Sorrow Is Felt at Stewart’s Home Away From Home

This northeast Florida resort community that was spared the trauma of two huge hurricanes in recent weeks was visited by a different sort of tragedy Monday.

By midafternoon, some flags flew at half-staff and people in drugstores and supermarkets went about their business with grim faces. At the Sawgrass TPC Club golf course, players just finishing their rounds and hearing the news stood in small clusters in front of television sets in the pro shop. To one after another, club pro Billy Peterson delivered the news. He spoke in hushed tones, head down.

Payne Stewart, the reigning U.S. Open champion, the man pictured on the famous champions’ wall just a few feet away at the entrance to the pro shop, pictured with his fist clenched in victory celebration, was dead. He had died in a bizarre plane accident, only hours ago, and only three days before he was to play in the Tour Championship in Houston.

This city is headquarters for the PGA Tour. This is where its business is done, the decisions made. The clubhouse where dozens stood in silent shock overlooks the course where they play the TPC event, which is, after the four Grand Slams, the most prestigious tournament on the calendar.

The tour players come here often, especially those, such as Stewart, who live close by in Orlando. This is their home away from home, their place to practice, to work on things, to see friends and have meetings and practice putting. If you have a tour card, you have a membership here.

That’s why the pictures are on the wall of all the event winners of ‘99--Stewart is up there not only for his U.S. Open but also for his title at the AT&T; in Pebble Beach. That’s why the semicircle of flags is behind the driving range, one flag for each tour event.

Most likely, by the time those flags are raised this morning, two will remain at half-staff.

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A couple of hundred yards away, at the PGA office headquarters, a stunned tour commissioner, Tim Finchem, stands outside on the grass. With him are a cameraman, another helper and the tour’s vice president of communications, John Morris. It is a pretty autumn Florida scene, with trees, still green, swaying in the background, reflected in the picturesque pond behind Finchem.

Finchem appears to have little sense for the scenery. He is tense, somber. He recites, like a man who has just seen a ghost, a statement for general distribution to broadcast outlets all over the world. The words say that Stewart will be sorely missed, that the PGA Tour is experiencing a deep sense of loss, that all their thoughts are with Stewart’s family and that Stewart was a man who did much for the game of golf. The way Finchem delivers the words says that his shock, his pain, are real.

There is to be no news conference, just the sound bite to the broadcast outlets and a statement read earlier to the news services.

There is no reason not to deal with the press en masse, no spin to put on this story, no shame to avoid. This was an accident, a horrible, unexplainable, shocking event. But Finchem is clearly not up to the circus that the media, by its very numbers, can bring to such things.

He decides he can handle one short one-on-one. His look is still far away, his mind perhaps drifting to memories of happy dinners or friendly rounds of golf or boys’ locker room banter.

He says that he keeps thinking of Stewart’s wife, Tracey, at home in Orlando, and how she knew her husband was probably dead long before the plane, flying on autopilot, crashed near Mina, S.D. How horrible that had to be, he says.

He says he hadn’t seen Stewart since the Ryder Cup, but had talked to him a couple of times on the phone, once just last week, when they discussed an event Finchem needed help with in the spring.

There is a short discussion about how prevalent it is for touring pros to use chartered jets so they can leave at the last second for commitments and can squeeze in as much time as possible at home. Finchem nods that that is, indeed, the case. Later, somebody else cites the case of golfer Scott Hoch, who said that, by using a rental jet in partnership with a few other golfers, he was able to stay home 29 more days than he could have otherwise this year.

Another conversation cites the general belief that there are 50-60 pro golfers, many of them on the Senior PGA Tour, using rental Learjets and Gulfstreams almost exclusively.

One story discusses Greg Norman’s infatuation with planes. As the story goes, Norman had a Gulfstream G-3, but once Jack Nicklaus got his G-4--a little better, a little safer, a little more expensive--Norman quickly one-upped Nicklaus, buying the G-5 that he currently uses.

At PGA headquarters, around the golf course, at the stores and shops around town, conversations fill time, somehow providing a bond that is better than solo sorrow. Soon, the sun goes down on this crisp, sunny, Florida day that had, like dark clouds and stormy winds whipping in, turned Ponte Vedra Beach so grim.

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Year by Year

Payne Stewart on the PGA Tour:

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Year Events 1st 2nd 3rd Top 10 Money Rank 1981 10 0 0 0 1 $13,400 160 1982 24 1 0 1 4 98,686 39 1983 32 1 0 1 7 178,809 25 1984 31 0 2 2 6 288,795 11 1985 26 0 1 0 6 225,729 19 1986 29 0 3 1 16 535,389 3 1987 27 1 2 2 7 511,026 12 1988 27 0 2 1 12 553,571 14 1989 24 2 3 2 11 1,201,301 2 1990 26 2 2 1 8 976,281 3 1991 19 1 0 0 2 476,971 31 1992 23 0 0 1 5 334,738 44 1993 26 0 4 3 12 982,875 6 1994 23 0 0 0 2 145,687 123 1995 27 1 0 1 6 866,219 12 1996 25 0 1 1 7 537,293 33 1997 23 0 1 1 7 538,289 40 1998 21 0 2 1 6 1,193,996 19 1999 20 2 2 0 5 2,077,950 3 Totals 11 25 19 130 11,737,008

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