ATLANTA – When Billy Andrade made the PGA Tour in 1988, he was greeted by Payne Stewart, who called him “Rook,” and took him under his wing.
“He busted my chops and needled me for three straight years,” Andrade recalled. “His caddie, Mike Hicks, in 1991 finally said, ‘Enough is enough, Payne. You need to leave him alone. Billy’s one of the good guys,’ and after that we became good friends.”
One of the good guys, indeed. On Tuesday evening at the Southern Exchange in downtown, Andrade will be awarded the 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. Stewart, an 11-time Tour winner and World Golf Hall of Fame member, died tragically 23 years ago during the week of the Tour Championship.
“It’s the highest golf honor of my life,” Andrade said.
Brad Faxon, the winner of the award in 2005, whose friendship with Andrade dates to their junior golf days growing up in Rhode Island, said Andrade has a bit of Stewart in him.
“If you think about Billy, he’s got a tremendous amount of ball-buster in him,” Faxon said. “He’s just a happy-go-lucky guy.”
Andrade, for one, took Faxon’s words as the highest of compliments and added, “I learned from the best,” a reference to Stewart.
But such high praise of being a needler on the level with Stewart, who was considered to be in a class of his own, demands an example and Davis Love III, winner of the 2008 award, supplied one from the first time they met at the Junior World Championships at Torrey Pines.
“We were 15 or something and I get paired with this kid I never heard of in the last round, Billy Andrade from Rhode Island,” Love recounted. “We get up on the tee and they introduced him with scores of 77-75-76. Then they introduced me with scores of 79-69-81. Billy goes, ‘Pretty F-ing consistent, aren’t you?’ It was the first thing he ever said to me and we’ve been friends ever since.”
Since the earliest days of his burgeoning pro career, Andrade, 58, has used his platform to give back to the game that has given so much to him.
“When you’re a rookie on the Tour you’re just trying to survive,” Andrade said. “But I played in a few pro-ams and experienced the power of the game, the way it can bring people together and raise money and help others in need.”
Andrade remembers playing in the Fred Meyer Challenge in…
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