Kite

They're old school chums, a profound friendship forged via the shared experiences of endeavoring together to qualify for the Professional Golfers' Association Tour. Tom Kite made it; Dennis Satyshur didn't.Kite reached the ultimate, winning more money than any man in the history of the game and now has gained possession of the 1992 U.S. Open championship.Satyshur, to be sure, isn't exactly a woeful washout. He pursued golf, too, but headed in another direction and became one of the country's most renowned club professionals -- proficient as a player, a respected teacher and adept administrator.

There is a difference between people who fly kites regularly and those who go out once or twice a year. You can tell them apart by the lengths they go to get their kites in the air. Some run around like chickens with their heads cut off. And some don't. You want to get tips from those who don't. "Two people can launch a kite easily with the wind blowing at your back," said Dr. Adam Grow, a Silver Spring veterinarian who is president of the Maryland Kite Society. The two should stand about 50 feet apart.

SOTOGRANDE, Spain -- As players, they have been opposites in personality and style.Tom Kite is the ultimate grinder, a practice-range workaholic who has won more money than anyone else who has ever played on the PGA Tour except for Greg Norman, and more tournaments -- 19, including the 1992 U.S. Open -- than most thought possible.Seve Ballesteros is the natural, the phenom who won the first of three British Opens at 21 with a shot from a parking lot and captured the first of two Masters less than a year later.

As the drab days of February yield to the winds of March, kite festivals are popular events. One of the best will be held next Sunday at Gunston Hall in Lorton, Va., the Colonial plantation of George Mason, known as the "Father of the Bill of Rights."The 5,000 original acres owned by Mason are now reduced to 550, but the plantation remains pretty much intact, with a fine manor house filled with 18th century furnishings, restored kitchen yard and schoolhouse, the famous boxwood garden, nature trail and family graveyard.

The Great Kite Fly in Annapolis yesterday brought out the boy in 2-year-old Jaron Blunt and the girl in 72-year-old Joan Urbas. Neither paid any attention to the scores of other kite-fliers on the green fields of St. John's College as they concentrated on the task at hand. For when it comes right down to it, kite-flying is an intensely individual sport. St. John's College, a scholarly campus where 450 undergraduates read a "great books" curriculum that includes ancient Greek, philosophy and English poetry, holds the kite festival to bring the college and community together.

Over a Carroll County cornfield yesterday, kites soared hundreds of feet in the air, fluttered perilously close to treetops and sometimes crashed to the dusty ground.It was the 12th annual "April Kite Sail," courtesy of kite enthusiast Bill Cunningham, who invites friends, family and kite lovers to join him each year for a high-flying rite of spring on a Manchester hilltop.Cunningham, who describes himself as 40-something, always schedules the "kite sail" for the third Sunday in April, when, according to the Farmers Almanac, good weather is a good bet. The almanac isn't always right -- veteran kite sailors recall some rainy, cold days -- but yesterday didn't disappoint.

For Fatimah Gates, yesterday's family excursion to the first Bel Air Kite Festival was also a trip back to her girlhood in New Orleans, where her stepfather made kites to fly in the Big Easy's Harrell Park. "This reminds me of growing up in New Orleans. ... It's just too much free fun and too beautiful to stay indoors," Gates, a Baltimore District Court clerk, said as she spun a purple-pink shark kite higher and higher at Rockfield Park near John Carroll School. "A shark in the sky, what do you know?"

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. -- Remove the asterisk from Tom Kite's record. Remove the albatross from his sunburned neck. The leading money-winner in the history of professional golf finally has something to back up his fat bank account.Facing gale-force winds on the front nine, and the pressure of winning his first major championship down the stretch, Kite erased some bitter disappointments yesterday to win the 92nd U.S. Open, at Pebble Beach."It was such a struggle," said Kite. "I don't know whether this is getting over the hump, but I can't remember a much better feeling than this in golf.

When kite-making rises above a children's pastime it can be an art form in its own right. That's the premise at least of Paper in Flight, an exhibition of kites created by artists using washi -- Japanese handmade paper -- in the Brown Center at Maryland Institute College of Art. The show presents about a dozen kites in various shapes and colors suspended from the building's vaulted ceilings as if borne aloft by winds. The centerpiece of the show is a 10-foot kite in the shape of a dancing figure by MICA alumna Lesley Dill.

POTOMAC -- Grant Waite learned a lot from playing with Tom Kite during the last two rounds of the $1.3 million Kemper Open. He learned how to maneuver his ball around the deceptively difficult TPC course at Avenel. He learned how to keep his bubbling emotions from spilling over.And, most significantly, he learned how to win.With Kite playing the role of tour guide and teacher, Waite overcame an early one-shot deficit to golf's all-time money-winner as well as loads of potential disaster to win his first tournament in his second try at the PGA Tour.