All sports are competitive, but they are competitive in very different ways. Team sports pitch two groups of players against each other in direct combat. Racket and fighting sports involve individuals going at it against each other. In racing—whether power-assisted or not—each individual competes against the field.
But some sports—target sports such as archery and shooting, ice-skating, bowling, classic ski racing—are different. An individual competitor in these sports can’t directly affect how a rival does; he or she can only control their own game. It’s that which makes them so psychologically compelling; it’s more than a sportswriter’s clich to say that those who play in such sports are competing against themselves.
Of all those true mind games, golf is the most cruel and heartless. That’s a lesson Rory McIlroy learned the hard way on Sunday at The Masters, when the 21-year old phenom from Northern Ireland blew a four shot lead entering the final round.
As McIlroy’s heartbreaking collapse showed, golf’s physics is unforgiving. A golf swing is an extraordinarily complex piece of work with all sorts of angles and torques and forces applied to hitting the ball. At impact during a drive, a top pro’s club is moving at more than 100mph, which means that a minuscule error—truly, too small for anyone to notice, no matter how knowledgeable they sound on TV —gets magnified such that it can have devastating consequences.
In addition, golf does not take place in a placid, pristine environment. Its setting is chaos theory made real. The game is played partly in a physical space where wind can puff or cease unpredictably, taking a poor shot onto the green or landing a good one in a bunker; and partly on land corrugated by all sorts of indentations, covered by grass that can lie this way or that, and often lined with trees whose surfaces are not exactly the smooth planes of Euclidean laws.
I don’t mean by stressing all this dry stuff that golf is a game of luck. It’s not. Great golfers, as they say, get in a position to win. But when you couple a player’s mindset—confident or wobbly, as the case may be—with the impact of golf’s physics and environment, anything can happen.
At Augusta on Sunday, it did. McIlroy, who has been touted as the next Big Thing in golf since he was a teenager , started the final round four shots ahead of the pack. It was plain early in his round that all was not well. In the first five holes, he missed three very makeable puts. But despite not looking all that comfortable, and notwithstanding the fact that others on the course were playing great, he turned for home still in the lead.
Then came the 10th hole. McIlroy must have made a tiny mistake in his swing, as he hooked his drive . That was the unforgiving physics. Then the ball hit a tree; it could have bounced on the fairway, but instead it ricocheted up a hill between two of Augusta National’s cabins, to a place where nobody had ever seen a golf ball land before. That was a chaotic environment at work.
If he had had nerves of steel, great good luck and everything had gone right, McIlroy might have made bogey at the hole. He actually made a pretty good fist of his second shot, but by the time he got down to the green it was clear even on TV that his head was a mess. He eventually made seven at the par four, and then made a hash of the next three holes to finish 10 strokes behind the winner, South African Charl Schwartzel.
For Schwartzel, unlike McIlroy, golf’s unpredictable physics and environment turned out well: on both the first and third holes he holed out from a distance. Some of that was skill, but nobody should think that all of it was. One tiny bump on the first green or gust of wind on the third hole and his head might have been in as bad a place as McIlroy’s.
After the tournament was over, and everyone had commiserated with McIlroy, there was the usual stuff about how this would make him stronger, and a general expectation that his talent would see him win a Major, one day. Maybe. But plenty of great golfers have never won a single Major Watching McIlroy this week I had a bad feeling that we might be seeing a replay of the adulation that greeted Sergio Garcia when he burst onto the scene as a 19-year old at the PGA Championship in 1999.
Garcia finished second in that tournament, aided by a legendary shot that seemed to defy any law of physics or math, and was widely predicted to have a great future ahead of him. Which indeed he has had. But playing such a psychologically challenging sport subject to unforgiving physics in a chaotic environment , more than a decade later Garcia still has yet to win a Major.
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