Payne at 25

By Lee Pace

To the left of the putting green on Pinehurst No. 2’s 18th hole stands a bronze statue of Payne Stewart.

The champion of the 1999 U.S. Open, the first ever held at Pinehurst, was captured by sculptor Zenos Frudakis in the pose he struck after sinking the winning putt to edge Phil Mickelson — right leg and arm extended, mouth exuding the joy of the victory. The statue is easily the most photographed spot in Pinehurst, and grounds maintenance workers have struggled for years to keep healthy grass around it because of all of the traffic.

Caption: Payne Stewart Statue

Just inside the clubhouse, framed and hung on a hallway adorned with a century of Pinehurst memorabilia, is a photograph of the same moment and pose. Photographer Rob Brown captured the millisecond of golf history from the roof of the clubhouse, clicking his shutter just as the ball tumbled into the hole. The massive gallery surrounding the green has yet to acknowledge the putt — only Stewart, his caddie and one spectator with arms extended realize the ball is in the hole.

“It was really his moment,” Brown says. “I’ve noticed in shooting golf since then that there is usually one instant the golfer has all to himself — he knows he’s made the putt but no one else does. He’s alone, in his own little world. It’s pretty neat.”

The statue and the photograph will be the tangible remnants of Stewart’s victory when the 25th anniversary of his win rolls around on June 20th, four days after the 2024 Open champion is crowned on the same course. The victory came just three months before his tragic death in a plane crash.

“Payne didn’t just play golf here,” Pat Corso, president and CEO of Pinehurst Inc. from 1986-2004, said upon Stewart’s death. “He understood and was part of the Pinehurst experience. He understood the traditions and the history, he immersed himself in the community. There’s quite a sense of loss that he’ll never be here again.”

Stewart won his second Open title (he won at Hazeltine in 1991) by out-dueling Mickelson, Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh in the fourth round. In hindsight, if you analyze Stewart’s game, equipment, preparation, mental frame of mind, maturity and the karma of the setting, it’s not difficult to understand why he won that Open. In fact, choosing Stewart to win before the event would have made extraordinarily good sense.

Consider these elements:

Stewart was comfortable in Pinehurst.

He spent several weeks staying at the Pine Crest Inn in the fall of 1979 when a mini tour staged four events in the Sandhills area. Stewart, just out of Southern Methodist University, became friends with the Barrett family, the longtime owner of the Pine Crest, and enjoyed his return trips in the late 1980s to visit Harvie Ward, his swing coach at the time, and to compete in the 1991 and ’92 Tour Championships.
No. 2 was ideally suited to a “feel” player.

The golf course requires imagination and improvisation to create the recovery shots necessitated by excursions into the crevices and hollows surrounding the putting surfaces. Stewart played on feel, intuition, imagination and emotion. Many U.S. Open venues remove choice from a golfer’s arsenal, forcing him into lob-wedge recoveries from thick rough surrounding fairways and greens. At Pinehurst, the fairway rough was limited to 3 inches — giving golfers the option of playing full shots toward the green — and the greens surrounds were closely cropped, affording the option of pitching, chipping or putting from off the putting surface. That played to Stewart’s strengths.
He missed the cut the week before at Memphis.

That allowed Stewart to travel to Pinehurst and arrive on Saturday, in time to spend two concentrated days studying the course and mapping a game plan before the crowds arrived. Stewart picked up a yardage book and spent those two days detailing each green complex and noting in yellow marker where he did not want to leave an approach shot. That sense of feel, added with the skill of planning he had developed over the years, gave him an outstanding plan of attack entering the championship. By noon on Wednesday of championship week, Stewart was ready to go.

Caption: Payne Stewart Statue

His equipment suited him for the first time in many years.

Stewart had used Wilson blades and Titleist balls early in his career but signed a lucrative sponsorship deal with Spalding in 1993. The company was expanding its line of Top-Flite irons and balls and wanted a premier player to promote its equipment on tour. With the change, Stewart went from classic to high-tech. He went from forged irons to cast. He went from a soft Titleist ball spinning at 3,500 revolutions per minute to the two-piece Top-Flite Z-Balata at 8,500 rpm. His game struggled during a mid-1990s slump. That contract ended in 1998, and Stewart began playing with a set of Lynx irons and returned to Titleist balls. He’d even found a putter earlier in the year he liked.
His game was rounding into excellent form as 1999 evolved.

Stewart reformulated his swing in the mid-1990s to compensate for the changes in his equipment. Now that he was playing with clubs and a ball that suited his game, his swing gradually returned to form. He regained the classic, rhythmic motion that had constituted one of the best swings on the PGA Tour.
He had handled his loss in the previous year’s Open with grace and maturity, in a manner he could not have exhibited a decade earlier.

Stewart led the 1998 Open at The Olympic Club in San Francisco by four shots entering the final round. But he struggled to a 74 and lost by one shot to the surging Lee Janzen, who fired a 68. The round included a slow-play warning from USGA official Tom Meeks after Stewart’s drive on the 12th hole had the misfortune of coming to rest in a sand-filled divot. Stewart had acquired a sense of peace with his life and his golf game over the years — partly a result of new spiritual life — and handled the loss with his head held high. No excuses. No snipping at his opponents or Meeks. He simply congratulated Janzen and vowed to get better.

At Meeks’ suggestion during a visit with Stewart months later, he even practiced hitting shots out of sand-filled divots.

“Lo and behold, Payne drove into four sand divots that week at Pinehurst,” remembers Mike Hicks, Stewart’s long-time caddie. “Twice it happened on the fifth hole, and he made par both times. That will always stick out in my mind — that he had the vision to prepare for instances like that.”

It fell together perfectly that week in 1999. This year’s championship promises to have a feel and personality and plot-line all its own. But the ghost of Payne Stewart will surely lurk high in the pine trees surrounding the village and No. 2 course.

Lee Pace is a freelance golf writer who has written about Sandhills area golf for four decades and is the author of club histories about Pinehurst Resort & Country Club, Mid Pines, Pine Needles and Forest Creek.