The Clothes Didn’t Make the Man, His Maturity Did

In the PGA Tour’s dark age between the eras of Tom Watson and Tiger Woods, when too many players seemed faceless, emotionless and charmless, Payne Stewart stood out like an accountant with a smile.

Golf was a job to him, but he never let on that he considered it work. If that approach wasn’t enough to distinguish him from other players, his clothes were. The knickers and Scottish driving cap made a statement.

If you didn’t know him, you assumed it was a bold statement. “Brash” and “cocky” were words often used to describe him. The dictionary defines “brash” as hasty and reckless, so brash he could be. Cocky, he wasn’t.

The reason he signed the apparel deal with Plus Fours in the mid-1980s, he confided to a friend, was because he wanted to be remembered for something after he left the PGA Tour. He didn’t think it would be his golf game.

Anyone who ever marveled over Stewart’s picture-perfect swing could have told him different.

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Before his Learjet, en route from Orlando, Fla., to Dallas on Monday, crashed far off course in South Dakota, Stewart, 42, was one of five active players to have won at least three major tournaments. His second U.S. Open championship last summer put him on a list of multiple winners in that tournament with several others, including legends such as Walter Hagen, Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino.

Until he developed inner peace this year, however, Stewart was haunted by the fact that he hadn’t won more often in his 20-year professional career. Someone a couple of years ago figured out that he had blown more Sunday leads than any other active tour player.

“There’s nothing worse than a gracious loser,” he once said, having fun at his own expense.

Yes, there is. An ungracious winner.

That’s how he was perceived after his first major championship, in the 1989 PGA. As the leader in the clubhouse, he was observed laughing while watching on television when the leader on the course, Mike Reid, was losing his grip on the tournament.

But he matured over the years, becoming less reckless, less brash. There was a touching moment after he won his final major at Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina by drilling a 20-foot putt on the final hole. Embracing the stunned runner-up, Phil Mickelson, Stewart told him not to become discouraged, that his day would come.

Stewart, of course, knew exactly how Mickelson felt. Only the year before, at the Olympic Club in San Francisco, he unraveled during the final round and enabled Lee Janzen to come from seven shots behind to win.

Stewart probably knew it wasn’t to be for him when he hit a perfect drive down the middle of the 12th fairway, only to have it land in a divot covered by sand.

Approaching 18, having lost his grip on the tournament, he, like many others who have played Olympic, noted that the traps surrounding the green are shaped so that they spell out I.O.U.

This year, Stewart collected.

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In life and death, the player Stewart’s career most paralleled was Champagne Tony Lema’s. Lema, the 1964 British Open champion who died in a crash of his private plane two years later, once lamented a 79 he shot before adding, “Considering what happened the night before, it was a pretty good round of golf.”

Stewart was known to have had some of those nights before, but not lately. His devotion to golf was a distant second to his devotion to his family. He shared a room during the 1998 U.S. Open in San Francisco with his mother, Bee, because his father had played in his only U.S. Open at the Olympic Club, and he said this year that his children, Chelsea, 13, and Aaron, 10, had led him back to his faith in God.

He wasn’t perfect. Less than a week before his death, he was involved in a controversy, having performed an insensitive, stereotypical imitation of a Chinese American during a television interview. He later apologized.

“That’s Payne,” a friend of his said.

But he had come a long way from the irreverent kid who rented a limo and driver for his first Masters in 1983 and, when they pulled onto Magnolia Lane for their final approach to Augusta National, popped a cassette into the back-seat VCR of the movie “Caddyshack.”

Years later, when offered a lucrative book deal if he would allow a writer to caddie for him at Augusta, he declined because he didn’t want to deprive his regular caddie of the Masters experience.

Players on this year’s U.S. Ryder Cup team looked up to him as one of their veteran leaders, even though he had spoken out against those who had made an issue of their relatively low financial compensation.

When he spotted three of them, Woods, Mickelson and David Duval, gleefully spraying champagne onto the gallery from the balcony at Brookline, he turned to a longtime acquaintance, columnist Skip Bayless of the Chicago Tribune, and said, “They finally found out that they can’t buy what they’re experiencing right now.”

He met his death Monday in an out-of-control Learjet at a time when he finally had his life under control.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com.