"Rory et al."

What we bring to the Masters, and what the Masters brings us.

About twenty minutes before the leaders teed off on Sunday, I went across the street to the package store and picked up a twenty-pound bag of ice. I didn’t know how much ice we needed, but it was my job to get ice, and I’d rather show up with too much ice than not enough. Too much ice is a laugh; not enough ice is a problem. Twenty pounds of ice seemed like way too much ice, which meant it was the correct amount of ice.

We’d be making “Azaleas” at my buddy’s house — that’s what the ice was for. An Azalea is a cocktail that calls for two shots of vodka, and I was coming off a good-sized night out on Friday, and so I looked around for a lower-proof auxiliary beverage I could nurse in between Azaleas. I found a four-pack of Guinness Zeros. My grandmother’s maiden name is McAndrews, and their association with an older South African college teammate solidified them in my mind as a cool guy beer. I wondered if a beer from Dublin was the perfect beer to cheer on a kid from outside Belfast or exactly the wrong one. My geopolitical history isn’t the sharpest, but I figured it was right in spirit. And they’ve really figured out non-alcoholic beer in the last 18 months or so — it just tastes like beer now. I bought the ice and the beer and got in the car.

At my buddy’s, I picked up the ice and the beer and an insulated metal tumbler and got out of the car. My uncle appreciates quality beer, and he drinks beer from an insulated metal tumbler to keep it cold. I’ve started drinking my beer from an insulated metal tumbler, because I’m an aspiring quality beer appreciator, and because serious people enjoy cold beer.

I stood outside wearing an Augusta Greenjackets hat. After my 85-78 flame-out at Heritage last week, I bought a bunch of minor league baseball hats — they have more flexibility to explore cool vintage styles than the big clubs, and I figured that, if I was going to play shitty and nobody was going to pay me to wear their hat, then I’d might as well wear really cool hats. I had on an off-white waffle shirt that I thought made me look like a mid-twenty-something and an untied pair of Nike Blazers I wear everywhere but the course. And I had on a pair of cutoff jorts that my family despises, but that I think are comfortable and ridiculous and a reminder to let go and not to take life so seriously all the time. I was around friends. Looking silly on my own terms is its own exercise in anti-perfectionism, maybe — if not for the fact that deep down I thought I pulled them off.

I called Austin to remind me what unit he lived in, but I remembered before he picked up the phone: unit 33, my mom’s lucky and favorite number.

The Masters snuck up on me this year. For whatever reason, I thought of Valspar, Houston, and Valero as non-signature second-tier events, not the three events leading up to the Masters. I’d focused most of my sports-viewing energy on college hoops and baseball. And I’d had plenty else going on: I recorded my worst pro start, did a full audit on my whole adult life, discovered contrast therapy and talked to carrots, started making a conscious effort to let go of my type-A-ness, saw this newsletter’s audience grow by about 200%, scrambled to prevent my car’s registration expiring without driving back to CT for an emissions test, had the head fly off another 2-iron, put on six-pounds (hopefully good ones), gained 10° of internal hip mobility, started reading a great book, spent time with friends, made golf fun again, and recorded my best pro start. And then it was Masters week.

If I’m being honest, I almost wished we could’ve pushed it back a week. The Masters only happens once a year, and I didn’t feel ready. I had too many distractions, like taking final exams in late December and it never quite feeling like Christmas. I didn’t think I was bringing the best version of myself to Masters week to enjoy it properly.

But I woke up on Thursday and saw those familiar greens on the TV and it hit me. I had to drag myself off the couch for my 2:10 second-round tee time. I followed every shot of Rory’s 72 in between shots of my own 69. It was magic again, just like every year. It’s the Masters, of course — come as you are, and it will take you.

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If you weren’t aware, Rory McIlroy won his first career Masters Tournament on Sunday. With his victory, he completed the career grand slam in his eleventh attempt, and finally won the jacket after his second-nine collapse fourteen years ago. It’ll go down as easily the most significant golf tournament of the 2020s. You’re subscribed to a golf newsletter — you already know this, and you probably watched it happen.

Considering I publish on Fridays, as far as tournament commentary goes, I get a very late bite at the apple. You’ve heard a week’s worth of commentary — that his shot into 15 is an all time Masters great, and that his wedge into 13 is an all time masters worst. You understand the truly elite company of six career grand slam winners, not even held by the single-name legends Phil or Arnie. You saw the highlights and heard the takes. The news cycle has more or less run its course.

