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Episode 176: Kevin Robbins — Limitations vs. Ambitions, Chasing the Greats, and ‘The Last Stand of Payne Stewart’
125 Plays5 years ago
"I'm still trying to figure out why the greats are great," says Kevin Robbins, @kdrobbins on Twitter.
Kevin Robbins returns to the show to talk about The Last Stand of Payne Stewart.
Thanks to Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction for the support.
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Transcript
Writers vs. Athletes: Limits and Growth
00:00:00
Speaker
You know, so my own limits and yours as a writer, we would hope that we keep expanding those as we get older, that we get better, that we never peak. There's nothing physical about writing as long as we can walk to the next interview, I guess. So we don't face that kind of limitation that athletes do.
Introduction to the CNF Podcast and Guest
00:00:24
Speaker
Hey, CNF. Greatest podcast in the world. Sponsored by Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Discover your story, man, with Bay Path's fully online MFA in Creative Nonfiction writing. Recent graduate Christine Brooks, who calls her experience with Bay Path's MFA faculty, is being cloaked.
00:00:44
Speaker
filled with positive reinforcement and commitment. They have a true passion and love for their work. It shines through with every comment, every edit, and every reading assignment. The instructors are available to answer questions big and small, and it is obvious that their years of experience as writers and teachers have made a faculty that I doubt can be beat anywhere."
00:01:06
Speaker
Don't just take her word for it. Apply now at baypath.edu slash MFA. Classes begin January 21st, 1st, 1st. Oh right.
00:01:20
Speaker
Charles Howell III is a PGA Tour golfer, kind of a runty guy, but he could bomb it. He did a commercial where he said, grip it and rip it? Heck yeah. It made for a whole lot of laughs in the old college apartment back in the day. But here at CNF Pod, we say grip it and rip it.
00:01:51
Speaker
That's right, CNFers. This is CNF, the creative non-fiction podcast, where I talk to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara. Hey, hey. Today's guest is Kevin Robbins, at KD Robbins on Twitter. He makes his return to the podcast after a three-year hiatus.
Kevin Robbins on 'The Last Stand of Payne Stewart'
00:02:14
Speaker
Back then, we talked about his biography of Harvey Pennick,
00:02:19
Speaker
iconic golf instructor. And this time around, he's written The Last Stand of Payne Stewart. The year golf changed forever. It is published by Hatchet Books. We get into a lot of great stuff. Stuff that digs beyond golf. It's gotta be beyond golf, right?
00:02:46
Speaker
you could say this podcast went by feel. That'll mean something to you after you've read this book and certainly listened to this pod.
00:02:55
Speaker
There are two approaches to a podcast intro. One is, get out of the way and pave the way for the guest. You've heard me say it, don't bore us, get to the chorus, quoting Tom Petty. You know, that serves the listener in a way, right? It honors the time. I don't want to waste your time, so why not deliver you the goods posthaste?
00:03:21
Speaker
The other approach is letting loose a bit, letting you know what's on my mind in the hopes that maybe it'll connect with you, give you something to think about, maybe make you feel a little less lonely.
Podcast Intros: Quick vs. Personal
00:03:34
Speaker
Or maybe I'm trying to feel less lonely myself talking into this mic, weird as that is, on my own, talking by myself into this microphone. Yes, it does appease my own loneliness.
00:03:50
Speaker
and existential dread, believe it or not. You will also have a skip ahead button on your media player to use at your discretion if this doesn't strike your fancy. You know, every week is a grind. Every day is a grind.
00:04:13
Speaker
You know, we come at our work and wonder if it'll make that connection. And it's hard to know if you are. We either write and talk into what feels like nothing and there's no validation, but we show up anyway, right? All we have is the work. And if you plop down and bang out some bad words, you need to give yourself some credit.
00:04:38
Speaker
There's a lot of people out there who want to say they're a writer or a podcaster or anything, and they're waiting for the perfect moment. But you know there's no perfect moment. It does not exist. You're never ready, but you've shown the courage to sit down, I know you have, to maybe stay in on a Friday night to write that essay when there's pressure to go to the bar.
Effort in Writing and Podcasting
00:05:03
Speaker
When others are hungover on a Saturday morning, you wake up early and you keep going. That's the juice right there. All you can control is your effort and your desire. Put all your money on those two squares, man. And the wheel will always land.
00:05:19
Speaker
the winner I have to believe that I hope you do too man so in any case Kevin Robbins is is back and it was a thrill to catch up with him I hope three years do not go by before we get to speak again on this podcast or in person but especially this podcast the book again is the last stand of Payne Stewart
Themes in Payne Stewart's Story
00:05:44
Speaker
The backdrop might be golf, but the underlying themes, Kevin so skillfully woven to this narrative, are timely and timeless. I hope you like this conversation. See you in efforts. Let's kick it.
