The final hour of the Masters golf tournament telecast annually provides us with some of the best drama on television. This year, we watched a young Australian prevail over an Argentine grandfather by holing a birdie putt on the second hole of a sudden death playoff. In doing so, 32-year-old Adam Scott became the first golfer from Down Under to win the Masters.
This is a remarkable fact considering the quality of golfers Australia has produced. Since 1940, Australians have won 15 of golf’s other major championships, more than any other country except for the United States.
The vanquished Angel Cabrera - who is 43 years old, has the physique of a churrasco chef and is given to smoking cigarettes on the course - was gracious in defeat, heartily congratulating Scott. Some of the sting was probably eased by the fact that Cabrera won the Masters in 2009 and the U.S. Open in 2007. Scott, in addition to bearing the hopes of a nation on his broad, square shoulders (his countryman, 25-year-oldJason Day, finished third after fading late in his round), seems like a genuinely nice guy despite employing a putter (and putting technique) that’s likely to beo utlawed within the next two years.
Had Cabrera won, it might have been a more mathematically elegant story. The sports pages would have no doubt noted that Argentina now had a two-time Masters champion to go with its first-ever pope. More poignant, at least to those who follow golf, was that Cabrera’s victory would have fallen on the 90th birthday of Roberto De Vicenzo, the great Argentine golfer who - 45 years before to the day - missed out on a chance to win the tournament in a playoff because of a scoring error by his playing partner Tommy Aaron.
In the tournament’s final round, De Vicenzo birdied the 17th hole to move into a tie with leader Bob Goalby. But Aaron wrote down a 4 instead of a 3 on De Vicenzo’s score card, which the Argentine then signed without checking. Under the rules of golf, De Vicenzo was stuck with the higher score he signed for, Goalby was awarded the tournament, and De Vicenzo uttered a quote for the ages: “What a stupid I am!”
It’s probably important to note that De Vicenzo wasn’t disqualified from the competition for signing an incorrect score card and he wasn’t assessed a two-shot penalty. He was stuck with second place when he might have won the whole thing.
Which is all the more interesting when you consider the uproar that surrounded the Masters rules committee’s decision to penalize Tiger Woods two shots after he admitted in a television interview that he dropped his ball some two yards behind where he should have. In the second round of the tournament April 12, Woods’ third shot on the par five 15th hole struck the flagstick and caromed into the water. Woods dropped a ball, hit the shot again, made his putt and recorded a bogey six. Before he’d finished his round, a television viewer sent a text to a rules official on the grounds questioning Woods’ drop. The rules committee viewed a replay and decided that Woods had proceeded appropriately.Woods finished his round, signed his score card, then gave an interview to CBS Sports in which he explained that he dropped the ball a couple of steps behind the first shot because he thought the extra room might help. Then he went off and did whatever it is billionaire sportsmen do on Friday nights in Augusta, Ga.
It wasn’t until later that evening that the rules committee got around to reviewing the interview and determining that Woods hadn’t dropped properly - that he hadn’t dropped his ball as “near as possible” to the first shot. So they reversed their earlier decision that he had done nothing wrong and assessed him a two-stroke penalty. That set off all kinds of alarm bells - on Twitter, David Duval said Woods should withdraw. Broadcaster and three-time Masters champion Nick Faldo called on Woods to do the “manly thing” and withdraw.
Woods didn’t - and almost won the tournament despite the two strokes tacked on to his score. He finished in fourth, four shots behind Scott and Cabrera. In other words, he lost.
It’s probably for the best that Woods didn’t win or finish within two shots of the eventual winner. If either of those scenarios had occurred, there would have been real questions about the champion’s legitimacy. Woods, even before the meltdown of his personal life in late 2008, was a polarizing figure, a robotically precise athlete who has employed some hard-nosed tactics in managing his personal brand. He is also the best player to ever have played his sport anda tremendously compelling figure, Don Draper in Soft-Spikes. Woods, like Michael Jordan, transcends his sport in scary ways. Woods is as much a brand as Coca-Cola or Louis Vuitton. In the parlance of advertising, he “moves the needle” - his presence or absence in a tournament has a real and significant impact on revenues.
Had Woods won, his victory would have been tainted. Of course, people would say, the Masters rules committee wanted him to continue to play; they made an exception for Woods that they wouldn’t have made for any other player. Almost immediately after the decision was made to allow him to continue, the term “Masterisk” - an allusion to New York Yankee Roger Maris’ 1961 season in which he broke Babe Ruth’s long-standing record of 60 home runs - gained some currency. Woods’ old and disgruntled teacher Hank Haney took to Twitter to ask what would happen ifWoods won the Masters, then went on to finish his career with a record 19 major championships, one more than the storied Jack Nicklaus?
On the other hand, what if the two-shot penalty - which might not have been applied to any other player in the field under similar circumstances because other players don’tlabor under the scrutiny of Tiger Woods - kept Woods from winning or tying the lead? Would the eventual winner feel comfortable with that? Would there be some lingering feeling that the trophy wasn’t exactly legitimate, that Woods had been denied by a technicality?
One of the reasons some of us like sports is that they provide definitive outcomes in a naturally ambivalent world. Most of us learn to live with at least a measure of uncertainty about how well we perform in our professional and personal lives; our wins and losses are never so unambiguous as a box score. In real life there are ambiguous conditions, noble losses, moral and Pyrrhic victories.There’s evidence that the best of us go to bed feeling defeated most nights; studies show it is the least competent people who are the most secure and self-regarding. We might strive for excellence and occasionally achieve it, which might convey a measure of satisfaction. But who among us has not heard in our heads a bitter, muttering voice reminding us that the pay’s the same for lousy work?
Yet nothing is so simple as we want it to be, and the American obsession with winning produces occasional grotesqueries. Remember how surreal it seemed to hear the word wheezing from Charlie Sheen’s deranged rictus a couple of years ago? A recent Nike print ad - released after Woods won the Bay Hill Championship earlier this year and again became the No. 1-ranked golfer in the world - quoted the golfer: “Winning takes care of everything.”
But it doesn’t, not in real life. Woods famously threw away his marriage and his family, not to mention a lot of good will that might have been converted into capital. A lot of people were outraged, or at least annoyed, by Nike’s disingenuity in explaining that they didn’t really mean that winning cured everything.
Yet there is some bitter truth in the campaign. Most of us don’t care much about Woods’ private life or happiness. (Why should we? He doesn’t care about ours.) Winning returned Woods to the top of the charts. Kobe Bryant came back from a rape charge. Charlie Sheen got a new TV series. Winning.
Most of us don’t. And when we do, our winning is cut with ambivalence. Second place may be a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.
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Style, Pages 49 on 04/21/2013