The Rory roller-coaster
Sunday's Masters final round was exhilarating and exhausting, even if you were just watching from the couch.
There was a moment late in the broadcast of the Masters tournament on Sunday evening that seemed ominous.
Justin Rose and Rory McIlroy were on the first playoff hole, McIlroy somehow having managed to alternate between choking and rallying about half a dozen times in the space of 18 holes, and Jim Nantz mentioned that if there was no winner in the first playoff hole, the playoff would move to the 10th tee.
Uh oh.
The 10th tee is where, in 2011, a baby-faced McIlroy snap-hooked a drive so far left that it ended up among cabins used for overnight guests at Augusta National Golf Club. McIlroy was in the process of melting down, turning a four-shot Sunday lead into a 10-shot deficit, but that hook on 10 was the signature shot of the calamity. No one had ever seen a player hit a ball that far left, and everyone watching had a similar thought: there are cabins over there? Huh.
McIlroy having to return to that spot, amid another slow-motion car wreck, seemed like too much to bear.
Mercifully, he didn’t have to. He hit the perfect wedge shot on the first playoff hole — the one that he should have hit the first time he played the 18th, in regulation — and rolled in his short birdie putt after Rose couldn’t make his, and collapsed to the ground.
Thank heavens. Other than the immediate family members of his closest pursuers, I’m not sure how anyone could have watched Sunday unfold and not hope that McIlroy would somehow pull it out. Losing the way it looked like he might lose — blowing a lead, coming back, blowing it again, coming back, blowing it yet again — was far too cruel. With his history, and the 11 years of disappointments in major championships after he had racked up four of them by the age of 25, it was hard to image how he would recover from such a collapse. This would be the kind of loss that metaphorically causes you to walk into the sea. Years later, someone would discover McIlroy in a Tibetan monastery, grey-haired and at peace. The other monks would warn visitors not to say “pitching wedge” around him. His trigger words.
In the end, his final-round 73 has to go down as one of the absolute strangest rounds in major-championship history, let alone the Masters. The story of McIlroy’s Sunday will always begin with the double-bogey at the 1st hole, which instantly gave up the two-shot lead he held over Bryson DeChambeau, and people will remember the wedge shot he dumped into Rae’s Creek on 13 that began the great unravelling. But his entire round was full of majestic shots and brutal misses.
On the 7th, he launched an incredible 9-iron over (maybe through?) the trees to the front of the green, where it rolled close to the pin. That was the shot that had him laughing with this caddie, Harry, and seemed like it had finally sucked all the stress out of his day. He then missed the birdie putt. On the 11th, he again had tree issues off the tee, tried a risky second shot that would have ended up in the water 90% of the time but somehow stayed up on the bank at this moment. McIlroy made a poor chip and missed his par putt anyway, wasting the good fortune. On the 15th, with his drive blocked by trees, he made the shot of his life, whipping a seven-iron into a high, soaring swoop that landed over the water and on the green, giving him what looked like a perfectly simple eagle putt. His missed that one, too, settling for a tap-in birdie. McIlroy has drawn comparisons to Tiger Woods all his professional life, but this was the most anti-Tiger stuff imaginable. When Woods was on, he was so flawless it was almost boring. McIlroy on Sunday was simultaneously hitting all of these remarkable golf shots and yet also fluffing all of these easy ones. It was bewildering. I don’t think a golfer has ever done more to disprove the notion that momentum matters in a round.
But he survived, barely. McIlroy said to Nantz in the Butler Cabin when it was over, as both men were fighting back tears, that he didn’t know what anyone was going to talk about leading up to the Masters next year — now that he had finally broken his losing streak and wrapped up the career Grand Slam.
I’m pretty sure I know what people will be talking about. That round, and the drama that was almost too much to watch.
The Blue Jays’ big bet
Last week brought news that the Toronto Blue Jays had finally locked down Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., to a bazillion-dollar contract extension that is unprecedented in franchise history for a bunch of reasons.
It’s surprising, but in the big picture of Rogers Communications’ all-in bets on sports, also not that surprising. My piece here for theScore considers the context.
And now, the politics
The federal election is two weeks away, and Mark Carney almost certainly wishes it were sooner. For the Star, I wrote about the campaign question at this point: Can Carney rag the puck until election day?