BOOK REVIEW

The Last Stand Of Payne Stewart: The Year Golf Changed Forever by Kevin Robbins (Sportsbookofthemonth.com price: £15.39, saving £4.60 on rrp)

Last month marked the twentieth anniversary of golfer Payne Stewart’s untimely death in a Learjet which suffered a catastrophic loss of cabin pressure and flew 1,500 miles on autopilot before crashing in a south Dakota cornfield.

It’s believed that the pilot, co-pilot and passengers were either unconscious or dead for much of the flight; the cockpit voice recorder recovered from the wreckage featured the haunting sounds of a low-pressure alarm but no evidence of conversation.

Stewart, who was just 42 when he died, won 18 tournaments in a 19-year PGA Tour career despite enduring a potentially career-ending slump in the 1990s, winning only once between 1991 and ’98.

Yet 1999 marked a sea-change in Stewart’s fortunes. He won the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, a victory which acted as a platform for his nail-biting win (over Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods) at the US Open at Pinehurst later in the season. His career appeared set fair after he was part of the winning US Ryder Cup team which staged a remarkable comeback against Europe at Brookline, Massachusetts, the same year.

As author Kevin Robbins explains in The Last Stand of Payne Stewart, the final year of the twentieth century also witnessed a change in Stewart the man.

He experienced significant personal growth, transforming from someone who could be aloof and dismissive into one of the more popular and genial players on tour.

Stewart’s close friend and former golf pro Paul Azinger says that the change in attitude was prompted largely by religion after Stewart became a devout Christian.

“He was more reflective. He’d refer to himself in the third person and say, ‘The old Payne Stewart wasn’t a very good guy, but this is a different Payne Stewart.’ ”

A few years after his death, Tracey Stewart (the couple had been married for 18 years) wrote a superb, heartfelt biography of her husband which spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

The Last Stand Of Payne Stewart complements Mrs Stewart’s biography and reads more like a story of redemption.

You don’t need to be a golf fan to appreciate it.