It’s a Major Loss for Golf

The colorful knickerbockers and Scottish driving caps weren’t just fashion. Payne Stewart once told a friend that he started wearing odd clothes on the PGA Tour so fans would have something to remember him by.

Chances are--with Stewart dead Monday in an eerie plane crash--people will remember him for something else.

“His record was outstanding,” Arnold Palmer said. “What a terrible thing to happen to someone enjoying such a great career.”

Stewart had risen to golf’s upper echelon in this, his most successful season on the tour, a year that included more than $2 million in earnings and a stirring U.S Open victory.

It was his third win in a major, added to victories in the 1989 PGA Championship and the 1991 U.S. Open. And Stewart’s 11 victories earned him $11 million during a 19-year career.

“This is a tremendous loss for the entire golfing community and all of sports,” tour Commissioner Tim Finchem said in a statement issued from PGA headquarters. “He will always be remembered as a very special competitor and one who contributed enormously to the positive image of professional golf.”

That contribution came with a heavy dose of bravado. Perhaps unsure of his place in the game during those early years, Stewart never missed an opportunity to grab the spotlight.

The Springfield, Mo., native often talked about himself in the third-person, quick to extol the virtues of his own game. He and Peter Jacobsen had a band called Jake Trout & the Flounders that regaled the tour with familiar songs rewritten to include golf-oriented lyrics.

And there was that wardrobe, that shock of pastel colors and caps and the knickers--known as plus-fours because they fell four inches below the knee. Stewart began wearing them about the time he joined the tour in 1980.

“Not everyone can get away with that,” Curtis Strange told the Associated Press. “He had a personality to do that.”

In 1983, on the occasion of his first Masters, Stewart hired a limousine to take him to Augusta. As the car approached Magnolia Lane, the road that leads to the storied clubhouse, he popped a cassette of “Caddyshack” into the back-seat VCR.

It was his way of taking a jab at the golf shrine.

But there was substance to go with that irreverent style. Stewart learned the game from his father, Bill, an amateur champion. He got his first tournament victory in the Quad Cities Open in 1982. He won his first major, the 1989 PGA Championship at Kemper Lakes in Hawthorn Woods, Ill., by shooting a final-round 67 and coming from six strokes behind.

His second major--an 18-hole playoff victory in the 1991 U.S. Open at Hazeltine Golf Club in Chaska, Minn.--wasn’t nearly as dramatic. His 75 beat Scott Simpson’s 77 in one of the highest scoring playoffs in Open history.

Undaunted, Stewart told the press afterward, “Funny things can happen on the way to the clubhouse.”

The ensuing years weren’t so funny, though.

From 1992 through 1998, Stewart won only once, at the Shell Houston Open, and only because leader Scott Hoch fell apart in the final round. Stewart’s trademark arrogance often verged on surliness.

“There were times when . . . I played very poorly and I wasn’t having fun playing golf, and I didn’t want to continue,” he recalled.

The turnaround began a couple of years ago, after successful elbow surgery and a newfound commitment to religion. Gone was the anger. An even temper and a tempered ego took its place. Stewart became one of golf’s good guys.

“Look at me,” he joked several months ago. “I’m 42 and I’m just now maturing.”

This optimism would be tested by a wrenching loss in the 1998 Open at the Olympic Club, the same course where his father had played the Open in 1955.

Starting the final round with a four-stroke lead, Stewart found himself in a duel with Lee Janzen down the stretch. Janzen drove his ball into a tree and watched it fall luckily to the ground. Stewart hit a perfect drive and watched it roll into a divot that officials had chosen to fill with sand.

This bit of misfortune sent him into a tailspin and Janzen won by a stroke. But Stewart rebounded.

“I want some more trophies,” he said earlier this year. “That’s what’s driving me. I’m not out here because I need a paycheck; I want to win some golf tournaments again.”

A few days later, he won the rain-shortened AT&T; Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, his first victory in four years. Several months later, he won his second Open.

This time, at Pinehurst, N.C., there would be no faltering at the end. Trailing Phil Mickelson by a stroke with three holes to go, Stewart sank a 25-foot putt to save par on 16. Then, leading by a stroke on 18, he made a 20-footer to preserve the victory.

It was the longest putt to decide the Open in the tournament’s 105-year history.

“I can’t describe it,” Stewart said. “Everything just bubbles inside you and all of a sudden, it’s over. You did it. I did it again.”

Said Mickelson, “Those putts Payne Stewart made on No. 16 and No. 18 showed what a great champion he is.”

The final weeks of his life brought one more compelling victory as Stewart played on the U.S. Ryder Cup team that won at the Country Club in Brookline, Mass., last month. It was his fifth Ryder Cup and the U.S. won four of them.

