It occurred on October 25 after a catastrophic loss of cabin pressure not long after takeoff. They were travelling from Orlando to Dallas, where Stewart was consulting on a course design in nearby Frisco. From there they were headed to Houston for the Tour Championship. All likely were rendered unconscious within a minute or so, and the plane drifted north and eventually ran out of fuel. It stands as the saddest moment in golf. That Stewart was happily married to Tracey, his wife of 18 years, and had two wonderful children – daughter Chelsea, 13 and son Aaron, 10 – made the tragedy even more heartbreaking. Media coverage was extraordinary, with national TV networks interrupting daily programming to cover the episode live well before the plane crashed. Jim Nantz, then as now a CBS sports broadcaster, hustled from a restaurant in Connecticut to New York City to assist in reporting for the network. The immediate aftermath was morose but inspiring, the long-term appreciations stunning and prolonged. Stewart’s funeral in Orlando five days later was attended by many of the most noteworthy people in golf. Jackie Burke, the great golf sage who passed away at 100 earlier this year, once said, “Live your life so that when you die, you fill up the church.” First Baptist Church in Orlando was packed that day. Eight months later,
The neighbourhoods around Bay Hill Club in Orlando are notoriously maze-like, and on a March morning in 1999, I couldn’t find Payne Stewart’s house. He lived just off the 12th tee of the course, and I’d been to his home before, but somehow was looking on the wrong side of the street. Suddenly a barefoot guy in shorts and a t-shirt sprang into the street and slapped the bonnet of my rental car, waving his arms and yelling as though warning of a washed-out bridge. It was Stewart, of course, as theatrical and extroverted as you saw on TV. When Stewart comes to mind, I don’t see the celebration when he holed the putt on the final hole at Pinehurst to win the 1999 US Open. I see that snippet of him in his natural habitat three months earlier, waving his arms and laughing as he shouted through my rolled-up window, “Right here, dummy!” Interview gold came from Stewart that day, as it always did with him, and I left thinking I’d hang with him many more times. But a few months and his best career exploits later, he was gone. It’s been 25 years since the Learjet 30 carrying Stewart and five others – pilot Michael Kling, 42; first officer Stephanie Bellegarrigue, 27; course architect Bruce Borland, 40; Stewart’s agent, Robert Fraley, 46 and one of Fraley’s colleagues, Van Ardan, 45 – plunged into a field near Mina, South Dakota.
86 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024
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