'I just did not see this coming at all': Paul Azinger said of winning Payne Stewart Award

ATLANTA – Paul Azinger and Payne Stewart loved to play practical jokes on each other.

Take, for instance, the 1993 Tour Championship when it was played at The Olympic Club during an unusually warm week. Each time Stewart dug into the water cooler on the back nine, he only found empty bottles and a note….that someone had scribbled his John Hancock to it. 

"It couldn't have been anyone but Zinger," Stewart told the Orlando Sentinel. "Every can would have some mean message about why there wasn't any water on it. 'Bone dry.' 'Where's the water?' 'I'm dying of thirst.' And every single one had my name signed to it."

All these years later, Azinger confesses he did this dirty deed.

"He's just got a devious mind," Stewart said. "He's a kid at heart, but a kid with a devious mind." 

So, too, was Stewart. When Azinger stunned him with a hole-out bunker shot that trickled into the hole on the 18th green at Muirfield Village Golf Club to steal the 1993 Memorial Tournament, he made a bee line to Stewart while they were still standing on the 18th green. "Payne, I'm really sorry," Azinger said. Stewart had held the lead most of the day. "It's OK, bud," Stewart answered. "That's part of it. That's the game."

Azinger tried to console him again as they signed their scorecards. During his victory speech, Azinger expressed mixed emotion for breaking the heart of one of his closest pals and wondered if Stewart was back at his locker, shattered and choking back tears. But it turned out Stewart wasn't too broken up.

“I knew he was OK when I got back to the locker room and there were bananas stuffed up in the toes of my shoes," Azinger recalled. 

Not long ago, Stewart, who died in a plane crash in 1999 during the week of the Tour Championship, went 1 up in their back-and-forth game of pranks when his widow, Tracy, and son, Aaron, surprised him with news that he had been named the recipient of this year’s Payne Stewart Award, which is presented annually by the PGA Tour to a professional golfer who best exemplifies Stewart’s steadfast values of character, charity and sportsmanship. 

“I just did not see this coming at all,” Azinger said. “Gosh, I don’t get tricked very often.”

Azinger and Stewart, an 11-time Tour winner and World Golf Hall of Fame member, met in Hattiesburg, Miss., at what is now the Sanderson Farms Championship in 1982. “I thought he had earrings in his ear,” recalled Azinger, who later learned it was a form of acupuncture. “I became a better player the second I shook his hand.”

Azinger grew up the son of a career military man, who served as a navigator in the Air Force, a lieutenant colonel who flew missions in both Korea and Vietnam. His mother, Jean, won numerous state and regional golf tournaments. When she was seven months pregnant with him, she played an exhibition match with Patty Berg and chipped in three times that day.

“To this day, some people claim I inherited my golf talent from her through osmosis,” Azinger said in his autobiography, Zinger.

But the truth was more simple: he fell in love with the game by watching his parents and playing with them. Azinger had a strong unorthodox grip but the two most influential instructors in his career – Jim Suttie and John Redman – both refused to change it. During his first year at Brevard Community College, he was the No. 3 man on the ‘B’ team. But he worked hard at this game and by the time he returned to school for his second year he was the No. 1 player on the team. He moved on to Florida State, where he helped lead the team to its best season in school history at the time. 

Azinger still needed a little seasoning before he became one of the game's fiercest competitors. In 1985, when he led a tournament for the first time, he became so nervous he told his wife, “If I have to be this nervous to make a living, I think I’m going to give up golf and do something else.” Later, he asked veteran pro Bert Yancey about those butterflies. Yancey’s reply was classic. “He drawled, ‘Son, you want to welcome that chance to be nervous. You want to be so nervous you can’t spit. Because if you aren’t nervous, you are playing in the middle of the pack. And that’s not where you want to be,’ ” Azinger recounted.

Azinger won for the first time at the 1987 Phoenix Open and could hardly spit as he went on to collect 12 Tour titles, none bigger than the 1993 PGA Championship. To say he was nervous during the sudden-death playoff with Greg Norman with a major championship on the line would be like saying the Titanic took on a little water. He told CBS’s Jim Nantz about the neon flashes going off in his eyes every time his heart took a beat.

His breakthrough victory that shed the label of best player never to win a major was expected to open the floodgates for Azinger but he soon would face an even bigger foe. Whenever Azinger lifted the Wanamaker Trophy, he felt a dull, throbbing pain in his right shoulder. Doctors eventually diagnosed Azinger with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer he beat after six months of chemotherapy and five weeks of radiation. While he returned to the winner's circle post-cancer, Azinger’s diagnosis afforded him the opportunity to work in television in 1995 during his recovery, and he has made a successful second career as a television analyst, working most recently for the PGA Tour Champions.

It was Azinger who donned a tam-o’shanter cap, like the ones Stewart wore on the golf course, and tucked his pant legs into his socks, to replicate Stewart's famous knickers, when he gave a moving eulogy at Stewart’s memorial service after a jet carrying Stewart and five others from Orlando to Texas crashed into a field in South Dakota. 

Having shared a few stories of Stewart, who he called “the life of every party,” Azinger removed his cap, paused and said, “To try to accept the magnitude of this tragedy is the most difficult thing I've ever had to do.”

Azinger, who played on four U.S. Ryder Cup teams and was the winning captain in 2008, is a most fitting recipient of the Payne Stewart Award. The only question is, what took them so long to honor him? He joins the likes of award winners Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and most recently Brandt Snedeker.

“To be named the recipient of this award, representing my dearest friend, is one of the proudest moments in my life,” said Azinger. “Payne displayed the ultimate character, sportsmanship and service to others throughout his career. He set the standard for how to represent the game of golf, so to be recognized for this award is truly humbling.”

Back home in Florida’s Bradenton-Sarasota area, Azinger and his wife, Toni, give back through the Azinger Family Compassion Center in Manatee County. Opened in 2021 on the campus of One More Child, the 12,000-square-foot facility, which aims to serve vulnerable and struggling families within Manatee County, continues to make a difference in the lives of hungry kids, sex-trafficked children and working families living paycheck to paycheck. Over the past year, Azinger's non-profit has distributed nearly $19 million worth of food, clothing, household items and other needed supplies, and supported more than 190 nonprofit partners from the surrounding area.

In Azinger's book, Stewart described him as “a great friend, who displays courage and faith that people should strive to imitate,” all qualities represented in the Stewart Award. But just as when it came to delivering practical jokes, Azinger one-upped Stewart with this perfect description of his dear friend: “If golf were an art, Payne Stewart was the color," he said. "Payne Stewart had style.”

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Paul Azinger on being named recipient of 2025 Payne Stewart Award