Tom Kite Quotes

I've wanted to design golf courses ever since I was a kid. I suppose it comes from the way I've played the game. To find the proper way to play any hole, I've always begun by asking myself what the architect has tried to do with it.

The USGA is terrific. I've designed my course in Bedminster to the highest standards of the USGA, and it's a very special course.

Pete Dye introduced me to golf course design back in the 1960's. He came to my hometown Columbus, Ohio to work on The Golf Club.

A Nicklaus Design golf course is done by the guys in my company that I work with, that have been trained in my vision, and they do what they think I might do. They might come in the office and ask me questions and I'd certainly answer their questions, but I'm not involved in the site visits or anything else.

There's more to be learned here [St. Andrews] about course design than anywhere. Collection bunkers, false fronts, bump shots. The fundamentals of design became fundamental because of what's here. And it happened accidentally. Or maybe accidentally on purpose.

It should almost be a prerequisite to play Castle Stuart before you're allowed to design golf courses nowadays.

Ballybunion is the course on which many golf architects should live and play on before they build golf courses.

Everyone I built a course for thinks they have the best golf course in the world and I'm very pleased and proud of that.

Well, I think that Augusta is not the same golf course that I grew up on. Bobby Jones' philosophy was giving you space off the tee; if you put it in the right side of the fairway, you ended up getting the right angle to the green.

I don't hit it very far; I don't overpower a golf course, but I think I'm a pretty decent putter. At Augusta National, putting is premium.

This golf course, you miss a shot a little bit off-line, it's going to bite you.

I'm not the most charismatic, maybe emotional, fun-packed individual on the golf course; I get that.

But we do have a golf course near by and I play fairly regularly.

Sometimes when you play a golf course for the first time, you just got to be committed to your targets.

A big part of managing a golf course is managing your swing on the course. A lot of guys can go out and hit a golf ball, but they have no idea how to manage what they do with the ball. I've won as many golf tournaments hitting the ball badly as I have hitting the ball well.

Try to devote the percentage of time for each club that you're going to be using on the golf course. I like to have two or three different clubs that I practice with, not four or five.

As a kid in Fayetteville, N.C., I played golf all day, every day, a lot of it by myself. I spent hundreds of hours around the greens at Cape Fear Valley, the course my dad owned, hitting every shot I could think of - the one-hop-and-release, the chip that lands dead, the explosion from a bad lie.

If I had one golf course, from a design standpoint, one that I really love, it would probably be Pinehurst. There's a totally tree-lined golf course where trees are not a part of the strategy.

I've never set up any golf course that would favor anybody. I try to make it exactly the opposite, which is what we did at Valhalla when we modernized it to accommodate the lengths players are hitting it today.

There are golfers everywhere who may never get a chance to play a links course in Scotland, a tree-lined course in America or the sand belts of Australia. Hopefully I can bring some of those elements into their backyards.

I've played with amateurs for a million years, and they just don't hit many flush shots.

When you're on a golf course, a couple of things are very interesting. No matter who you're with and who you're playing with, people want each other to do well.

TPC Louisiana, where the Zurich Classic is held, is an outstanding course.

Having played the Old Course many times since my first visit in 1981, I am now of the opinion it is one of the best and most beautiful tests of links golf anywhere in the world.

I try to deign golf courses that are individual in character and individual in their own standing.