Keeper of the Flame for Payne Stewart

[MrMustang1965]

Tracey Stewart won't be in North Carolina next week when the 2005 U.S. Open Championship is staged at Pinehurst No. 2, the first time the golf course hosts the event since her late husband, Payne, had his most memorable victory.

She'll be home in Isleworth Country Club in Windermere, Fla., outside Orlando, lending support to 16-year-old son Aaron, who'll compete in a junior golf tournament.

The U.S. Golf Association had invited Stewart to Pinehurst and hoped she would take part in a ceremony honoring her husband Tuesday evening beside his fist-pumping, leg-kicking, larger-than-life bronze statue that faces the 18th green. It's where he sank a 15-foot, par-saving putt for a one-stroke victory over Phil Mickelson in the 1999 U.S. Open.

Just four months later, at 42, at the height of his career and happiest time in his life, he perished during a charter jet flight from Orlando to Dallas. Shortly after takeoff, the cabin lost air pressure, and the six passengers and crew presumably died within minutes. Set on autopilot, the tiny ghost plane flew on, while millions watched the horrifying scene unfold on worldwide TV, until 3 1/2 hours later, it finally ran out of fuel and crashed into a South Dakota pasture.

"My whole life shattered into pieces in thousands of different ways," says Stewart, 45. "Every part of my life changed. They took off that day, and they just kept going, higher and higher, and never came back. They just went straight to heaven."

So she was relieved when Aaron was asked to play the local tournament because it gave her an excuse not to go to Pinehurst and relive the painful past.

"Tracey has great memories of Pinehurst and Payne's win, but I think it would be hard for her to come back," says [deleted] Coop, the sports psychologist who worked with Payne and will speak on behalf of the Stewart family at Tuesday's ceremony.

"The PGA Tour is kind of like a big family. She doesn't feel like she's part of that anymore; she doesn't feel like she's a member. But more importantly, it would open fresh memories. And with five or six years, it's still fresh in terms of memories."

That would be the passion Tracey and Payne had for each other. The love they felt for their two children. The commitment they had to their faith, the drive for his career.

The laughter, joy, romance and adventure they had in their lives.

"I'm still deeply in love with Payne, like he was here yesterday," she says. "I can't help the way I feel. I just can't imagine I will ever feel any different. My saying is, 'What do you get after you've had a Rolls-Royce?' "

Carrying on his legacy

An intensely private person, she rarely does interviews, yet she braces for the avalanche of media requests that rock her world before every U.S. Open and Payne's birthday (Jan. 30, 1957), the anniversary of the plane crash (Oct. 25, 1999) and Father's Day.

"It's like people say, 'You need to move on,' but yet nobody really wants me to because people keep wanting to bring it up all the time," Stewart says.

In 2000 she co-authored Payne Stewart, a New York Times best seller, and she had hoped those words, her words, would be enough to chronicle his life.

Since the crash, she has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity, including to the Payne Stewart Memorial Golf and Leadership Complex in Golden, Mo., and hoped that money, their money, would be enough to cement his legacy and keep his spirit alive.

For the last six weeks she has relived every detail about the crash, listening to testimony, giving her own, in a lawsuit she and her best friend, Dixie Fraley Keller, and their families brought against Learjet. Fraley Keller was married to noted sports agent Robert Fraley, who represented Payne and was with him on the flight.

Their attorneys claimed the corporate-jet manufacturer was negligent in using a weak valve adapter that was susceptible to corrosion and fracturing. They argued its failure caused the cabin to lose air pressure. The Stewart family's attorneys had asked for more than $200 million in lost earnings and damages.

Wednesday, after only six hours of deliberation, the six-woman jury determined the adapter was not defectively designed or manufactured and that Learjet was not negligent.

Stewart wonders:

What does the media want her to say? How do people think she feels? Does everybody just assume she'll say she's happy, that she has moved on with her life?

Because she isn't. And she hasn't. She's still carrying a torch - and carrying the torch - for Payne.

"I don't think people understand," she says. "I've had a lot of friends say, 'You need to move on with your life.' Well, I am. I'm trying to do the best I can, day in and day out. And I can't not feel the way that I feel. I have no desire to be with anybody else. I haven't met anybody that would even make me feel like that.

"So there's really no choice there, is there?"

She says she hasn't dated - and that nobody dares to set her up. "They know me well enough. They know I just couldn't go there."

Says friend Alicia O'Meara, the wife of golfer Mark O'Meara: "We all carry a torch for our first love. She'll always love him."

Daughter Chelsea, 19, will be a sophomore at Clemson this fall and plans to attend law school. Aaron, a straight-A honors student, is about to start his junior year of high school.

"I don't know what I'm going to do when Aaron goes off to college," Stewart says. "I'll have to find something to do with my life."