00:06:10
Speaker
a couple of books about Stewart since his death and both of them came out I think a year after he died one of them was the authorized biography that his wife wrote the other one felt I don't know a little opportunistic and so I thought there was room
00:06:29
Speaker
for another story about Payne Stewart. But I also wanted to build in something that made it bigger and distinct from the other two books. And that was the obvious opportunity, that door to open. And also, we didn't see that happening before our eyes in 1999, because we didn't recognize that it would be anything permanent or significant. And now, when
00:06:56
Speaker
like Roy McElroy won a golf tournament today, another world golf championship. Well, his style of play really was kind of born or beginning in that period of 1999. So I'm glad you recognize that, Brendan. And I don't know, you know, that very much is a golf story, the Payne Stewart part of the book.
00:07:18
Speaker
I think is, you know, it's a life story. It's a story about a guy who was one thing at one time and when he died he was quite another. It also, in terms of what you were saying about having room to tell it, I think the fact that it's been 20 years since that plane crash where he died and we've seen the evolution of golf like really hit that hockey stick moment like when Tiger comes on and then it just blows
00:07:47
Speaker
up into the stratosphere. It was like having the 20 years allowed the story to kind of end in the themes in this time and to have that remove in that room you were talking about. Like that was important too to telling the story I imagine. Yeah, well as essential and time gives us another way to reappraise someone's life. Time gives us the opportunity to give it a different kind of meaning or look at it in a different way and
00:08:17
Speaker
You know, pain meant a lot of things to a lot of different people. Not all of them were positive, but most of them were. I mean, his last year of life, his last season on the tour, it represents so much, not just in golf. I mean, like, I play golf, so I can look at it as a professional comeback story, and I know what that takes, you know, on a minor scale.
00:08:43
Speaker
But just as someone who appreciates humanity and how people live and what that means, his last year of life meant something. It showed us something that he had grown, he had evolved, he had changed as a person. I think it's a redemption story, not a full redemption, but he was on the path to that. And then he got snatched away. He got on that plane.
00:09:13
Speaker
He was 42 years old. He was on the way up professionally and personally. And then the plane never came down. He did, but he and the five other occupants
Payne Stewart's Personal Growth
00:09:25
Speaker
were dead. And I think that's really unfair. I think that really is tragic. I wish we could have seen how the story played out.
00:09:33
Speaker
Yeah, because this book, in a lot of ways in his life, it really defies precocity or that you are somehow ossified as a person when you're in your early 20s. And for him to die at 42,
00:09:51
Speaker
and he was on that path to being better at approaching middle age. In a lot of ways, that's a breath of fresh air that we are constantly evolving and we don't have to be who we are at age 23 for the rest of our lives. Oh, yes. Yes to that. That was really my hope and my objective with this story was we tend to
00:10:20
Speaker
idolize and athletes, they mean something greater than they are to us and that's fine. That's what most of them accept that and embrace that and that's great. We need idols, we need heroes but he as a young man, he had flaws and he did things and he said things that I'm sure he
00:10:47
Speaker
he regretted and wanted to take back but you can't do that. It happened and so he owned it. It took him a while but he owned that and then when he emerges again in the summer of 98 and then throughout 99, I think he's deserving of
00:11:08
Speaker
of our adulation in a different way. I think he was an example in 99 as an athlete of somebody deserving of our praise and he was a hero in a small way.
00:11:23
Speaker
Yeah, in a 10-year span from when he was, say, 32, when he reveled in Reid's collapse at the PGA Championship to 99 when he wins the US Open but takes Phil Nicholson's head in his hands and says, this doesn't matter. That's, in a 10-year span, that's quite a lot of growth. I think so. And yes, so it is a fact that he did that in the 89.
00:11:54
Speaker
at the PGA Championship. And it's also a fact that 10 years later, he went to Phil after making the putt to win the US Open. He went to Phil, put his face in his hands, and said something. And we know what Phil's version of that is. And I'm not at all saying that didn't happen. But what I'm saying is, we can look at Payne Stewart in 89. We can watch him. And then we can watch what he did in 99.
00:12:22
Speaker
Yes, he's showing us something. It's not just his words now. He's showing
Factors in Payne Stewart's Change
00:12:27
Speaker
us something that matters and we'll never know his motivation because he's not here to explain that for us. But the fact that he did it, that to me says something. It says enough.
00:12:42
Speaker
And in those intervening years from when he was a pretty brash, charismatic, younger player who could be very callous at times to the... Temperamental. Temperamental, of course. What do you think was the inflection point for him that turned him from someone that had a bit more empathy in his golf bag, so to speak? I don't think there's one point.
00:13:12
Speaker
There are four or five things that happen and that converge and that conspire to create the guy we saw in 99. The obvious one is that he is older and we all mature at different rates. I didn't grow up as quickly as a lot of people. I saw something of myself in Payne Stewart and that's what really animated this story for me. So there's that.
00:13:41
Speaker
That's rational. That's, you know, that's empirical. He's 42 now in 99. He's a grown man. The popular story in 99, because Payne wore this bracelet that said WWJD, the popular story in 99 about his growth was that he, you know, that he had, he found a new kind of faith that he got religion. And I think that's true. I mean, it's definitely true.
