At the Masters, a unique view of a champion

If I rise on tiptoe, and crane my neck, and turn my shoulder slightly, and peek through the daylight between the heads of strangers, I can glimpse it.

The fluttering yellow flag on the 18th green of the Masters.

Then people shift and my view is blocked.

It’s a few Sundays ago in Augusta and Rory McIlroy is somewhere on this green trying to win the Masters with a four-foot putt in the play-off. Four feet is nothing, he’ll do this blindfolded tomorrow. Four feet is everything because to cross that distance successfully carries the promise of history, relief, satisfaction, redemption, vindication, immortality.

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The crowd has that particular stillness which comes with the anticipation of the extraordinary. No one wants to breathe in case a breath of collective wind pushes him off the tightrope. People are tense, as if willing McIlroy, as if gathering themselves to celebrate him and turn this church into a carnival. The evening is dying. Light is being slowly lost. At the back of a crowd that’s 10 deep or more, I can see nothing. But I am connected to the crowd, and to the moment, and it is an extraordinary sensation.

This has never happened to me before. Sport is to be seen, isn’t it? In a journalist’s life this will encompass a multitude of vantage points. The press box; the boundary line; behind Harsha Bhogle, Peter Roebuck, Jim Maxwell in an ABC radio booth; in the stands with a player’s parent who can barely look, mutters an incoherent prayer and wears a tight smile.

Everyone has a story about sports’ brilliant angles. The singular Sharda Ugra stands under a leaking shamiana in Mizoram once, her seat wet, watching Aizawl FC play Mohun Bagan through the rain, making hurried notes on damp paper and then hiding her notebook under her shirt. Then a cloud rolls in and the players start to resemble ghosts in a mist. “Too good,” she remembers.

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Clayton Murzello of Mid-Day sits inside the players’ enclosure during a famous Sachin Tendulkar innings in a Ranji Trophy semi-final in 2000 and watches everyone’s faces. Jonathan Selvaraj of The Sportstar stands on the edge of a wheat field on which the Haryana state boxing championship is being conducted. Mihir Vasavda of the Indian Express sits alongside North Koreans in Pyongyang during an AFC Cup semi-final and at least at the football, he says, they are released from the stoic silence that wraps their nation. This game demands expression from everyone.

At the Masters, as people wait for McIlroy to arrive on the 18th hole, some able to see more than others, they shuffle, bump, chat, joke, swear. They wonder how he’ll recover if he loses. They discuss the length of a putt left. Just strangers tightly tethered by expectancy and married to suspense.

At one point it strikes me, America’s going through its own turmoil, an embracing nation is turning narrow and inward-looking, yet on this evening there’s this wonderful outpouring for a Northern Irishman. Sport is rescuing us again.

This game, replete with theories and mechanics which defy mastery, is dazzling, even if its professional practitioners can seem rather pampered. Yet there’s an empathy for McIlroy, for, as humans, we value the idea of the chase (of our better selves) and understand the mean truth of falling short. Eleven years without a Major feels like a stain on his greatness. Only when he finally wins and walks to the clubhouse, his face suffused with emotion, do we actually understand how deep his suffering lay.

The devotion of golf fans is measured in patience and in 5km treks alongside golfers. Its reward can be a startling proximity. A golfer in the trees might be 10ft from you as he hits, allowing you to hear that immaculate sound of perfect timing. At my first Masters, I understand how TV tells half-truths. In real life the greens feel smaller and slyer, the pines taller, the slopes steeper. There is to this place a dangerous beauty.

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There’s a quaint, famous list of Prohibited Items at the Masters. No cameras (on tournament days). No radios. No phones. Think of it as a polite invitation to give yourself utterly to the golf. There are no large screens and so, apart from what the scoreboard speaks, you know nothing.

Since I can’t see the play, I am interpreting the golf via ripples of sound. A shot lands in the sand, a bunker shot ends 5ft from the hole, a putt is missed—which is what happens to McIlroy in regulation at the 18th—and all this is relayed through exclamation, groan, cheer, curse, sigh.

Out here in Georgia, at 6ft, I’m not tall enough. So a lankier fellow who can peer down the fairway at McIlroy offers occasional quiet commentary during the play-off. In the crush I’m scribbling indecipherable notes. Silence wraps us like a membrane. The louder sports gets everywhere else, the more sacred this hush feels.

There are no sponsor marquees overlooking the green. No reserved press seats. No advertising hoardings. There’s something pure to this moment. At my desk I’d have replays, but never this feeling.

McIlroy’s four-foot putt goes in.

For days later I’ll watch YouTube videos of this moment, McIlroy falling and crying, his rival Justin Rose a study in uncommon grace. He knows what it’s taken for Rory to beat Rory. Only other athletes truly appreciate what it means to conquer the self on a field suffocated with pressure.

The crowd cheers and chants and then the threads of intensity which tie it together abruptly come undone like cheap stitching. The moment in sport is intoxicating but fleeting. It’s tasted and felt and liberates and then it’s gone like the evening itself. It will never return, yet you’re so grateful to have had it at all. When I walk away from the 18th green, it feels like something precious is broken. A spell perhaps.

Rohit Brijnath is an assistant sports editor at The Straits Times, Singapore, and a co-author of Abhinav Bindra’s book A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold. He posts @rohitdbrijnath.

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