I’m loathe to talk about golf. Largely because everybody else seems to. It’s a game not without self-regard and shares the habit of football fans in assuming everyone else is interested.
But it would be tin-eared, not to say curmudgeonly, not to tip an overbranded cap to Rory McIlroy, the Northern Irish golfer, whose nervosa at failing to live up to the promise of a prodigious youth and add the Masters and a grand slam of majors to his legacy has lasted a decade and more.
Clubs have been bent, tears have been shed, dukes have been raised and marriages imperilled by the struggle. The sporting world has been left almost as exhausted as he.
But, fair play, all the ingredients for a great sporting story finally came together in his triumph. Redemption, persistence and, of course, the vital component of uncertainty of outcome. Doubtful it stood, as he and his nearest challenger Justin Rose, clung together like two spent swimmers. No art choked though. Both battled in excellence and a decency of spirit. Well done them.
But the aftermath has been entirely predictable. “Personal demons” have been swiftly followed by great expectations. On, on McIlroy will charge to a calendar slam and an era of personal domination. Apparently.
It is, I suppose, possible. Though the single victory does largely overlook the pattern of temperamental inconsistency which has more regularly been his golfing hallmark.
Mulling all this – as is my wont – a number of things occur.
The first is the short-term memory of back-page journalists and the average sports fan.
Both lurch between deep pessimism on the basis of recurrent and obvious patterns – a Spurs supporter speaks – and the boundless optimism of myriad false dawns.
A swallow has appeared. So summer has arrived. Fans of Welsh rugby and England football will recognise the syndrome. And have taken no notice.
But even among the perennially successful, few reichs last a thousand years. They’re more common in team sports – SA, NZ in rugby, Manchester Utd under Ferguson, Liverpool under Paisley, the Australian and the West Indies cricket sides of the 70s and 80s. Teams well managed are self-supporting structures, each component compensating for occasional lapses in another and their winning culture attracting able replacements as age does what it does to the sporting frame.
But even they don’t last. As any groaner at Old Trafford or even the Etihad will tell you.
Rarer still in individual sports. Lendl, Sampras, Williams, Borg in his pomp. But rare indeed and peopled largely by personalities of icy self-control. The sort, I don’t know, like Tiger Woods. And look what happened to him.
Cavaliers, for such McIlroy is, have even less likelihood. They’re not built for Roundhead consistency.
There are rare exceptions who actively and consciously feeds off the emotion; John McEnroe’s racket smashing altercations with umpires were a wilful exercise in stiffening the sinews and summoning up the blood.
The flip side is Mike Tyson. His dominance based on angry technical excellence but whose rocket fuel of rage eventually consumed him.
Neither could match the Swiss mountain coolness of Roger Federer’s long term mastery of his sport.
Back then to Rory McIlroy who faces a plethora of psychological choices. History is littered with those who practised an emotional restrain that was unnatural to them and which, in tandem with the personal intrusion success brought, paid a price in their personal lives. Bjorn ‘Ice’ Borg. Tiger Woods.
One hopes not.
Another is now to return unburdened to the fray. Liberated to be a first among equals and deaf to the fans and writers who, overnight, have converted him from the ridiculous to the sublime and placing on him a load he cannot carry.
Who knows? The aligning stars of sporting excellence – of which the mind is a constellation in itself – is by definition a thing of vanishing rarity and reading the future in them is a fool’s game.
And as Jack Nicholson once said of watching sport in bars: “Every asshole is entitled to his opinion.”
I’m sure he didn’t mean me.