00:14:09
Speaker
his kids, Aaron and Chelsea, they went to a Christian school, a Baptist school in Orlando. And it's a fact that they were exposed to things at that school that they brought home and talked to their dad about. And I think that pain was sort of ready for that kind of impression or presence in his life. And it's for this reason. And here's another reason that I think another inflection point, as you called it.
00:14:40
Speaker
won the 91 US Open at Hazeltine, his second major in two years, and finally maybe reaching the destiny that he and everybody had prescribed to himself. And then he vanishes. He stops winning, kind of. He won in 95, but he won in 95 because somebody else, another player, coughed up at what looked like an insurmountable lead, and Payne just kind of slipped into it as he did at the 89 PGA.
00:15:09
Speaker
So he goes through this tremendous slump. He's in the wilderness professionally and then consequently personally because he's now he's questioning himself. Who am I? Is my is my golf career over? And if it is, who do I become? So that's happening. And I think we can't overlook what happened in 1993 as this slump is gaining momentum.
00:15:37
Speaker
and his buddy, Paul Asinger, over in Bradenton, Florida, pain lived in Orlando, his buddy gets this cancer diagnosis. And as Paul described it, it's really touching. I think this gets to relationships and how men maintain relationships with each other, especially athletes, especially athletes in an individual sport like golf.
00:16:05
Speaker
Gets this cancer diagnosis and all of these friends of his just kind of like they kind of drift away a little bit and I think that's because they don't know how to deal with that and so their way of dealing with it is maybe Denying it but not pain Pain came closer to Paul and it was it was a kind of a physical thing pain would drive over from Orlando they would get in the boat they would go fishing and
00:16:31
Speaker
They didn't talk about mortality or death or big things like that in the boat. All they did was fish and drink beer and have fun and just that presence. Paul told me that presence of pains, it just meant a lot. And I do think that pain looked inward at this point. I think this is important. And he looked at Paul when things were uncertain. Is Paul going to live? Is Paul going to die?
00:16:58
Speaker
And maybe he thought to himself, when my time comes, how can I look back on my life, my legacy, and am I satisfied with that now? So I think there are these four or five things happening. He's growing up age-wise. He's mired in this slump. He's found faith, which is really kind of one of those things he needed to make sense of the slump to give his life a different kind of meaning
00:17:28
Speaker
and then his confrontation with mortality, personally, his confrontation with mortality through Paul's cancer diagnosis. So what did you see in, or how did you see yourself reflected in pain as you were pursuing and generating this book?
Parallels in Personal Growth
00:17:47
Speaker
In a very obvious way. And it's kind of what we've talked about a little bit. It's that we all, when we're younger, because we're young,
00:17:56
Speaker
and figuring things out, we do and say things that we wish we hadn't. And I don't think Payne Stewart was a bad person. I think he had a good heart. I don't think I'm a bad person. But I do look back and I think, God, I wish I wouldn't have said or done that. I said things that are embarrassing. I did things that are shameful and Payne did too. And so in the broadest kind of way, if we look at
00:18:26
Speaker
pains life as a reflection of our own life, where we're all kind of on the same arc. Well, at some point, you either move on, you accept and embrace who you used to be and you accept that you can't change that and you accept that you can change yourself
00:18:51
Speaker
so that in the end, you have become a better person and people recognize and view that or you don't and you get worse. I'm not sure we're always moving in one direction. Maybe we are but pain was moving in the right direction and I want to move in the right direction. So in the simplest terms, that's what I mean.
00:19:15
Speaker
Did writing this book grant you that kind of permission to reconcile past things that you might have felt shameful about and kind of give you that permission to forgive yourself throughout getting to know pain as you did throughout the writing of this book? I'm not really ready to call it permission because I think that
00:19:44
Speaker
I was doing the same thing years ago through people I've met, through my wife, my family and the choices that I made as a younger person to just become different.
00:20:01
Speaker
And so I'm not sure it's permission, but I do think it's an example of a famous person. You have an athlete doing that. I think that that's interesting. And I think that, you know, that was something I wanted to share with the world. I wanted to show them, look, you know, look what pain did. And you can do that too. I hope people see that.
00:20:23
Speaker
Yeah, and it's encouraging, in a sense, too, that you could see pain making those changes, but also, even at age 42, regressing a bit, too. It wasn't perfect. Saying the Europeans should caddy for them, and then making the Chinese sort of comment he made later in that kind of accent. That's very insensitive, and that's someone who was on a certain path,
00:20:51
Speaker
And then definitely, you know, regresses a bit. So it's imperfect. That process is imperfect. And that's what makes him real. You know, it would be, it would seem artificial or too adjulatory or like hagiography if, if in the end pain's perfect. Yeah, but he's not and, and I'm not, and no one is. And that's what makes it real and even more relatable and even more connective for me.
00:21:20
Speaker
And I wanted people to see that. You know, it's funny you mentioned those two examples of in 99th the Ryder Cup where he makes that that off-handed remark.
