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In an age of ubiquitous social media where news spreads in nanoseconds and the word “viral” has little to do with infectious disease, it’s easy to forget what it was like in those horrible hours 20 years ago. At that time, word of the “incident” spread through a series of frantic phone calls that began a little after 11 a.m. that Monday morning, Oct. 25, 1999. Wives did most of the coordinating in those days. Cellphones were a luxury less than half the population owned. But because of all the travel, they were common among spouses and players on the PGA Tour. That morning’s conversations weren’t about hotels or playdates. They were urgent, clipped, bordering on panicked. “Julie, it’s Katie. Have you heard about the plane?” “Debbie, it’s Tammy, there’s a problem on a plane.” That was the only way they knew how to describe it. Details were near nonexistent. None of them used the word “incident,” which is what the Federal Aviation Administration called an unpiloted Learjet streaking across the American Midwest as experts attempted to predict where it would come down.
Air-traffic controllers had only a few labels: The first was to call it NORDO, which was a contrived acronym for “No Radio,” an indication that an aircraft had lost radio contact with controllers. Sometimes the problem was mechanical; sometimes microwave interruptions on a frequency could cause a plane to lose radio communications. In those cases, pilots were supposed to remain on their assigned heading and altitude so controllers could direct other aircraft around them. But NORDO didn’t apply in this case. “Deviant aircraft” didn’t seem appropriate, either. This was pre-9/11, a time when “deviant aircraft” usually referred to low-altitude prop planes carrying contraband over the swamps of Florida or the desert Southwest. This was something different. And referring to it as a “crash” seemed macabre, even though everyone from the FAA director to the person who swept the floor in the control center knew that a crash was coming. But until that happened, the official designation was “incident.” Of course, the wives didn’t know that. They only suspected that something was horrifically wrong aboard an aircraft. And it was up to them to get the word out ahead of the media.
Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, an avid golfer and friend of many players on tour, was one of the first with the news. Limbaugh called Tom Watson. Watson’s wife, Hilary, called Sally Hoch (Scott’s wife) at home in Orlando. The Hochs were neighbors with Payne and Tracey Stewart and their two children, Chelsea and Aaron. “I’ve got something I have to tell you,” Hilary said to Sally. “There’s a plane that has depressurized and is flying around on autopilot. Everyone is gone.” Hilary paused for what couldn’t have been a beat or two but it seemed to Sally like an eternity. “One of them is Payne.”
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