But, as with all things, the Masters exists as a duality: it exists as the union of the tournament and the version of ourselves we bring to experience it. As the week went on and the rest of my life walked to the bench and sat down, I realized how deeply, deeply important this tournament’s outcome was to me. As the highs and lows kept coming on 10, 11, 13, 14, and 15, the gravity of the moment — of my own need — floated above his shoulders like specters. He had to do it. He had to.

I was already whiplashed and vulnerable when he walked down 17 fairway. When he made contact with his approach, when he yelled pleading for it to go, I carried the whole day’s uncertainty on my shoulders as if it was just mine. When the ball hit the green’s surface, I started crying into my hands — I didn’t even see it roll out to two feet for birdie.

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I’d been saying all week that I thought this was Rory’s year.[1] I’ve always been a Rory fan. He’s a bouncy 5’9” Ulsterman with the most athletic swing in the game. He hits shots nobody else can. He’s largely an insightful interview.[2] When it came time to defend the Tour from a foreign invasion of dumb sportswashing money, he took the brunt of the media responsibilities in between the commissioner’s twice-annual public appearances. He and I both buoy our wedge play with an elite driver, and we both seem, paradoxically, to be better at hitting the hard shots than the easy ones.

But, if the stakes could get any higher than the 54-hole lead at the major he couldn’t get for the last decade, it was who sat two shots behind him. I seriously, deeply, totally cannot stand Bryson Dechambeau. He once considered himself the only man for whom Augusta was a par 67. He went to LIV understanding he’d be banned from the Tour, then sued the Tour once he was banned from the Tour, then was the last to keep suing his former playing partners out of “principle.” He’s tried to paint his hundred-million-dollar contract with the Saudis as an act of “forgiveness” for the perpetrators of 9/11. He froze funding to a junior golf league named after his late father. His social media smokescreen as a PR resuscitation feels contrived and lab-generated and focused-grouped and fake. He reacted to winning the US Open by making YouTube thumbnail faces. His yardage book literally says “BAD.”

In reality, whether you like or dislike an athlete isn’t something you can litigate. The reasons we give for either are a posteriori, attempts at describing what we already feel — anything we say about those feelings are pure after-the-fact rationalization. Rory has that certain je ne sais quoi, and Bryson has the opposite. That’s how I feel, the feelings I brought to this Masters. You might feel differently, or the reverse. That’s fine. Anything beyond how we deep-down feel is just words.

But I think there’s something we can litigate instead. Something more hung in the balance this week than Rory vs. Bryson, than one man against another. At some point it outgrew the players. It was about what those players stood for.

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In Ancient Greece, various city-states would hold religious festivals to celebrate their patron gods. These festivals came to include various competitions: theater, music, art, along with competitions to display great soldiers’ abilities in battle — running, wrestling, boxing, and riding.

These competitions are known as the Panhellenic Games, and they were held around Greece. But the most famous was held every four years at the sanctuary at Olympia. And so, from a festival of dance and theater and sport to honor the gods, was born the Olympic Games.[3]

Eventually, Greek sport grew beyond these religious festivals, and towns would host games where competitors could win valuable prizes — usually in the form of mind-numbing amounts of olive oil.[4] But the Panhellenic Games, still attached to their religious festivals, awarded only crowns made from local plants: laurel, pine, wildcelery, or, at the Olympic games, olive leaf.

Of all those games, most victors and their olive oil are lost to time. But we still have record of who won an Olympic olive-leaf wreath, their names preserved in history to this day, their accomplishment more immortal than they could have ever dreamed.

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My first contact with NLU was to send them a piece called “The Eye Test Manifesto” which was published in May of last year. It argues that modern statistics, while valuable, have outkicked their coverage in declaring themselves not just descriptive, but subsequently predictive and even prescriptive. According to the stats evangelists,[5] their numbers not only tell you what happened, but they say what is going to happen, to the extent that you should play golf according to their math. I like to think golf is more complicated and beautiful and human this, and I’ve spent many a keystroke, as Tron Carter put it, “raging against playing golf inside a spreadsheet.”

There’s a reason I feel so passionately about preserving the human elements of golf: I used to be the stats guy. I was a left-brained pseudo-nihilist[6] STEM kid who assumed that the emotional parts of the game were distractions from the facts of the matter. The pros were too consistent to be anything other than ruthlessly systemic, and I saw Bryson as taking the game to its natural logical conclusion: a science problem. After all, the ball doesn’t have feelings, so why should I?

At some point, the Olympic Games grew so large that they required athletes to live and train on the grounds for a while. But, interestingly: those athletes were discouraged from excessive training. Because, after all, these were religious festivals, and athletic prowess was meant to be an expression of virtue. As such, excessive training was seen as near-cheating, unfairly to take success and glory from the most virtuous men to whom it was rightfully and godfully given.