Handling Controversy in Narrative
00:21:31
Speaker
It's not very thoughtful. It's actually it's bold and in the Ryder Cup, the situation asks for that kind of bravado. But what he says in Florida, literally days before he dies,
00:21:50
Speaker
He makes that comment on television where he he he does it in his Chinese impression and it's not just the voice but you know, he kind of like bears his teeth and squints his eyes and it's and It's really it's really racist and but Two things about that like there are people in 99 and there are people today who look back on that and still think that's innocent and that it's funny and that it just shows that his his
00:22:18
Speaker
he's confident at the Ryder Cup or at Disney in Orlando when he does that impression that he's still the funny guy. And it asks us also to look at pain, like how do we regard those things and are we applying our own values to the way we regard those things? Like what's racist and insensitive to you and me isn't to some people and wasn't to some people back then.
00:22:48
Speaker
So I wanted to be really careful when I was writing those examples, those kind of anecdotes, set pieces, that I wasn't trying to beat somebody over the head with my own values. I just wanted to present them as facts and then show the response to those and let people make up their own minds.
00:23:14
Speaker
And it also kind of gets to a point how, you know, sports media kind of, media in general, but sports media in particular, you know, loves its athletes to, they want more personality and to show flair and, but the minute a line gets crossed, you know, these athletes get, you know, vilified and then you wonder why they retreat into, you know, their, their social circles and they get,
00:23:37
Speaker
insulated by their own social media presence and perhaps their own group of trusted people that just insulate them and then you can't get anything written and done and then it's this kind of circle of you know the minute that they try to say something you know colorful that that's demanded then they get slapped on the wrist and you wonder why they retreat. That's true but this story what pains life
00:24:06
Speaker
gives them an example of someone who owned it. Payne did apologize. He expressed his regret in 99 for who he had been. He did it before reporters, and he did it in television interviews. So I hope that suggests to other public figures who say something, and I'm just talking about athletes, any public figure who says something regrettable
00:24:36
Speaker
or does something shameful that rather than run from it and rationalize it and hide from it, just own it and take responsibility for it. And I think that the public will forgive and also move on and appreciate that someone is taking responsibility. I mean, this is a story for
00:25:01
Speaker
our time right now because we have public figures who are not taking responsibility for and they're evasive and they're lying and that's not who pain was in 99 and I hope we can look back and say yes this is an example that we can live by now.
00:25:23
Speaker
And with those telling anecdotes that we were talking about a moment ago and you said that you didn't want to – you just kind of wanted to present it and lay it out there. And I think that's such a great skill you have as a storyteller to just kind of tell it straight and to let what happened do the heavy lifting.
00:25:46
Speaker
How did you approach that as a writer and maybe even develop that muscle over the years?
Letting the Story Speak
00:25:52
Speaker
It takes a lot of restraint on the part of the artist to let the story do the heavy lifting and not let your own prose do the fireworks for you. I appreciate that. I was a newspaper reporter before I started doing projects like this. If you think about the values of
00:26:14
Speaker
and best practices of a newspaper journalist, transparency, clarity, a kind of leanness to the language, saying more with less, all of those things kind of inform how I do these books. And also, you know, so I teach journalism at UT Austin now and when I get students, they're either freshmen, first semester freshmen,
00:26:42
Speaker
or their upper division, meaning juniors or seniors in my skills classes. And so it falls on me. It's a great responsibility to impress on these students who journalists are and what they do. And sometimes I have to correct impressions that are misguided given the climate today. So I'm thinking about all of these things, of course, as I'm doing a book like this.
00:27:09
Speaker
And it's important to just kind of get out of the way. And I'm also dealing with somebody who had a complicated legacy. I'm dealing with somebody who has family still out there, family who's helped me in this book, who has dear friends now still who helped me with this book. And I'm not saying I'm writing it for them, but I'm writing it with the awareness that they're going to read it possibly and that it's in book form, it's permanent.
00:27:36
Speaker
So getting things right is the most important thing. Sometimes I would hear things in the reporting of this book that I really wanted them to be true because they fit the story so well. And then I learned that they weren't. And so I couldn't use them. So what I had was what I had. And as somebody trained in
00:28:06
Speaker
the principles of reporting, it's easy to just like, here it is. And I'm not here to interpret this. I'm not here to imbue this in any way. It is what it is. And I know that's a lazy phrase. I should take that. I retract that. But there was a definite, definite storyline here. There was a bright through line.
00:28:35
Speaker
And once I identified that, it was very easy to just sort of get out of the way and let things stand for what they were. Do you think people underestimate the amount of research and reporting you have to do to be able to pull off that kind of feat of storytelling, to be able to just sort of surrender to the story and tell it straight, like just the titanic amount of work that goes into it to make it feel so seamless?
Research's Role in Storytelling
00:29:05
Speaker
Yeah, maybe. Although I will say that when friends, when people ask about the two books that I've done, a lot of them do say, oh, that must have been so much work. And so that's reassuring to hear that people generally might
00:29:29
Speaker
recognize that telling a hundred thousand word story in a book form takes a lot and it does and that's why it was important to me to show that work at the back of both books that I did. There's this reporting and sources section in the Paine book where I wanted... So everything in this book, this Paine Stewart book that's in quotation marks is cited in
00:29:58
Speaker
the reporting and sources section. I wanted people to know where I got everything. I think the bar is higher now in 2019 to tell people where you got stuff so that there's no mistake that you made up something. And so that was really important to me to show at the back of the book where I got stuff. I wanted this story to feel like
00:30:27
Speaker
It was happening all over again, that we were back in 99, watching it unfold. And my editors and I talked a lot about this choice, that without reflection, without people reflecting in the book, without people looking back and saying, this is what this moment meant,
00:30:52
Speaker
It risks not having the kind of significance or greater importance. And that was fine because the moments themselves, the five moments that I use in the book to propel it along, they are recognized as big now. We look back 20 years later and the 98 US Open, pain showed us something and we recognized that that was meaningful.
