My 10-year-old grandson was watching with me in utter confusion when a 35-year-old multi-millionaire collapsed onto the ground, his tears moistening the fine trimmed lawn all around him, the cheers of thousands pounding in his ears. And in my living room in Bethlehem, I raised a fist. "Boy, Pops, a lot of people get excited about golf, don't they," Zev asked, not really a question.
We were watching, of course, Rory McIlroy ending a 15-year quest to win the Masters Golf Tournament.
Now, there should be nothing sentimental about it. Rory is not a plucky underdog; he received $4.2 million for the win, and it will be worth much more than that in endorsement dollars. The Masters, irresistible as it might be to golfers — and I am one — is a fraught entity as sports events go. Long a bastion of racism that for decades kept African American stars from playing, and still treats women as second class citizens. But, there we were; millions of Rory-ites sharing his accomplishment, his dream, his joy, but not, to be sure, his $4.2 million.
What is it about sports that can create those moments? Well, I've been around some spine-tingling moments in my multi decades as a sports journalist and I'm not sure I have all the answers. I do know that somehow a bond, artificial though it might be, is built up between athletes and the people who watch them.
Our feelings about Rory are easy to figure out; he has been at the top or near it since 2010 and had won everything there is to win except the Masters. He had come so close so many times, but always found a way to find his inner duffer when it counted most. Moreover, he wore his heart on his sleeve. He told us how much this hurt, how depressed it made him, how embarrassing these fold-a-ramas in the clutch hated him. And we understood that. We are him in so many situations in our life. And then there was his round on Sunday; an apt exemplar of his Masters history, a rollercoaster of fantastic feats and the most futile of failures.
As far as team sports go, there are countless examples of these memorable moments of connection between athlete and crowd. I remember Ryan Howard's farewell speech to Phillies fans at Citizens Bank Park. It was warm and human and wonderful, and one got the feeling of that connection between the crowd and the team.
Baseball is played on so many nights during the summer that the members of a team become our surrogate sons, our boys of summer. And we become, to a certain extent, their parents — sometimes scolding but always there for them.
Perhaps the most memorable farewell in sports history was more of a non-farewell. It unfolded on a dreary September afternoon in 1960, when Ted Williams came up to bat for the last time in Fenway Park. And in the bottom of the 8th inning, of course, being Ted Williams, he hits it out of the park. The cheers rained down on him for minutes as he ran around the bases with his head down. But Ted, true to his character, never emerged from the dugout to acknowledge them. He was not a man who made curtain calls.
We would know so little about that moment were it not for the fact that the writer John Updike decided to come to Fenway Park that afternoon and later wrote about it in typical lyrical prose for the New Yorker. And maybe Updike came closest to figuring out what it is that draws us to these moments; these times when there's such an emotional connection between fan and performer. Wrote Updike, "There will always lurk around the corner, in the pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when the density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future."