Her closest friends understand her feelings.

"Payne was a larger-than-life human being," says Todd Woodbridge, the Australian tennis pro who with his wife, Natasha, were neighbors of the Stewarts in Central Florida. "His hole is too big to fill. She's scared she'd always be comparing somebody to him."

Offers two-time U.S. Open winner Lee Janzen: "It's something that you never get over. You just have to figure out a way to live your life with some kind of happiness."

Integral to his golf career, too

Carving out those bits of happiness and creating a sense of normalcy is what has impressed Stewart's closest friends the most over the last six years.

Stewart built a home for her family at Isleworth, and she made it a point to become part of the community. She immersed herself in the kids' lives.

"I never realized how expensive golf was until I had an amateur to pay for," she says with a laugh.

And she escaped into tennis - she's a member of Isleworth's A-plus level team.

"Tracey's one of the strongest women I've ever met," Woodbridge says. "She's sad, she's had a huge loss, but she doesn't live her life negatively. She doesn't say, 'Why me?' She takes it for what it is. She's poured a lot of positive energy into their kids to make their lives as good as possible without a father, especially without a father who was a famous person. It's a tribute to her, and to Payne, as to how well grounded they are."

Stewart says she is fulfilled by her children, and her faith, and is sustained by her deep love affair with Payne, whom she fell for at the 1980 Malaysian Open.

Born in Rockhampton in Queensland, Australia, Stewart then 20, was traveling with her brother Michael, a professional golfer, on a three-week string of tournaments on the Asian Tour. She spotted Payne at a pre-tournament cocktail party in Kuala Lumpur and thought he was "the most beautiful man I had ever seen."

On their first date, they fed bananas to the wild monkeys living in the trees in the rough alongside the fairways. They were married Nov. 10, 1981.

For more than a decade, she traveled with him on the PGA Tour and was his best friend and ever-positive coach. She knew his golf game inside and out. She recognized his potential, and she pushed him straight to the top - to three major championships and 11 PGA Tour victories and, just before his death, a promising golf course design career.

They were a case of opposites attracting. He was outgoing, uninhibited and loved being the center of attention. She was focused and thoughtful, comfortable in smaller groups. He was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. She was steady, organized, with her feet on the ground.

They both loved a good party - and boy, were they competitive.

"They had a great marriage. It was very different from most people's," Coop says. "She was very intricately involved in motivating him and supporting him and pushing him when he needed pushing. Probably if Payne had been as competitive as Tracey, he would've won even more tournaments."

She provided the keen eye that Payne needed to win the 1999 U.S. Open. While watching Saturday's third round from the house they had rented near the course, she noticed he was struggling in his putting. She figured out he was moving his head, forward and upward, as if trying to see his putts roll into the hole.

After his round, she suggested he spend some time that evening on the practice green. Forty-five minutes later, he was sinking every putt - with his eyes closed.

Because the gallery was six deep on the 18th green Sunday, she could only see his 15-foot putt rolling in the direction of the cup - and never saw it drop into the hole. The bedlam around her told her the outcome.

Two minutes later, Payne found her in the crowd and scooped her up. "He said, 'I kept my head down. I did it all day. I kept my head down.' " she recalls. "And I said, 'I know you did, Luvie. I'm so proud of you.' "

Loving memories keep her going

Stewart believes a person is lucky to find his or her true soul mate once in a lifetime, and she doubts she'll experience such a complete connection again.

"It's such a hollow feeling, you know? It's like the joy is gone. Payne made everything so much fun."

But she's comforted by the sense he is watching over her.

"The night of the accident, I dreamt of Payne, and he was kissing me, one of those big, nice, long, embracing kisses," she says, sweetly. "A couple of weeks later, the first time I got into the car to drive after the accident, I was headed downtown and all of a sudden a big truck pulled in front of me. On the back, written in big letters in the dust, were the words 'I love you.'

"I'd never seen anything like that, before or after. I just felt like it was a message from Payne."

Every day, she says, she talks to him. And she continually prays to God to tell Payne how much she and the kids miss him, how much they love him.

"I'll look forward to the day that I'll hopefully go to heaven, and I'll be with God and Payne again."

[PK]

Nice story Mr. 65. Brings tears to my eyes. Payne left us much too early. The DMN had a good article on the U.S. Open at Pinehurst on the front page of the Sports section today and had a lot of nice things to say about Stewart and his memory.

[No Cal Pony]

Great story. Around here they've been mentioning Payne's win among the greatest games played at Pinehurst. I would have to agree. I remember watching it on TV. What a day! It brought tears to my eyes then and still does today.

Here's to Payne Stewart, a great golfer, man, and Mustang!

Go Ponies!