00:31:22
Speaker
the 99 Pebble Beach tournament that he won, we can look back now and recognize, I don't need to tell anyone that those were meaningful. And nobody else needs to tell anyone that either. Again, they stand for what they stand for. So I'm glad that we did it this way. And I'm trying to think of the name that one of my editors gave it.
00:31:49
Speaker
this tactic to tell the story as if it's happening again right before your eyes. Contemporaneous, I think, contemporaneous narrative is what one of my editors called it. So the book lacks reflection. No one quoted in the book saying, that was a huge moment. And when Payne won that 99 US Open, it changed everything for his legacy.
00:32:16
Speaker
Nobody's saying that and so my hope is and my faith is that when you read that section, you just feel that.
00:32:26
Speaker
There's a point towards the final quarter of the book or so where Payne's giving a talk somewhere and he cites his time in playing in Asia early on when he was in his early 20s, I think, and how he was sort of studying how a lot of the players over there who didn't necessarily have the technology in their bag, so to speak.
00:32:53
Speaker
He said, I'm citing the writing here, and him, he's like, what do they know about this game that I don't? And he said he realized those players understood their limits. They knew who they were and who they were not. And that's something I love just to blanket and to cover any industry, especially as a writer. So I wonder, for you as a writer and even as a teacher,
Ambition vs. Limitations in Writing
00:33:18
Speaker
How do you maybe test your ambition and then put it up against known or unknown limits? Are you talking about when it goes to the words in the book or more broadly just my whole career as a teacher?
00:33:38
Speaker
I would say maybe your career as a writer and a teacher, like, you know, learning, you know, understanding where your limitations are and then leaning into, you know, finding out who you are and then learning, leaning into your strength, so to speak. Wow. That's what a great question. Um, let me give that a minute. Um, it's really, so I don't know,
00:34:05
Speaker
my strengths. I don't know what my strengths really are. I know that I can write a clean sentence and I know that I'm accurate. I know that I can meet a deadline. These are all the things that I put stock into when I think about doing a book because doing a book, there's a lot. That's a lot. If you let doubt or the fear of failure creep in, I think it can be paralyzing.
00:34:35
Speaker
So here's what I know I can do. I know I can get things right. I know I can conduct a good interview. I know that I use quotes well sparingly. By that I mean sparingly. I know that I can build a scene because I'm observant. I can meet deadlines. I can hit word counts. But there's something ephemeral that the greats have that
00:35:04
Speaker
I'm still trying to chase down. And I don't know what that means. I don't know how to write a book like Timothy O'Brien or Susan Orlean or one of my favorite books that I read this past year. It's called American Wolf by a guy named Nate Blakeslee. And he writes about this wolf in Yellowstone. This wolf, she is the character of the story.
00:35:35
Speaker
Like a wolf, that's, how did he do this? And I'm still trying to figure out things like that. And maybe, you know, maybe I'll never figure him out. And that's okay because a publisher still let me do books my way. But gosh, that's, you know, that's an interesting thing. And it's really, it's a mystery, you know? It's like the, I'm trying to chase that down and figure out
00:36:04
Speaker
what my potential is. That's a thoughtful question. I don't even know if I'm answering it, but you've got me thinking about a lot of things right now. Well, that's always the quest of the artist really. It's kind of pushing, trying to find that something that makes you singular, something that it doesn't make you sound like you're
00:36:26
Speaker
Trying to be something someone else or something other than other than who you are and there was only Really one way through that and that is just through the work through imitating and then eventually something bubbles up That is that is like comfortably you in in the pocket So yeah, it's it is just an ever-evolving an ever-evolving thing. It's it's really complicated to approach it and I don't know that it ever ends you what you just
00:36:55
Speaker
described as the way that I talk to my students at UT. I tell them, you know, at first it's imitation, it's flat-out stealing and then through that you kind of figure out who you are, that singularity, that voice, whatever that means. I mean, I don't know if I have that yet or maybe I do and maybe it's enough.
00:37:26
Speaker
I'm beyond the point of where I'm trying to sound like somebody else. So I do know what I sound like. But there's still something to be achieved. And it's, again, that hard to define ephemeral quality that makes books, makes good books great, makes good stories great. Like how did boys in the boat become
00:37:54
Speaker
the sensation that it became, I don't know. And it's a book that I've read. And would I like that kind of commercial success? Yes, not because I want to make that kind of like a bunch of money, but wouldn't it be nice to be recognized, your book be recognized as something that mattered in that way?
