Ode To The Moment

Beth Yarbrough

Don’t we all love that feel-good moment when a great champion finally earns the one crown that has always eluded him, a crown that he has always deserved but never quite claimed? One does not have to be a fan of professional golf to relate to the final round of play at The Masters in Augusta, Georgia yesterday afternoon.

I can’t leave my post from last week about the beautiful tradition of The Masters without a follow-up post about the gift that it gave us at the end of this year’s tournament. For those of you who don’t follow the sport, Rory McIlroy had never won the flagship tournament of golf, despite years of trying and several near misses. To make matters even more painful and pressure-filled, he had, along the way, won every other major tournament on the golf circuit. There are four of them, known as golf’s Grand Slam - The Masters, The US Open, The PGA Championship, and The British Open.

Before yesterday, only five professional golfers in the history of the sport had ever won all four during their careers. They were Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and Gary Player. For frame of reference, notable names not on that list include Arnold Palmer. Career Grand Slam winners, to put it mildly, breathe rarified air.

And for the past eleven years, McIlroy has been playing professional golf as the winner of three of those, all while carrying the proverbial monkey on his back - “when will you win The Masters?” He admitted in an interview yesterday that “will you ever win The Masters?” had also begun to creep in from time to time.

Thursday’s first round was a disaster for him, but he rebounded with an astonishing round on Friday and another one on Saturday. He started Sunday’s final round with a comfortable lead. And then it seemed as if every monkey who had ever haunted him across the years decided to show up all at the same time. He fell behind almost immediately, then came back, then settled in for a few solid holes, then knocked his ball into the creek for no apparent reason. There were several errant shots that left things like trees and broadcast towers squarely in his way, not to mention detours into sand traps so deep they would qualify as canyons in some places.

And all this with television cameras trained on his every move and people around the globe watching. And still he held on, losing and regaining the lead a few times as he went. At the end of the day, one hole remained. He came to it with a one shot lead. The only obstacle that now remained between him and Career Grand Slam Winner status was a short putt. And he missed it. That dropped him back into a tie with Justin Rose, which meant he and Rose would have to return to the 18th tee and play the hole again for a tie-breaker.

Life clearly was not going to fling wide the gates, here. The peak of golf’s Mount Everest was at the end of his fingertips, yet he was in danger of sliding all the way back down the mountain, only to have to return next spring and try again. The two men ended back on the 18th green for a second time, both with remaining putts that could hand either of them a victory.

He was a golf prodigy growing up in Northern Ireland. His parents worked two jobs and sacrificed everything to help him. The story goes that McIlroy’s father, himself a golfer, used to encourage him by saying “hit every shot as if The Masters depends on it.” And on an afternoon in Augusta, Georgia just as the sun was getting low in the sky, he did just that, and this time, at long last, he did not miss.

Rory McIlroy’s victory yesterday was long overdue and hard-fought and not especially pretty, and that is exactly what made it so beautiful.