Chapter 40

Ryder Cup

The Country Club

Brookline, Massachusetts

September 24–26, 1999

Forget Nicklaus and Palmer,” Sports Illustrated declares. “Woods, 23, and Garcia, 19, have the star quality of Newman and Redford.”

The Ryder Cup is the Oscars of golf, a biennial competition showcasing the best in the sport from America and Europe, playing for priceless prestige and zero prize money. The golden Ryder Cup trophy stands seventeen inches tall—3.5 inches taller than an Oscar statuette.

The host course this year is the Country Club, in Brookline, Massachusetts, founded in 1882 and one of the United States Golf Association’s five original clubs. Tiger will be appearing for a second time—the third Black golfer, following Lee Elder (1979) and Calvin Peete (1983, 1985), to play for America.

On September 24, Europe takes the lead in the two-day team competition, building on its 1995 and 1997 Ryder Cup wins with standout performances from seven rookie players. With a roster boasting nine of the world’s top fourteen players—including Tiger, Payne Stewart, and Phil Mickelson—pressure is mounting on the Americans, who continue to trail after the second day of team play.

The US team captain, Ben Crenshaw, is a two-time Masters winner and a Texas native. He calls a Saturday night team meeting and invites a special guest—the Texas governor, George W. Bush, who shares a passion for golf with his father, President George H. W. Bush. The governor reads aloud to the team the moving words of a soldier who served at the siege of the Alamo.

Inspiration strikes. “It shows what a number of Americans have done for this country,” Phil Mickelson says. “We might not be soldiers who fight in wars, but this is something of its own and we need to fight as if we are.”

To reporters, Crenshaw simply says, “I’m a big believer in fate. I have a good feeling about this. That’s all I’m going to tell you.” Then he gets up and leaves the media room. He hasn’t done a mike drop. But it feels that way.

The individual competition draws thirty thousand spectators onto the Country Club grounds, where the narrow course dimensions hint at its original purpose—a track for horse racing.

Crenshaw sends out his top six players, and Tiger contributes one of the six straight singles wins. The tide is turning.

A pair of columnists from the Boston Globe—Bob Ryan and Michael Holley—are reporting from the course. “Oh, this is starting to get interesting,” Ryan says. Holley is beginning “to get why the Ryder Cup is such a big deal.”

Another Texas native, the 1997 British Open champion, Justin Leonard, steps to the 17th green, facing a forty-five-foot putt. He sinks it.

Though it’s too soon to celebrate, Leonard and his teammates seem to collectively lose their minds in one of the most famous moments in Ryder Cup history. A wild mix of team members and fans bursts onto the green, delaying Leonard’s singles opponent, two-time Masters winner José María Olazábal, from attempting his own twenty-five-foot birdie putt. Olazábal misses, sealing victory for the American team.

Payne Stewart remains on the course as the boisterous celebration pushes the boundaries of good sportsmanship. “That’s enough for today, don’t you think?” Stewart asks his opponent, Scottish golfer and European Tour star Colin Montgomerie.

“I’d have to agree,” Montgomerie says.

Stewart graciously concedes the hole.

Crenshaw makes a command appearance on the clubhouse balcony. “Don’t stop believing,” the captain says as American flags wave and champagne corks pop. Tiger’s played in all five sessions of the tournament. “This is all for Ben,” he tells reporters. Before joining the team for victory festivities, he heads back to his room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston to rest up—then oversleeps.

Tiger startles awake, realizing, “I get this person jumping on me and scaring the living crap out of me.”

The person is Payne Stewart, who knows his Isleworth neighbor well enough to say, “Get the hell out of bed. Get your ass down to the team room and experience what it’s like to be part of a Ryder Cup.”

Tiger’s grateful for the wake-up call.

“This is awesome,” he says.

A month later, Payne Stewart’s twin-engine Learjet takes off at 9:19 a.m. on Monday, October 25. It’s a routine flight from Orlando, Florida, to Houston, Texas, where Stewart, one of the PGA’s top thirty money winners, has qualified to play in the $5 million TOUR Championship at Houston’s Champions Golf Club. Stewart is traveling with his two agents at Leader Enterprises, Inc., a course architect from Nicklaus Design, and two pilots.

The trip usually takes less than three hours. But half an hour into the flight, at 9:44 a.m., air traffic control loses contact with the pilots. The air force and Air National Guard try and fail to intercept, though they can see signs of cabin depressurization in the frost covering the Learjet’s windows. The jet flies northwest, drastically off course, until at 1:14 p.m. it enters a supersonic spiral into a field in South Dakota. All six people aboard are lost.

