Payne Stewart's loss is still felt 10 years on

[Richard Pascoe]

It is 10 years since a Learjet 35 came out of a sharp autumn sky and crashed into a farmer's field in South Dakota. Payne Stewart, the winner of the 1999 US Open, was on board that plane. If Stewart had lived, he was America's likely Ryder Cup captain next year.

But why should we remember? What has Sunday's anniversary of Stewart's death got to do with us? Is this just another example of Princess Di syndrome, another contribution to our pathetic modern demand for vicarious grief? Or will we really miss Stewart at Celtic Manor next year?

Stewart said in 1999: "I would love to be Ryder Cup captain. I would be a very emotional captain. A very hands-on captain. I wouldn't hesitate to sit somebody down if he wasn't performing, even if he was the No 1 player in the world."

Stewart would have winced at the thought that he was the only victim of the crash being remembered 10 years later. There were five other people on that jet and each one of them left behind family and love and grief and some things that we will never know about. When the people on the ground picked through the wreckage they found the crushed wedding ring of 40-year-old Bruce Borland and a photograph. The picture was of Borland on a beach, his three sons mucking about and little daughter Elizabeth holding her mother's hand. That was the family that Borland, a golf course designer, had wanted to show to Stewart. He had not been due to be on the jet, but there was a spare seat and Stewart had invited him aboard. Borland's eldest now wants to be a pilot.

On Oct 25, 1999, something went badly wrong soon after take-off. An unexplained loss of cabin pressure and a lack of supplemental oxygen knocked out the crew and passengers. Millions watched on television as the jet crossed America on autopilot before it finally ran out of fuel. The last voice heard was of pilot Stephanie Bellegarrigue. Her ashes are buried on a mountain in El Salvador. The other pilot who died was Michael Kling. His widow, Donna, has since set up an orphanage in Haiti.

Stewart's two agents, Robert Fraley and Van Ardan, also died in the crash. Fraley's father, Charles, 82, says: "He did real well with his time on earth." Debbie, the widow of Van Ardan, now visits Africa regularly to talk to women who have lost their husbands through genocide, Aids and other human suffering.

All these stories reported in the New York Daily News reminded me of Thornton Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey in which five people fall to their death. A priest wonders if this was God's design, the narrator leaves it to the reader to choose between terrible accident or divine purpose.

A month before his death Stewart had played in the infamous Bearpit at Brookline. Stewart was thought by some to be a loud-mouthed patriot, but he had been softened by religion and was appalled by the abuse that Colin Montgomerie received that day. The American waded into the crowd to have people ejected and, sickened by what he had seen over the course of 18 holes, picked Montgomerie's ball up on the final green and said: "That will do us."

For a long time Montgomerie kept a photo from that day in his business folder. He wrote in his autobiography: "Every time I pull it out I think back to the moment Payne gave me the match and how fragile life can be."

Stewart's widow, Tracey, told the Daily News earlier this year: "I don't believe that time heals all wounds, I just think that you learn to live with your loss. There is a void in my heart that only Payne can fill and life doesn't feel complete without him."
Their daughter, Chelsea, is now a charity co-ordinator for the Tour Championship, but she still remembers silly things like dancing on Payne's shoes to the sound of Frank Sinatra. Son Aaron is a golfer at Southern Methodist University and hoping to make it on to the tour like his father.

Somewhere in South Dakota there is a pale grey memorial stone surrounded by barbed wire to keep the cattle off. Does it have anything to do with us? Can the people left behind be truly inspirational to us or are we just rubber-neckers?
The answers are not so simple.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/golf/rydercup/6416997/Payne-Stewar...