Friends and family of Payne Stewart honored the life of the golfer with a get-together at Rivercut Golf Course.

October 25, 1999, was a surreal day of shock all across the Ozarks. Ten years later, the images are still sad and haunting.

42-year-old William Payne Stewart, just months after winning the 1999 U.S. Open for his third major victory, was flying from Orlando to Dallas when the plane's cabin lost pressure.

With everyone on board unconscious, military jets were called out to follow the plane, which eventually ran out of fuel and crashed into a South Dakota field.

Sunday, ten years later, those that knew Stewart, many of them dressed in his trademark knickers, gathered at Rivercut Golf Course to play a round of golf in his honor, and share their love in Payne, including Stewart's sister Laura Thomas.

"I'm real proud that the community supports him as they have," Thomas said.

"We're honored that a gentleman like Payne Stewart is from Springfield, we want to continue that legacy," Stewart's friend, Rick Grayson said.

Grayson, one of the area's top pro instructors, organized this event and hopes to hold it every year. As a friend of the Stewart family, he says that Payne has an enduring legacy that lives on.

"A lot of the junior golfers are trying to be the next Payne Stewart from Springfield," Grayson said. "And that's what's kind of fun, that would be a legacy that he would probably never would have thought of. The junior golfers in our community are trying to be the next Payne Stewart and that's a wonderful thing."

But another enduring factor is the sorrow of losing Payne.

"It's been an emotional travel, still is for me," Jim Morris said.

Morris was a close friend of Payne's father Bill. And when Bill passed away from cancer, Jim became Payne's surrogate father.

In 1993 at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, rather than choose from an array of movie stars, Payne chose Jim to be his amateur partner, explaining... "since I can't play with my father in this tournament, I'd like to play with my second father."

The Springfield duo won the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and when Payne passed away, Jim was one of many Springfieldians who understood what the city lost.

"They lost their hero, we lost a man that we picked up our papers because we all wanted to know how he was doing, what he was doing and so on and I think we've had a lot of people that were instrumental in Springfield, but certainly in the sports world, he's above anybody else."