Mike Hicks, Stewart’s caddie, is already in Houston at Champions Golf Club when his cell phone rings. “Oh, my god,” he says again and again while receiving the terrible news. Hicks runs off the course.

Everyone who hears the news is devastated.

“There is an enormous void and emptiness I feel right now” is the way Tiger describes his own feelings.

The flag at Pinehurst, where Stewart won the U.S. Open in June, is lowered to half-staff.

“I questioned, should we play golf this week?” Davis Love III says before deciding to “go ahead and get the grieving process started.” Love is feeling Stewart’s loss more than most. Just over a decade ago, in 1988, he lost his father, beloved Golf Digest instructor Davis Love Jr., in a private-plane accident on Florida’s west coast.

It’s up to the players whether to take part in the pro-am scheduled for Tuesday, October 26. Most do, including Tiger, who finds himself strangely soothed by the rituals of golf.

“When we got to the course, it was so silent,” Tiger says afterward. “It was eerie—nobody was asking for autographs or clamoring for pictures. It was real quiet. Even on the range guys were hitting and nobody was talking.”

Rather than cancel the tournament, it’s determined that the participants will play twenty-seven holes on Thursday and Saturday, allowing for attendance at Stewart’s funeral, on Friday. It’s also decided that the TOUR Championship will proceed with twenty-nine players, leaving the thirtieth slot open. The last-place prize money, eighty thousand dollars, will be awarded to the Stewart family in his memory.

At eight forty-five on Thursday morning, the first tee is filled with the sounds of prayer and the hum of a lone bagpipe playing the mourning tune “Going Home.”

Stewart was open about the renewed Christian faith he’d experienced as a father. His daughter Chelsea and son Aaron had given Stewart the brightly colored WWJD (What would Jesus do?) bracelet that he was wearing when he died. At First Baptist Orlando, six thousand similar woven cotton bracelets are distributed at the service.

Tiger is among one hundred PGA players in attendance; twenty-nine return to Houston to finish a TOUR Championship tournament marred by grief. Twenty-four golfers also wear old-fashioned golf knickers—like the ones Stewart famously wore—during play. Tiger is one of the few holdouts. “You don’t have to wear knickers to honor someone,” he tells journalists. “I’m comfortable handling things internally. I don’t need to show the pain I feel inside.”

He compartmentalizes his emotions to focus on what he does best: winning.

Tiger earns the $900,000 top prize, finishing four strokes ahead of Davis Love III, who praises Tiger’s performance unconditionally. “I said the first couple of years he was here that he was not even close to how good he could get. We are starting to see that now. He is clearly head and shoulders above the rest of us.”

“You hate to keep blowing his horn,” analyst Curtis Strange says, “but every time you turn around, he’s doing something no one else can.”

The future looks not only bright but also clear. The Lasik surgery Tiger had following the Ryder Cup has corrected his nearsightedness—so severe that without glasses or contacts he’d be considered legally blind—and now he has twenty-fifteen vision. “The first thing he said afterward,” recalls journalist Tom Callahan, “was ‘The hole looks bigger.’” Not exactly what his opponents wish to hear.

Tiger’s traveled the world and made many memories this year, but there’s one souvenir he won’t be keeping: the Shirt.

During the Ryder Cup, the US team captain, Ben Crenshaw, had had photos of winning American teams printed onto a three-button burgundy polo-style shirt with a beige collar and beige cuffs. The day the 1999 team wore the garment—instantly nicknamed the Shirt—the Americans beat Europe and won the cup.

“It wasn’t a beautiful shirt, but I thought it was cool,” says teammate Jim Furyk, who’s still going strong paired with Tiger’s ex-caddie, Mike “Fluff” Cowan. “It had a lot of emotion and time spent on it by Ben.”

Tiger has no emotional attachment to the garment, though, telling ESPN, “I threw it in the fireplace over Christmas and burned it. It was sooo ugly. It provided more warmth for the house.”

He’s ending 1999 on a much cooler note. His winnings this year total $6.6 million. He’s named PGA Tour Player of the Year. He’s had eight PGA Tour wins, ending the season with four in a row. People are starting to speculate that he could beat the record Byron Nelson set in 1945: eighteen PGA wins, including the eleven in a row.

Eighty-seven-year-old Nelson sends the newly twenty-four-year-old a note: Tiger, I love watching you play on the TV, it’s a lot of fun to watch you. If you do break my record, I’ll be the first one to congratulate you. I had the record for 55 years. If you go ahead and break it, Merry Christmas.