It's interesting: even when I thought he was right, I never much rooted for Bryson. He just never really resonated with me. I was busy cheering for the athletes who made me feel something, and few players made me feel more than Rory McIlroy.[7] He made me remember that I fell hopelessly in love with golf by hitting plastic balls with plastic clubs in my backyard until sunset — before I could count, much less consider golf an interesting math problem.

I’ve realized I can’t play golf with my left brain. In my mind, the math was never unemotional, it just carried its own emotional content: rationalization of mistakes, excuses for less than my best,[8] submission to the law of averages. If I was going to fail, it was more comfortable to believe that the math predestined my failure, that there was nothing I could do. Math travels through the mind leaving eddies of doubt.

I’m a professional golfer now. It’s a commitment, sort of like monks make: I renunciate what holds me back. My zealot belief in the numbers no longer serve me, and I disavow myself thereof. And, in this sense, the 2025 Masters was a test of faith. On the one hand: athleticism, resilience, creativity, honesty. Rory. On the other: physics, rigidity, inevitable spreadsheet-golf. Bryson. Going to bed on Saturday night, I knew they’d be playing for that green jacket, as eternal as those olive wreaths. And it felt like the world hung in the balance, as if the two of them would play for my soul tomorrow afternoon.

If I’m being honest, as much as I got scared by his Anton Chigurh impression, I’ve been saying for years that Augusta National is too human a place for Bryson to win, yet. I knew with all my heart that his approach didn’t work for me, and the moment set up too perfectly to play out as anything other than a metaphor.

At which point, it was just Rory against himself. I’m still reacquainting myself with my more human golfing instincts, with a less practiced and more virtuous two-year-old hitting plastic balls in the yard because he loves to. I play professional golf without knowing how far I’ll get, if I’ll realize the potential I carry in my heart. Somewhere, I know I have it — it’s not belief, it’s knowing, and I wouldn’t be playing pro golf if I had anything less. But it’s not about the potential. It’s about manifesting it. It’s about whether or not you can actually pull it out of yourself.

When that approach into 17 hung in the air, I felt myself hang in the balance. I needed him to win as proof that people like us who keep going and believe will eventually win. I didn’t realize how much I’d brought to this Masters, that I’d brought everything I had — all my hopes and doubts, my belief and worry, my fear and love, my Greenjackets hat and insulated tumbler and too much ice and jorts, my whole being. I brought it all and let the Masters determine me. As Rory called for the ball to go, he asked for the forces of the universe to bend in our direction. And, when the ball landed on the green, I knew they had.

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Mea Culpa:

Last week, as I promised that this newsletter would be shorter than the last (which I do believe it is), I paraphrased a Mark Twain quote, that “I wrote a long letter because I didn’t have time to write a short one.” The genuine quote reads: “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

I got an email from Brad Stadler that informed me that “this quote is often misattributed to Twain but likely is from Blaise Pascal.” He “figured I’d be the type that might like to know.”

Brad: you are absolutely correct. I’m a proud, board-certified geek, and I don’t want to go around misinforming the people, and I’m going to be so excited the next time someone attributes that quote to Twain and I get to correct them.

You did get something wrong yourself, however: that “Twain makes for a better story.” Not true. Blaise Pascal is a certified badass. He invented the calculator and public transportation. He defended the scientific method at a time when it was unpopular to do so. He was the first to practically describe the concept of air pressure. And Pascal’s Wager is the first thing you learn on day one of any religious philosophy class. The guy is a legend.

Thank you for noticing the error. I try to run a tight ship here, but if anything else slips through the cracks, please, all of you, keep me honest!

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[1] I have the receipts!

[2] When he does media.

[3] I took a Classics class on the Ancient Greek and Roman games my senior fall of college — all such information is from that class. In all honesty, I paid very little attention and took it pass-fail, so I might have some of the specifics wrong. But the big stuff is spot on, scout’s honor.

[4] For the equivalent of the 100m dash, around 5,400 liters of olive oil.

[5] A group I love to criticize but acknowledge is a small, fluid group. Mark Broadie, for instance, the inventor of Strokes Gained, is a wonderful steward of the math. Justin Ray comes to mind as another. I want no beef with anyone who use stats responsibly!

[6] Of the proper “the world is made of fundamental particles and larger bodies are mere organizations of those particles” sort, not the “everything is meaningless and I’m gonna make bad music about it and that doesn’t contradict itself at all” kind.

[7] There’s only one — man I hope Spieth is back soon.

[8] Hey, Tour average from 100 yards is only like 18 feet!