The defending champ should have been the life of Tuesday night’s dinner for U.S. Open champions. Instead, she took his place.
He should have teed off at 2:40 p.m. Thursday, paired traditionally with the British Open and U.S. Amateur champs.
He should have been keeping the first-round locker room loose with his sharp wit and sharper ensembles.
He should have played his favorite event on one of his favorite courses, then been there Sunday, Father’s Day, for his 14-year-old daughter Chelsea and 11-year-old son Aaron.
Instead, she had to be out there Wednesday morning on golf’s most famous finishing hole, presiding over the 21-shot salute to her late husband.
Oh, the Payneful irony. Tracey Stewart was always one golf star’s wife who wanted to stay out of her husband’s lime-knickered limelight.
You never saw her go running into the 18th-green TV shot to give him a staged kiss. The only real tube time she ever got came when she held his hand as he trudged humiliated back to the clubhouse through tall grass after coming apart in a playoff at the 1985 Byron Nelson.
He was one of NBC’s favorite peacocks, a try-anything cut-up, a dazzling public speaker when he needed to be. She just wanted to be his silent partner.
It has been unbearable enough losing her husband when he was only 42. Now she finds herself almost having to be Payne Stewart.
If only he was still around to show her how. If only Payne’s agent and close friend Robert Fraley was still there to guide and protect her. Fraley also died in the Learjet crash last Oct. 25.
“I’m just not equipped to do all this,” Tracey recently told me. “It has just been overwhelming.”
She decided to do a book, felt taken advantage of by one writer, then wound up being criticized for trying to capitalize on her husband’s death.
She cut short the number of interviews she did to promote “Payne Stewart: The Authorized Biography” because talking about Payne day after day just made her miss him even more.
As I listened to Tracey Stewart’s anguish, I couldn’t help thinking of Dutchie Caray.
“Oh, no,” Harry Caray’s widow said by phone from Chicago, “what she’s going through is much more difficult. Harry was almost 84 when he died. At a certain age you just have to start expecting things to happen.”
Yet after Harry led his last “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” Dutchie found herself almost having to become her toast-of-Chicago husband. She even began to look the part in Harry-style oversize glasses.
“I’d always been afraid of being in the public eye,” she said. “But the Cubs had been so good to me that when [Cubs’ marketing director John McDonough] asked me to sing I said yes. I always thought Harry was horrible [singing during the seventh-inning stretch]. I found out he was quite good.”
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She laughed. Dutchie Caray has an easy, warm laugh. But when she took Harry’s place on Opening Day, 1998, tears ran down the cheeks of several press box cynics. For some of us who grew up listening to Harry, hearing a packed house belt out “Ballgame” for his widow was one of the all-time emotional sports moments.
After that, Dutchie made peace with “being” Harry. If she capitalized by helping attract customers to Harry Caray’s restaurants, good for her. She was his better half. She deserves some financial reward for showing up four or five days a week to share her sunny personality with and sign autographs for fans from all over the world. She signs just the way Harry did, beginning with “holy cow.”
But fame has changed Dutchie only by making her more sure of herself in public. She hasn’t forgotten that people want a little piece of her only because they loved her Harry. She knows she is asked to speak to groups and that she was inducted into the Senior Citizen’s Hall of Fame for only one reason.
She asked that I pass along this advice to Tracey Stewart: “Tell her to get out and do as many things as she can. Sitting around can just drive you crazy. It helps to get out and talk to people so she can see how much they cared about her husband and in turn how much they care about her.”
Tracey returned to her Orlando home after Wednesday’s ceremony. That’s all she could take for now.
But over time she should grow more comfortable with being Mrs. Payne Stewart. After all, she was always the strong one. He wouldn’t have been Payne Stewart without her.