The Last Stand of Payne Stewart

“Around Payne Stewart’s life, and death, mystique has grown. Kevin Robbins makes it all so lucid and real. There’s brilliant reporting here, great humanity, and writing as memorably stylish as Stewart’s famed plus fours. Reading this, the gallery will roar.”–Gary M. Pomerantz, author, The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End
“Compelling and well told.”–Booklist
“Few public men have been more obviously flawed than brash, big-mouthed, attention-seeking Payne Stewart, and a slew of his contemporaries might seem better qualified to embody that era. Yet Kevin Robbins has pulled off the impossible: By charting Stewart’s herky-jerk walk from brattishness to humility, while illuminating his play as the last-gasp of a golf now gone forever, he has revealed in his subject a largeness, a grace, that even Stewart never dreamed he had. So buy in – and buckle up. Robbins’ meticulously-reported work on Stewart’s last hours stands as some of the finest writing on flight – both its beauty and horrors – published in years.”–S.L. Price, Sports Illustrated senior writer and author of Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and An American Town
“In many ways, Stewart was an enigma. Robbins captures his essence with incisive reporting and beautiful writing.”–Golf Channel
“Kevin Robbins knows golf, and he has brought energy and verve to the task of unraveling Payne Stewart’s enigmatic life. This is a wise and beautifully written book about the inner life and journey of a gifted athlete.”–Wil Haygood, author of The Butler
“Payne Stewart was the last of golf’s great swingers. In The Last Stand, Kevin Robbins has captured the man’s game and style and too-short life for eternity.”–Michael Bamberger, author of Men in Green
“Riveting and heartbreaking…Focus[ing] on the final year of Stewart’s life while expertly weaving in biographical details…Robbins provides both highly detailed and memorable accounts of Stewart’s tournaments…Powerful…This excellent biography is sure to please many a golf aficionado.”–Publishers Weekly
“Robbins delves convincingly into the agonizing nitty-gritty of what it takes to miss one less fairway per round, convert one more up-and-down and make one more crucial putt-the tiny improvements that spell the difference between winning a tournament and finishing in the middle of the pack.”–The Wall Street Journal

Kevin Robbins is an award-winning veteran sports writer and the author of Harvey Penick, co-winner of the 2017 Herbert Warren Wind International Book Award. He has written for The New York Times, Texas Monthly, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Austin American-Statesman, The Memphis Commercial Appeal, Golf.com, and Golf Journal. He teaches journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

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