Great Storytelling and Improvement
00:38:21
Speaker
And does pain,
00:38:24
Speaker
life story matter in that the same way that the lives of those rowers at Washington matter. I hoped, I hoped past tense, hope so. And we'll see, you know, the market will dictate. But again, I'm still trying to figure out how the greats are great.
00:38:47
Speaker
Yeah. When you look at, when you say you, like when you look at your own work and you're trying to, you know, maybe chase something that feels like the American Wolf or Boys in the Boat or something on that level that you see in your own work that maybe you feel and only maybe you can define this as lacking, you know, like my work doesn't have six-pack abs, like I wish I had the abs.
00:39:16
Speaker
Yeah. When you look at your work, what do you see as lacking? And maybe what club do you wish you had in the bag? Again, I mean, it's kind of what we're talking about and around right now, isn't it? And the answer is I don't know. And that's kind of the scary part of this, is now I'm confronting something. Maybe I'll never know. And am I OK with that?
00:39:45
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, I'm looking at my bookshelf right now, and I've got a lot of books in front of me that I love. And then I've got my books over here. And I love those two for different reasons. I love them because they're mine. But when I think about why doesn't my book rise to the level of excellence that these other books in front of me do, that's the question I'm still trying to answer. And I'll keep trying.
00:40:15
Speaker
I don't want to overstate the importance of this. It's not that I want to write a great book because I want to be recognized as any kind of great author or demand a big contract for a subsequent book. It's not vain like that. It's just that I do want to do something that sticks and that's what I'm still trying to sort out and I'm not going to give up. I don't think. I'm not going to give up.
00:40:46
Speaker
And am I happy with the way that I did these two? Sure, I am. Maybe I'm limited by the material. Maybe the stories weren't what I thought they would be.
00:40:58
Speaker
Um, I don't know, but I don't know what that club is. Uh, it's, but I'll keep shopping for it. How's that? Yeah. Oh, of course. And I, I like, cause I think even with, with boys in the boat or even say, you know, Hill and brand sea biscuit and even unbroken, I, you know, these, these great, these great books, I think with, with them, they,
00:41:23
Speaker
They must have just on some level, and I think it's with you with with panic and pain in these instances, like these are stories that you just they you had to tell them. They had to tell those stories. They had to have a deep love of the research and the process and the writing and then controlling the controllable, so to speak.
00:41:43
Speaker
Right. And then you have to just let the cards fall where they are. And so I think that's the only thing we can ever do as writers is just be, love the process for what it is and then the outcomes. Hopefully they'll be great, but we'll never, we can't control that. You're right. And you know what defines a great outcome? Is it Amazon ranking? Is it royalties? Is it landing on
00:42:11
Speaker
the New York Times bestseller list? Or is it just simply like getting an email from somebody through your website?
00:42:19
Speaker
who says, I just finished your pain book and it's magnificent. Like that matters. Yeah, you connected to that. You found that person and it meant something. Yeah, but so yeah, you have what you have in terms of your material and a couple of limitations that I had with my books were people knew their stories on some level, especially the pain steward material. And so I'm just trying to
00:42:47
Speaker
give it a new way of a new lens through looking back 20 years later at what was going on in golf. And Seabiscuit and Unbroken and Boys in the Boat and American Wolf and all these other books like this, they revealed brand new stories. Nobody knew these whatsoever. And there's something about the novelty
00:43:15
Speaker
of experiencing something the first time. You don't have any expectations. You don't have any preconceived notions. It's fresh. And that's what those books did that my books couldn't do because people knew the story on some level, both of the people I wrote about. Like think about it in cold blood. Like people maybe,
00:43:44
Speaker
knew about the clutter murders, but they had never been taken through the experience from beginning to end of investigation and the commitment of those crimes and the clutter's lives. That's what made that book so important. And what keeps it important is that it was first. And my books have not done anything first.
00:44:11
Speaker
and maybe I'll find something where I can do it first. Wouldn't that be great?
00:44:16
Speaker
How did you not get maybe weighed down by the burden of Payne's profile or his platform as you were trying to write the story, given that he was such a titanic figure? Sometimes there's inherent pressure in trying to tell that story. So how did you mitigate that through the course of your writing?
00:44:45
Speaker
What we thought we knew about him or what do you mean by that? I guess just not getting I think let's just say if I were approaching this I might Get feel overwhelmed by who he was and then I wouldn't be able to live up as a writer to his to his story and what people think of him and then I might that might get kind of get in my head and
00:45:05
Speaker
And so given that he had such a big profile and a big story and you know you were tasked with telling the basically the 20-year anniversary story of him and some other parallel golf tech things as well which also gives it some heft. But I wonder how you didn't get overwhelmed by the the bigness of it. So one reason is I think that I know golf and so it feels
00:45:35
Speaker
familiar and easy and comfortable like that's if I have a wheelhouse that's probably it. I've written about golf for a long time. I've played it for a long time and I think I understand how to tell a golf story. So that definitely helped. And also another another way of looking at it is I wasn't trying to make pain anything pain Stewart anything that he wasn't.
