Maybe the next time I am tempted to write about the Masters golf tournament, I should just sit down and shut up.
I mean, I won’t. But maybe I should. I have chronicled more than once how, in 1997, I predicted that Tiger Woods, playing in his first Masters as a professional, wasn’t ready yet — maybe in a few years, but not then.
Naturally, he went out and won by 12 strokes, a tournament record.
Oops.
Not content with a single dumb take, on Thursday, April 10, I wrote a column questioning whether a Masters without Woods was a Masters worth watching.
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What a dope.
No Tiger Woods? No problem
It was meant as a tribute to the absent Woods. Yet what transpired, in case you’re not a golf fan, is one of the most dramatic finishes to any sporting event in recent memory — not just golf, but any event.
Rory McIlroy was the fan (and CBS broadcast crew) favorite to win, as it would give him a win in each of the sport’s major championships — a feat he has pursued for 11 years. On Sunday, the final day of the tournament, he started out with the lead, lost it, regained it, lost it, regained it. You get the idea.
It was insane. It was mortifying. It was thrilling. It was fantastic. It was a great TV drama.
And it was about more than golf.
When McIlroy fell to his knees after winning the tournament in the first sudden-death playoff hole and sobbed with as much relief as happiness, it was A Moment. Jim Nance, Mr. Takes-the-Masters-More-Seriously-Than-Life-Itself, said, “Rory has his Master-piece.” And so big was the moment I actually kind of didn’t hate it.
Did Rory McIlroy’s win matter?
The Masters is the elite of the elite when it comes to golf, a tournament run by people so smug — and so powerful — that they dictate the terms of the broadcast to CBS Sports, not the other way around. It’s comical in some ways. And in the big scheme of things, no matter how historic — McIlroy became only the sixth golfer in history to win all four Majors — you know how much his win matters?
Not one damn bit.
Yet the big scheme of things is exactly why it matters, or at least did for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon in spring.
Let’s take a glance at some of the other things going on on Sunday. On the morning news shows, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told ABC News that a tariff exemption on some electronic devices that the administration announced on Friday was probably only temporary. Later, Trump said there was no tariff exception announced on Friday. Confused? Welcome to the club. Confusion is the point, seems like.
Let’s see, what else? Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family escaped injury when a man “harboring hatred” for Shapiro — the man’s words — set fire to their home, according to court records. The man also said that if he had found Shapiro, he would have beaten him with a hammer, according to an affidavit.
By Monday, Donald Trump was declaring that he was open to sending U.S. citizens to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
You get the idea. It’s a mess out there. McIlroy’s emotional rollercoaster of a final round was also a mess — but in a good way. It had a happy ending, at least if you were rooting for McIlroy, and just about everyone seemed to be.
For McIlroy, the stakes were sky-high. For 99.9% of the world, they were non-existent, no matter how much you might have screamed at your TV set. This is the beauty of sports. It is a perfect and necessary outlet to help us navigate the current climate, which is set somewhere between “disaster” and “nightmare.”
Masters drama was a welcome relief from the headlines
There is so much to worry about these days, so much division, so much hate and anger. A version of all those things exists in sports, too. Maybe you’re an Arizona Diamondbacks fan who hates the Los Angeles Dodgers (never forget the pool incident!). But you don’t really hate them. You would still watch Shohei Ohtani every chance you get, even if you were rooting for him to fail. (He rarely does.)
It’s fun to care about this stuff, to care about it more than you know you really should, or probably really do. It’s a great pressure-relief valve. If you were living and dying with every McIlroy shot Sunday, you know how cathartic that feeling can be.
When it’s over, it’s over, win or lose. But that in-between time is essential. So yes, I was wrong. The Masters without Woods was worth watching after all. And then some.
Masters preview: Is a Masters without Tiger Woods still worth watching?
Reach Goodykoontz at [email protected]. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Media commentary with a side of snark? Sign up for The Watchlist newsletter with Bill Goodykoontz.
