hank just smiles shyly, admits they’re right. “People can say I don’t work hard,” he says, “but there’s nobody who has more desire. You don’t shoot sixty-three when you don’t care, you know what I mean?”
The subject of turning pro is a melancholic one these days for Trip, who spent most of his life as the Golden Boy, the star athlete, an A student, the sure thing. After two years of agonizing, Trip has decided to forgo the pro tour. He has joined a Dallas money-management firm that is encouraging him to continue polishing his golf game while he learns the business, and he still hopes to play at the top amateur level. He could probably make a living on the pro tour; there are lesser players out there. But, he wonders, would it be worth the cost? Though Ernie has been quoted in the Dallas papers as discouraging his son from turning pro, Trip insists the choice was all his. “If anything, my dad wavered more than I did,” he says. “If I shot sixty-five, he’d say, ‘You ought to go pro,’ but the next day, when I shot seventy-eight, he’d say, ‘You better get a job.’” He seems at peace with his choice: “Maybe one hundred years from now,” he says wistfully, “someone will say, ‘Hey, Trip Kuehne changed amateur golf; he made it cool to not turn pro.’”
For her part, Kelli might feel a full share of qualms about making the opposite choice. She has been diabetic since age ten and knows that her condition may prevent her from playing in every tournament she wants to. At the same time, despite her lucrative endorsement contracts, she faces a difficult road her first year on tour, only able to enter a handful of tournaments (through special sponsors’ exemptions) before she attempts to gain her LPGA tour card this fall at qualifying school, all while she tries to balance her studies at UT and frets about being away from her boyfriend. And there are the minor annoyances too, like critical comments made by fellow pro Juli Inkster about how deserving Kelli is of her endorsement money and the ludicrous tabloid stories, printed in England and the U.S., that had her in a catfight with buxom swimsuit model Tyra Banks over Tiger Woods.
Even so, Kelli seems doubt free, Ernie-style, about her choice. “Why would I sit in an office,” she says, “when I can make a fine living playing golf? I’m not brilliant like Trip. I’ve never been driven to excel in school.” Despite her struggles in her first few months as a pro, few would bet against Kelli Kuehne in the long run. “Trip probably has the most physical talent of the three,” Hank Haney says. “And Hank is the most powerful player, the longest hitter, and plays with great feel. But Kelli is the strongest mentally. She has a superb work ethic and a great mind for the game.”
As the snow flurries dwindle, the sky begins to lighten to the west. The three Kuehne kids are all on the range now—Kelli has changed out of her cocktail dress and into golf clothes—teasing one another in jock talk, in which Kelli is the most fluent, reminiscing about the agonies of watching one another compete: like when Trip had Tiger Woods down on the final nine holes of the U.S. Amateur, only to see the title slip away or when Kelli stumbled through her nervous early rounds at the JCPenney.
Like any good family drama, the story of the Kuehne kids is open to interpretation. Is theirs a slice of the American Dream pie or a cautionary tale about the dangers awaiting precocious athletes? Will Kelli fulfill her promise? Can Hank not only stay on the wagon but also ride on to PGA stardom? Can Trip find happiness off the tour? As Hank Kuehne slams another drive toward the horizon, all three Kuehne kids follow it with their eyes as one, squinting into the winter haze, as if peering into their own futures.
Michael DiLeo is a freelance writer living in Austin. 
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