Universal Themes in Payne Stewart's Life
00:46:02
Speaker
that idea that his example is a human example and that it's universal and that it's relatable, that really strips everything down, doesn't it? I guess looking at it as a golf story and, oh, I can do this because it's golf and that's what I know, and also humanity, and that's simple. That's timeless. Looking at it in those two ways helped a lot.
00:46:30
Speaker
There were times when I was writing a passage where pain was doing something that was unflattering. There were times when I was doing things like this in the book and thinking, oh my gosh, his wife is going to see this. And there were no big surprises, by the way. His wife's going to see this as kids who are now older and married and have their own lives.
00:46:58
Speaker
Payne's friends are going to read this and my whole objective is, did this really happen this way? And if it did, I'm not responsible for the reaction people have to this. That's theirs. So I was very careful. I tried to be very careful when writing about Payne's past to just do it in a real
00:47:25
Speaker
declarative neutral kind of detached way and I had to remind myself that I'm not responsible for the way people feel about This moment in the book if I'm being factual And on the you know on that on that plane you call attention to the fact that I you know Payne's golf bag was on there as a point of like, you know precious cargo and in so many ways it was
00:47:53
Speaker
so inherently symbolic that this golf bag with those forged iron, you know, Mizuno clubs that symbolized a very different era of golf, you know, go down with this plane. That really stuck out to me as the... Thank you. Yeah, it really does. It was the hammer. It ended, you know, a certain era of play in golf and it went down with pain. It did. Really, it all culminates
00:48:22
Speaker
at the Ryder Cup in 99, which is notable and memorable and epic in its own right for how it went down, especially on Sunday. But at the Ryder Cup, we have Payne Stewart, 42, made the team again after missing the last two or three. We have Hal Sutton. We have Tom Lehman, Marco Mira, the captain, Ben Crenshaw.
00:48:52
Speaker
the stalwarts of the generation that they represent, the shot making generation, field players. And that moment in September of 99 is really their last of any significance, of any relevance. Now, Hal Sutton went on to win again, that he was done winning majors, all of those guys were.
00:49:19
Speaker
Paul Asinger went on to win. He wasn't on this Ryder Cup team, but I put him in this category, this generation of men born before 1960. And they're seeding their stage to the younger generation. But the Ryder Cup man, like you mentioned the golf bag, and that does represent something. It's very symbolic. But so is that Ryder Cup, because these four men are together for the last time.
00:49:47
Speaker
because one of them is going to get on a plane in a month and this is their last moment. This is their last stand and I just think that that Ryder Cup is so, so important and meaningful in that way.
00:50:03
Speaker
ended that uh... that writer cup to those i remember is my my uh... freshman year of uh... of college at u mass amherst and uh... you know my buddy joel whose my roommate we you know we just met that month he was a year ahead of me and uh... yeah he's a big golfer and uh... like that weekend it was uh... so it might have been like our third or fourth weekend knowing each other and we we watched it on a on a television screen maybe the size of
00:50:31
Speaker
your book just opened up, you know, a tiny little 10 inch TV. And when Leonard hits that pot, I mean, it was like the weekend my Joel and I like, you know, became really good friends that weekend. It was really just this moment of bonding. It was so exciting. Like it was incredible. That's what sports. That's what sports does, man. Like it gives us this shared experience. But we you were with your friend when this happened and you always remember that. And I can remember things and it
00:51:01
Speaker
sports situations that I've witnessed. And I remember the people I was with, and it gave us this shared experience that we were together when this happened. And that's part of this story too, is that Payne was with people at certain times. Like that night after the Ryder Cup on Sunday, that party that went deep into the night at the team hotel, Payne and Hal Sutton, who coincidentally were the two oldest players on the team,
00:51:31
Speaker
They were the last ones up and they were, everybody else had gone to bed and Payne and Hal were up and they were talking about when they would be Ryder Cub captains. And they talked about going fishing together and riding horses together. It was just, as Sutton put it, the walls had come down that weekend in Boston.
00:51:56
Speaker
and they were making plans and they were sharing themselves in ways they'd never had because that's not how you do it in golf. You protect, you don't share, you protect yourself in golf. Just this great, nice human moment these two guys were having and Hal will always remember that because he was with pain. Again, that shared experience.
00:52:24
Speaker
And I think it would be, I'd like you to take us to that moment in November of 2016, a Saturday night when you came across and was reading the NTSB safety report of this plane crash, because that was truly the seed that set this book in motion. So what was that like getting a hold of that and seeing that that's where the substance for this book or the real propulsion was coming from?
00:52:52
Speaker
Yeah, it was just happenstance. I wasn't looking for anything, but I did find something that, you're right, became the first moment. So I was reading this report, the summary at the top, and this report's like 1,500 pages long. And as government reports are, it's richly detailed. There's no story there, but everything is there
00:53:22
Speaker
ready to be organized. And I remember early in the summary of the report, it was kind of the report was listing kind of like the inventory of the plane, almost like a manifest. And it mentioned the 30 pound golf bag. And I don't know, I can't tell you why that just stuck with me, but it did. I didn't know at the time that it had the Mizuno blades.
