Learning what's important the hard way

The 40 months between dancing with Minnie and Mickey on the 18th green at the Disney Classic in 1983 and accepting a trophy sword from Arnold Palmer at the 1987 Bay Hill Classic would become the most trying period of Payne Stewart's life.

He would lose his father to cancer. He would lose the respect of many fellow pros and most of the golf media. He would lose his desire to continue his tour career. He would lose and lose and lose.

In Payne's 109 tour starts during that span, he was unable to grab the brass ring again. He couldn't shake the collar even in foreign tournaments. He had always seemed to be able to grab a trophy in Australia or Europe or somewhere.

Now it wasn't happening anywhere, and Payne was increasingly flustered about what to do.

There were some close calls, but something always seemed to happen. In the 1984 Colonial, he bogeyed the 72nd hole, then lost in a play-off to his friend Peter Jacobsen. He played his way into contention through 54 holes of two other tournaments only to have the final rounds and his would-be closing charges washed out.

He played his way into the lead of the 1986 Open with just six holes to go, only to become mesmerised by playing partner and eventual winner Ray Floyd's glassy-eyed stare. Payne faded to sixth. And to that point of his career, his 0-3 record in play-offs hardly conjured an image of a gritty closer.

Payne was having so many problems losing leads down the stretch that the media he so often treated curtly saddled him with the nickname "Avis" (a reference to the car-hire company's slogan that, because they were number two, "We try harder"). After all, in 1984 he had raised the tour record for earnings by a non-winner to $288,795, then blew that away two years later with $535,389, all as an also-ran, to finish, remarkably, number three on the official money list.

No player before or since has finished that high on the money list without a tournament victory.

But where the fates dealt him his cruellest blow was in his old college town, Dallas, in the 1985 Byron Nelson Classic at Las Colinas Sports Club.

The indelible and painfully graphic image of his agonising failure down the stretch that year was the closing TV shot and still photo in the next day's Dallas papers. The picture captured Payne and Tracey somberly drifting away through a field of wildflowers, hand in hand, taking the most direct escape to the sanctuary of their hotel room just off the course.

"It just killed him," Jacobsen recounted. "I'll never forget him and Tracey walking off through that field. It broke my heart."

Payne had stood on the 18th tee that day with a three-shot cushion. Up ahead, journeyman Bob Eastwood would run in the long birdie putt that cut Payne's lead to two. Still comfortable, right? Payne needed only a bogey on the final hole, a long, spacious par four. He could probably score bogey or better on the hole 49 times out of 50. Alas, this was number 50.

He bunkered his tee-shot. He could have simply laid up, wedged onto the green for a two-putt bogey and the victory. Instead, he chose to go for the green with a long iron and plopped that one into the deep bunker guarding the front left corner of the green. From there, Payne would blade his bunker shot to the far side of the green and three-putt coming back to create the play-off.

Payne took a two-handed grip on his composure, calmly signed his scorecard and nodded at the tour officials' instructions with an admirable air of nonchalance, and then climbed into a waiting automobile for the trip back out to the first play-off hole.

In the car with Stewart were his caddie, PGA Tour official Mike Shea and a woman volunteer driver. As the foursome bumped along a maintenance road through a remote part of the course, the frustration chewing on Payne's lower colon became too much to bear. He leaned forward, tapped the woman on the shoulder and said evenly, "Ma'am, can you stop here for just a minute?"

"Sure," she said, and brought the car to a stop. Payne stepped out of the rear door, closed it gently, walked around to the back of the car, and shouted a raw obscenity in a volume he later said caused sharp pain in his vocal chords.

Sketchy reports have it that several nearby mesquite trees were instantly charred and mother gophers frantically covered the tender ears of baby gophers in case more was to come. It wasn't. Payne returned to the car, his face tranquil, gently opened the door, eased onto the rear seat and pulled the door to. "Thank you, ma'am," he said politely. "We can go ahead now."

Jacobsen laughed knowingly when told the story. "That's perfect," he said. "Controlled rage."

Payne followed the double-bogey at 18 with another double-bogey on the first play-off hole to gift-wrap the title for Eastwood.

Like many pros and even a few members of the media, Jacobsen enjoyed a relationship based on fun with Stewart, but he also knew that Payne often didn't have time for "outsiders".

"I would say to him: `Payne, when we're together we have so much fun. And when you're with your close friends you're that way. You need to be that way with your not-so-close friends. Let people see who you are.' And he did that. He kind of expanded his scope of family, in his mind, from just his close friends to include virtually everybody in the world.

"I'm not gonna mention any names, but you know some players today act like they have to be cool or act like they're above everybody else. And Payne said he wasn't going to do that anymore."

Mark Lye's tour career ended after the 1994 season and he missed some of Stewart's transformation over the next few years. When he joined the Golf Channel as an announcer and spent some time around Payne at the 1998 Open at Olympic, Lye was jolted by the change.

"I hadn't paid much attention to it, but all of a sudden, I was, like, Wow! He . . . has . . . become . . . a . . . nice . . . guy!" Lye spoke slowly for emphasis. "And that's what's so tragic about his death. He had found out what was really important."