THERE is an extraordinary thing about the greatest sportsmen and the greatest sporting dramas.
How they can transcend the actual sport they are playing and how those occasions can grip us on an entirely human level.
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How they can bring us escapism, how they can connect us across generations, how they can transport us back to our childhood and remind us of how we began to love sport in the first place and why we love it still.
Rory McIlroy did all of those things at Augusta on Sunday night when he became the first European golfer and only the sixth man of all time, to complete the Grand Slam.
He did it because he is a genius and he did it because he is so palpably, unashamedly human and, therefore, so essentially fragile.
He did it because his genius had brought him four Majors by the age of 24 and because his fragility had left him still seeking a fifth Major at 35.
He did it because he made the impossible look easy with every devil-may-care approach shot and then made the easy look impossible with every short putt.
He did it because he was completely unwilling to take the safe option, even when all logic dictated that, as the leader, he must. He did it because he was utterly unable, at any point of that wildly inconsistent final round, to hide his emotions, to disguise his fear of losing.
He did it because, while he is extraordinarily good at golf, he would clearly be extraordinarily bad at poker.
Sunday at Augusta began as a duel between McIlroy and Bryson DeChambeau, the Trump-loving, ‘Make America Great Again’ beefcake with the Buzz Lightyear gait and the skull-and-crossbones cap.
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And it ended in a sudden-death play-off between McIlroy and England’s Justin Rose, who’d experienced a week every bit as dramatic as his Northern Irish friend and rival.
But in truth, Sunday was never either of those things. It always was McIlroy against himself.
McIlroy against his demons. McIlroy against his past. McIlroy against 11 barren years of striving for the final leg of that Grand Slam.
Win this Masters and be elevated alongside the legends — Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Gary Player, Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen.
Lose it and find yourself derided as a serial choker. And despite the weight of all that personal history, all those previous near misses, all that inescapable, gut-churning terror of defeat, McIlroy nailed the first and only play-off hole.
He fell to his knees on the 18th green, the same 18th green where he had missed a four-footer for immortality just minutes earlier and he sobbed.
When they handed him his Green Jacket, McIlroy’s voice cracked and his eyes welled up when he was reminded of the sacrifices his parents made to help him realise his ambition of becoming a professional golfer.
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I’m not a golfer. I never had the temperament for it and I chose never to inflict that level of torture upon myself.
But golf was my father’s sport, his father’s sport and one of my brother’s sports too.
Dad played off a handicap of three and won a cabinet full of trophies at Ilford Golf Club, where I would caddie for him as a kid.
It was my Dad, a schoolboy boxing champion who was also a keen player of badminton and bowls, who gifted me a wide-ranging love of sport. He took me to watch England play football at Wembley and he took me to watch our local sporting heroes, Graham Gooch and Steve Davis, at their imperious best.
At home, we watched Davis lose to Dennis Taylor on the final black at the Crucible and we watched Gooch’s Essex win the NatWest Trophy off the final ball at Lord’s.
We watched McEnroe and Borg, Coe and Ovett, Prost and Senna.
We watched Barry McGuigan defeat Eusebio Pedroza to win the world featherweight title at Loftus Road and we watched Seve Ballesteros fist-pumping on the final green as he won the Claret Jug at St Andrews.
Seve was the swashbuckling forebear of Rory and they are now tied on five Majors, although not even that late, great matador could complete the Grand Slam.
Dad loved watching them both because they could do things with a golf club he could never dream of.
He and I would watch any and every sport and it connected us as father and child.
It continued to connect us after Dad’s body was ravaged by Parkinson’s disease and even after his mind slowly succumbed to dementia.
Watching McIlroy on Sunday and beyond midnight into Monday, from my sofa with my wife — who has no interest in golf but plenty of fascination with humans — brought all of that back to me.
Especially as Dad died the weekend before The Masters after a long and cruel illness, very bravely borne.
At his funeral next month they will play ‘Straight Down The Middle’, a dopey Bing Crosby song about golf, and we will remember how obsessive and how competitive he was about that wonderful and ridiculous game.
How such a quiet man could become so animated by the traumatic complexities involved in trying to get a little white ball into a hole hundreds of yards away.
Dad would have been enthralled by the compelling drama of McIlroy’s final round at Augusta.
It would have been good to have phoned him on Monday morning and asked him whether he’d stayed up to watch the golf.
Even though that would have been the stupidest of questions.
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RORY McILROY finally won the Masters to complete an epic Grand Slam after YEARS of waiting.
The fans’ favourite fell to his knees and roared in celebration after beating Justin Rose in a dramatic play-off.
McIlroy later broke down in an emotional TV interview as he said: “A moment like that makes all the years and all the close calls worth it.”
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