There would also be controversy when Stewart used a mock Chinese accent to criticize British golf analyst Peter Alliss in a television interview last week. He quickly apologized.

Among the top 30 on the PGA’s money list, Stewart was traveling from his home in Orlando, Fla., to the Tour Championship in Houston. A blue ribbon marked his reserved parking space at the Champions Golf Club on Monday.

“This was one of the most terrible tragedies of modern-day golf,” Palmer said. “Payne was one of the most likable and colorful players we have had in the game in quite some time.”

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CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

3rd: All-time in PGA earnings ($11,737,008)

11: PGA events won

19: Years on PGA Tour

*

3 major championships

Member of five Ryder Cup teams (record 8-2-2)

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SPORTS AND PLANE CRASHES

Active athletes, coaches and officials who died in plane crashes:

Oct. 18, 1925: Marvin Goodwin, Cincinnati Red pitcher, in Houston.

March 31, 1931: Knute Rockne, Notre Dame football coach, in Kansas.

May 4, 1949: 22 members of Torino, the Italian soccer champions, in Turin, Italy.

Oct. 27, 1949: Marcel Cerdan, former world middleweight champion, en route to fight Jake LaMotta in Spain.

July 1, 1954: John McBride, Alabama halfback, killed in ROTC training flight in Texas.

Oct. 30, 1954: Wilbur Shaw, President of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, in Decatur, Ind.

Sept. 20, 1956: Tom Gastall, Baltimore Oriole catcher, in Maryland.

Nov. 27, 1956: Charlie Peete, St. Louis Cardinal outfielder, in Venezuela.

Feb. 6, 1958: Eight members of the English soccer champion Manchester United, in Munich.

Aug. 14, 1958: Six members of the Egyptian fencing team, in the Atlantic Ocean.

Oct. 30, 1958: Philip Scrutton, British Walker Cup golfer.

April 29, 1959: Joaquin Blume, Spain’s European gymnastics champion, in Madrid.

Oct. 10, 1960: 16 members of the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo football team, in Toledo, Ohio.

Feb. 16, 1961: 18 members of the U.S. figure skating team, in Belgium.

April 3, 1961: Green Cross, a first-division Chilean soccer team, in the Las Lastimas Mountains.

March 1, 1962: Johnny Dieckman, world fly-casting champion, in Chicago.

April 12, 1962: Ron Flockhart, Scottish racing driver, in Melbourne.

Feb. 15, 1964: Ken Hubbs, 22, Chicago Cub second baseman, in Utah.

July 24, 1966: Tony Lema, 1964 British Open champion, in Munster, Ind.

April 28, 1968: Six members of the Lamar Tech track team, in Beaumont, Texas.

Sept. 26, 1969: 25 members of Bolivian soccer team “The Strongest”, in the Andes.

Oct. 2, 1970: 14 Wichita State football players, in Colorado.

Nov. 14, 1970: 37 Marshall University football players, in Huntington, W.Va.

Oct. 11, 1972: 30 members of a Uruguayan rugby club, in Chile.

Dec. 31, 1972: Roberto Clemente, Pittsburgh Pirate outfielder, from San Juan, Puerto Rico en route to Nicaragua to aid earthquake victims.

June 24, 1975: Wendell Ladner, New York Net forward, in New York.

Dec. 13, 1977: 14 University of Evansville basketball players and coach Bobby Watson in Evansville, Ind.

Aug. 2, 1979: Thurman Munson, New York Yankee catcher, in Canton, Ohio.

Jan. 11, 1980: Bo Rein, LSU football coach, in the Atlantic Ocean.

March 14, 1980: 14 members of the U.S. amateur boxing team in Warsaw, Poland.

Aug. 16, 1987: Nick Vanos, Phoenix Sun center, in Romulus, Mich.

Dec. 8, 1987: 17 players of the Alianza Peruvian first-division soccer team in Lima, Peru.

Sept. 30, 1988: Al Holbert, six-time IMSA champion, near Columbus Ohio.

July 19, 1989: Jay Ramsdell, CBA Commissioner, in Sioux City, Iowa.

April 1, 1993: Alan Kulwicki, NASCAR’s 1992 champion, in Blountville, Tenn.

April 28, 1993: 18 players and five team officials of Zambia’s national soccer team in Libreville, Gabon.

July 13, 1993: Davey Allison, NASCAR driver, the day after a helicopter he was piloting crashed on the infield at Talladega Superspeedway in Birmingham, Ala.

April 18, 1996: Brook Berringer, Nebraska quarterback, two days before the NFL draft, when the small plane he was piloting crashed in Raymond, Neb.

May 11, 1996: Rodney Culver, San Diego Chargers running back, in Florida Everglades.

Oct. 25, 1999: Payne Stewart, winner of the 1989 PGA Championship and a two-time U.S. Open winner, two miles west of Mina, S.D.