00:53:51
Speaker
I didn't know anything about this golf bag, but I just could not forget it. The report had been made public after the publication of the two books, two other books about Stuart's life. So that gave me hope that there was a new door to open and that's where it all began. And initially I wanted to do a story about the flight, a book about the flight itself. Like the whole book would be framed
00:54:21
Speaker
by the morning and the evening of October 25th, 1999. I talked to my agent about that, Jim Hornfisher, who's amazing at a lot of things, but he's really good at distinguishing a book and a magazine story. And Jim told me that he thought that I had a good magazine story, but I didn't have a book yet. And that's how I went on this search for and found the bigger
00:54:50
Speaker
meaning of 99 in golf, this moment of change. But it all started that November night, just by happenstance, finding this report. I was looking for it. I can't even remember how I found it, but I did, and that's where it all started.
00:55:09
Speaker
And it's kind of amazing that Tiger Woods was pretty, he really ushered in the 300 plus bombers of that time. And 20 years later, I mean, he's still right around 300, but he's almost like the feel version of a power player. But that ratchet, it has been ratcheted up where McElroy and Kepka and Johnson, they are the new power.
00:55:37
Speaker
Yes. It's an amazing thing to see that, you know, when Woods won the Masters, it was it was by feel really. He was. There are so many interesting coincidental parallels to the kind of the fallen rise of Tiger and the fallen rise of pain. But yes, so the Tiger Woods who won the Masters in April did it with a very restrained
00:56:04
Speaker
thoughtful, plotting, disciplined kind of golf and it was the same kind of golf that Payne Stewart won the 99 US Open with. So yeah and isn't it funny that Tiger was 23 in 99. He ran the table on the last half of the season and then you know we all know what he did in 2000 and
00:56:28
Speaker
And people wanted to be like him. And he brought a lot of people to golf. He brought a lot of people to golf who are playing golf on the PGA Tour right now. And isn't it interesting that the guy who gave us this style of golf is now having a retreat 20 years later from that style of golf because he can't play it anymore and he recognizes his own limits just as Payne did in 99.
Athletic Limits vs. Writer Growth
00:56:55
Speaker
and you just echoed it, and how we were trying to discuss what it means to have limits as writers, and knowing that, it changes your limit. That lever changes as we age or develop more skills or certain skills erode. It's like, okay, this is who I am. I know who I am now. This is what I have to lean into.
00:57:18
Speaker
It takes a strong mind and a humble mind to maybe be like, you know, I just don't run as fast anymore. So I have to adapt. That's totally true. In athletics, there's a peak. There is a physical peak beyond which you get worse and you can't change that. Like athletes die twice.
00:57:44
Speaker
And it's debatable, which is the more difficult and tragic death for them to deal with, right? When they have to leave their sport. Now, you know, so my own limits and yours as a writer, we would hope that we keep expanding those as we get older, that we get better, that we never peak, you know, because there's nothing physical about writing as long as we can walk to the next interview, I guess, or pick up the phone to make the next call.
00:58:14
Speaker
So we don't face that kind of limitation that athletes do. But when athletes do, when golfers do, let's just talk about golfers, Payne Stewart in 99 didn't try to keep up with Tiger Woods. So he capitalized on what he could do best. He could lean on his experience and he could master his short shots in ways that Tiger couldn't because he didn't have the repetition yet.
00:58:42
Speaker
He was only 23. And now the Tiger Woods, who won the Masters in April, he leaned on experience, didn't he? And he leaned on his ability to know the difference between a shot that was risky and too risky.
Praising the Book's Storytelling
00:58:59
Speaker
So in a lot of ways, Tiger Woods now is Payne Stewart in 99.
00:59:05
Speaker
Well, that's brilliant, Kevin. And I think you did a masterful job with this book. I loved it. I ate it up this week. And it was just such a great story of what you were able to tell of pain, a style of golf, and the tech that changed golf forever, really. And you just did such an awesome job. And I appreciate you coming back on the show to talk about it. So this was a lot of fun, Kevin. And thanks so much for the work.
00:59:33
Speaker
Thank you. I so enjoy talking to you because you don't ask questions just about golf. It's different from a sports podcast. You're interested in process and thinking and it's just very fresh and invigorating to talk to you. So thank you.
00:59:54
Speaker
, I hope you enjoyed that one is much as I did I enjoy them all I definitely do I wouldn't publish and if I didn't and that one was it was especially good when Kevin's a he's a great banker and a great writer , it's good stuff
01:00:17
Speaker
So thanks again to Kevin for the wonderful conversation and also thanks to Bay Paths and The Thank Creative Nonfiction for support. Go check out The Last Stand of Pain Stewart. If you dig the show consider sharing it across your networks and be sure to tag me in the show so I can jump in the fire with you. Some Kill'em All action right there.
01:00:42
Speaker
I know some of you might get that, and if you're feeling extra kind, head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. Why not? Head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes, and to subscribe to the monthly newsletter where I give my reading recommendations for the month, as well as what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it. So until next week, or until...
01:01:06
Speaker
Yeah, let's just say next week. Remember, see you in Evers. If you can't do interview, see ya!