The first time Don Kuehn shot his age, he was playing in a senior team event in Louisville, Kentucky. A teammate told Kuehn to make a note of it because shooting his age, he said, was the only stat he was keeping track of in his game.
“So I wrote it down,” said the now-77-year-old Kuehn, who was 66 at the time and had just fired a 65. “And then I wrote some more down, and I’ve been writing them down ever since.”
Shooting your age (or beating it) is a common currency in golf, so mouths will drop at the next part of the story. When Kuehn, of Kansas City, set out on the senior circuit at the start of 2024, he had two goals in mind: to shoot his age or better for the 500th time and to win his 50th championship title.
Kuehn hit the latter when he won the Legends division of the Kansas City Amateur in late July, but the former?
“I had a good feeling that I might be able to get to No. 500 at Pinehurst, and it worked out,” he said.
When Kuehn played the North & South Senior Amateur at the North Carolina resort earlier this month, he shot rounds of 74-73-74, meeting his goal in the final round.
The statistics surrounding Kuehn’s golf game are at once totally remarkable and unsurprising. Kuehn, retired from a career with the American Federation of Teachers, figures he plays just over 200 recordable rounds a year these days. Kuehn, can be found at Paradise Pointe Golf Complex, a country-run in Smithville, Missouri, on most days. There are two 18-hole golf courses there, and Kuehn likes to tee off first most mornings and get in 18 holes in under three hours. Maybe practice a little after that.
Like most players Kuehn’s age, it hasn’t always been like this. During his professional career, Kuehn traveled extensively, and had little time for golf. But several years into the gig, he found himself sitting at the bargaining table one day in Los Angeles with a man who had attended Ohio State right after the Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf era. To kill time, they started talking about golf – namely where Kuehn might be able to play in the city.
“I found out that I was kind of a better person when I got away from the tension and the stress of negotiating a contract for 58,000 people,” he said. “…I played a few times out there and then I started playing a little bit on weekends, on a limited basis.”
Eventually, Kuehn was scheduling his vacation days around golf tournaments. He won his first serious tournament in 1998 – a club championship – and won the Kansas Senior Amateur in 2001.
As the years went on, Kuehn became the only player to win the “Kansas Senior Slam,” which includes the Senior Amateur, the Senior Four-Ball, the Senior Match Play and “The Railer” Stroke Play Championship. He also played the U.S. Senior Amateur twice (in 2005 and 2009) and began traveling extensively for national senior tournaments in 2011.
Kuehn is embedded Kansas City golf lore. He’s also been a member of the Board of Directors for Central Links Golf (the Allied Golf Association formed when the Kansas City and Kansas Golf Associations merged) since 2006. One of his most significant contributions was the first-person history Kuehn wrote about golf in Kansas City, albeit with his own quirky spin.
After being appointed to the chair of the centennial committee in 2012 for what was then the Kansas City Golf Association, Kuehn hatched the idea of creating a character to tell the story in a more compelling way. That became Jimmy the Caddie.
Kuehn imagined Jimmy as a mix between Forest Gump and Zelig, an omnipresent character created in 1983 by Woody Allen.
“Jimmy told the story from a first-person point of view of how golf developed in the Kansas City area,” Kuehn said.
That Kuehn would choose a caddie for his alter ego is not that surprising given that his roots in the game are as a bagman in his native Chicago. He got his first job caddying at the age of 12 at a (since closed) course called Thorngate, which was located in the suburb of Deerfield. Being under the legal age to work, he would either hide when the lady from Department of Labor came around to check work permits or spend his day shining shoes in the men’s locker room, where she couldn’t find him.
When the school year began, Kuehn would ride the bus past his house to the golf course and clean clubs for the assistant pro. At the end of a workday, Kuehn would either receive a few dollars or permission to climb up on the bag rack and pick out a golf club for himself from a stack of trade-ins. He assembled his first set that way and used them when caddies got playing privileges on Mondays.
“I just kind of fell in love with the game,” Kuehn said of that part of his life. “From 12 years old until now, that’s a long time.”