Over 18 holes of Rory McIlroy’s ball-striking, on a Sunday evening that seemed to stretch on forever, I fell in love with golf.
When I applied for an internship at Golf Digest, I skirted furtively around my own limited experience playing the game. Though I had played only five or six times, I had grown up in Fairfield County surrounded by golf-obsessed families. I talked about how my dad and brothers play recreationally, how I was still chasing my first par, and then veered quickly to the more familiar. I had read John Updike’s Farrell's Caddie, spoken to the late John Feinstein about A Good Walk Spoiled, aspired to be Golf Digest’s next Dan Jenkins, and long believed the platitude “the smaller the ball, the better the story.”
It didn’t much matter, I reasoned privately, that I chunked half my shots, or that I experienced the fleeting thrill of hitting a ball straight only a handful of times, or that, during my first time covering golf at the Houston Open, I didn’t immediately know who Scottie Scheffler was. I had been told I had some form of literary talent, and my expertise lay in the human side of storytelling.
I was a football player in high school, and had convinced myself, as many athletes do, of my own sport’s superiority. If we follow the analogy of sports as life, team sports are better, I reasoned, because life is a team game. Football is better, I reasoned, because real life involves contact and physical pain. Football is better, I reasoned, because its heartbreak, and its triumphs, feel so damn real.
Golf, in my mind, was a sport relegated to the wealthy—too expensive and burdened by an obsession with etiquette. Golf could inflict emotional pain, sure, but a golfer could simply dust off his or her pastel polo, gulp down a clubhouse cocktail, and return the next day with a chance to do it all again. The pain of defeat, of enduring defeat, didn’t seem quite as tangible.
But then there was McIlroy’s triumph, and his 11-year heartbreak, distilled all in one five-hour crusade.
I had never watched an entire final round of a golf tournament. This time, because I had an internship to complete, I did. All of it. Nearly five hours of brilliance, capped off by Jim Nantz’s own brilliance: “tosses his putter and crumbles to the sacred sod.”
All my life, I have tried to distill emotion into words. McIlroy’s final putt left me unable to do that. It seemed his very performance—the essence of his performance—was distillation enough.
My friends laughed as I scavenged the internet Monday morning for the ways golf’s best storytellers told Sunday’s story. There was exceptional language, rich and resonant. But I doubt any string of sentences captured exactly what Rory felt. Language, like a putt, just doesn’t always roll perfectly. And life, like golf, is ultimately individual.
After all, only Rory could sink that final putt. Not his best-friend-turned-caddie, nor his swing coach, nor his wife, nor his putt-dropping daughter, Poppy. Only Rory could sink that final putt, ending the agonizing 11-year journey. Only Rory could usher Scottie Scheffler, World No. 1, to bring out his 38 regular green jacket, declaring, on golf’s most hallowed grounds, the new champion. Only Rory could earn the title of honorary Augusta member for life, could place himself in the pantheon of Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.
McIlroy’s Sunday performance was theater in its purest form, a complete drama heightened by tension, resolved in one emphatic flourish. There was a foil in Bryson DeChambeau, an unexpected villain in Justin Rose. There were 11 years of character and plot development buried in the finale, climaxed by an out-of-body scream. The episode was rich with the horrors of unfulfilled dreams, resonant with the glory of attaining them.
There was no martini that could have dulled McIlroy’s pain, no washer capable of ridding his clothes of their stains.
It was an individual odyssey, but the whole world of golf—a team, you could call it—was behind him.
I never understood why patrons lined up outside a gate in Augusta, Ga., at 4 a.m. for a few consecutive days every April. I never understood why my friend missed Friday night to fly to Georgia only to wake up early and speed walk through impossibly green grass for a slim chance to throw down a folding chair at the 16th tee — or for the slim chance to be right there when McIlroy crumpled to the sacred sod.
I never understood what the craze was all about. And unlike Rory, I never will.
But I fell in love watching it.