Tom Kite - November 15, 2011

• By Morning Drive Team
• Nov 15, 2011 8:28 AM ET

World Golf Hall of Fame Member Tom Kite is in New York City where he will lead a clinic at Chelsea Piers for kids from The First Tee. The First Tee has been able to have a major impact on the lives of kids from all over the U.S. and New York City has an incredibly strong and active chapter of The First Tee. He is looking forward to meeting the kids today and offering some advice. When it comes to putting, he would advise kids to learn how to putt using a conventional length putter because the best putters tend to use the shorter putters although he would not advise kids to rule out the long putter because he recently went to one himself and has had a lot of success using the longer version. It would be a huge shock if Ben Crenshaw switched to a long putter and joked that the world would beginning rotating the other way if that happened. Considering how much Tiger likes to experiment with his game, he could see Tiger using the long putter in competition one day.

It is great to see Tiger Woods playing well again and he has heard updates from Fred Couples about Tiger’s progress and as he continues to improve, Tiger’s optimism grows and it is exciting to see this happen. Although it is fashionable right now to criticize Tiger, he feels that those comments will only serve as inspiration for him as he returns to his previous form.

Phil Mickelson is the latest inductee to the World Golf Hall of Fame and he feels that golf needs to set a policy similar to that of other sports where there has to be a certain amount of time to pass after retirement from competition before being enshrined. He would like to see the minimum age raised to 50 as one example of a policy change. Phil is as deserving as anyone to be in the World Golf Hall of Fame and he would have been even more exceptional if he had not come along in the era of Tiger Woods.

As he is from Texas, he is understandably excited about his Dallas Cowboys this season as they are finally getting healthy after a rough start in 2011 and they have a great team. Much of their ups and downs have been from facing tough opponents when they have been hurt so now that they are healthy, he is interested to see how well they do.