Monday: The magnitude of Rory’s win

Not only was it a career highlight, but his Masters win put the sport on a bigger scale.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
I really don't know where to start on this, so
I'm just going to kind of jump all over the
place with some thoughts on this golf tournament. Yesterday at
the Masters, I thought the twenty nineteen Masters, when Tiger
won his fifth and hadn't won in eleven years, was
an epic moment, that it was amazing that because no
one expected that. But this was different in that not

(00:26):
only was Rory the favorite, even though Scotty is the
number one player in the world, Rory was expected to
win the Masters, he was expected to finally get the
Grand Slam. He's already won twice this year going into
this weekend. He won at Pebble Beach and he went
it the Players, so he had won on a couple
of iconic golf courses. And then he makes double on

(00:48):
the first toll, and then he writes the ship and
takes the is okay, and then he loses the lead,
and then he gets it back when he finished number twelve,
And I believe after twelve he had a three shot
lead on Bryson, in four or five on Justin Rose.
I thought, turn it over, and then he did something
that I was a little bit unexpected. I didn't expect

(01:10):
him to play thirteen as a three shot hole. He
hit a threew off the tee instead of driver, which
left him two hundred and forty five yards to the green,
which I still think he could have gone for the
green in two. And even if you hit it in
the drink, then you can still get up and down
for par, and if you don't, the worst you're making
is bogey. He chose to lay up now, basically at
an eighty five yard par three. From there, all he

(01:30):
had to do is hit it's somewhere on the green. Now,
he says that he has a tendency to push shots
to the right. Well he did that time, and that's
because or no, he actually says he he has tendencies
to hook that shot too much to the left. So
he aimed a little bit further right than he normally would,
and then he pushed it to the right. I don't wherever.

(01:52):
You don't need to. You don't need to make even
birdie at that point five or six. There's thirteen, fourteen
fifty six pars the rest of the way. You win
the tournament. Going away, you're thirteen under. And the best
that Justin Rose got to was eleven, and then uncharacteristicly,
he dumps it in the water and now all of
a sudden, and then rom who was trying to put

(02:13):
pressure on him, I'm not wrong, but Deschambeau that was
trying to put pressure on him and would like to
go back and do number eleven over because he was
flag hunting on eleven, which you should never go flag
hunting on eleven. Anybody that's watched The Masters, and I've
been watching it for fifty years, but if you watch
it for twenty, every commentator says, anything left of the

(02:33):
flag on eleven is a miss, and he missed it
in the water left and it wasn't really all that close.
So that opened the door for Roy to kind of coast.
So he's coasting along and then all of a sudden
he makes the big bird. The shot of the tournament
was the sweeping draw into fifteen to set up the eagle.
But he was you could see the nerves were just

(02:54):
killing him because that putt was a major deceleration going
to the ball. It had no chance of even coming
close to making and he didn't hit the hole from
eight feet and so he taps in for birdie. Now
he's got the lead back and they go to seventeen.
I think they were tidy. He takes the one shot lead.
He's got the simplest wed shot in the world from
one hundred and twenty five yards anywhere anywhere that is

(03:16):
even remarkably close to the green. The only place he
can't hit it is the bunker. And where does it go.
It's in the bunker. And then he hits an okay
bunker shot, but not great, and the ball somehow stopped
five feet from the hole. If it releases out three
more feet were winning in regulation. I sat there and

(03:37):
as he's lining up for the putt, it looked like
he was leaning. He was aimed left. There was no
way he was making that putt. Then Justin Rose had
to make that. Well before that, Justin Rose had to
make the bomb just to get himself in a playoff position. Now,
Rose and McElroy both hit good drives on eighteen, but
the big difference is that Rose was hitting from one

(03:59):
to fifty five and Rory was hitting from one to
twenty five. Y drove him by twenty five plus yards.
So Justin's got to hit eight iron, which is going
to fly in a little bit low as it gets
up the hill, he doesn't get the spin off the
off the slope. Rory's hitting a gap wedge and he's
not even hitting it full and he spins it back
to two feet. Now, the putt that Rose had to

(04:21):
take the lead temporarily is one similar that Phil Mickelson made,
and it is a putt that breaks to the right
but not very much. And he didn't play that, and
so now Rory's got a two foot three footer to win.
I was pretty confident he was going to make that
putt to win the tournament, and he was able to
do so. But the emotion that he had on the

(04:43):
eighteenth green, fourteen years since he hit it in the
cabins to the left of number ten at Augusta to
lose to twenty eleven Masters, and all the near misses
and all the bad starts, and for four to eleven
or twelve years he's been and coming to Augusta with
the idea that he can win the Grand Slam. And

(05:04):
I know yesterday winning the Masters was the most important
thing growing even even growing up in Northern Ireland where
the Open Championship rules, the Open Championship is the most
important tournament to most of the world, but over the
last ten to fifteen, maybe twenty five years, the Masters
has had equal, if not greater importance because of its

(05:25):
aura and its history and its tradition. And Rory talked
about watching the Masters at eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, one
o'clock in the morning with his dad and being able
to stay up on a school night late so they
could watch the Masters. And you saw the live shots
yesterday from his home club in Hollywood, Northern Ireland, which

(05:47):
is just a tiny little town a little bit north
of Belfast, and the place is packed. It was one
o'clock in the morning when he made their almost when
he made the putt to win the tournament. That club
on a normal Sunday would have been closed five hours ago.
There weren't closing that down. And I guarantee you they
drink everything they had in there, and they're probably still celebrating.

(06:08):
But and then Rory knocks it in and then the
celebration and the tears and the walk up and the
hugg he got from Shane Lowry, and later on in
the press center he talked about his caddy, Harry Diamond,
and he said I met Harry on the putting green
at Hollywood Golf Club in when I was seven years old,
that was nineteen ninety six, and we both dreamed of

(06:30):
being great golfers. And he said, this journey, Harry's been
with me every step of the way, and this journey
is as much his as it is mine. All of
that goes back to what I said in the first segment.
You can't script this, and unlike any other sport that
we have on the global stage, you are all alone
with golf. Your caddy can tell you what to do.

(06:52):
You can hear the echoes of Pat Summerle and Jim
Nance and ken Vin Turrey and Nick Faldo and Lanny
Watkins telling you what not to do on certain holes
and where not to hit it and where to hit it.
And if you've watched the tournament as long as most
people have, you can you can figure all that out.
But you still got to step up there and execute it.

(07:13):
And anybody that's ever played golf, whether you're you can't
break a hundred right now and you're still trying, or
you're a scratch golfer, at some moment in time, you've
had nerves on the golf course, and so you kind
of get an idea of what makes you nervous. Magnify
that a million times because that's what he went through yesterday,

(07:33):
not only trying to win the Masters, not only trying
to finally get in the Winter Circle, but he had
the world watching at the same time. And you can't
get any better drama, any better TV than that.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, especially with you know that I guess if you
want to say that black cloud over him of the
twenty eleven and him just sitting there thinking, you know,
oh no, is it going to happen again? Here we
go again. You know, it's like you mentioned, it's just him.
He has nobody else. Yeah, the caddy can be like, hey,

(08:08):
use this club instead of that club, But at the
end of the day, he's the one swinging the club.
And I can only imagine I would have loved to
have seen like a a live representation monitor of your
blood pressure. He wears a now you know of yours?

Speaker 1 (08:25):
Oh my mind was off the charge too, but he
wasn't wearing it yesterday, but he may have had it
under the shirt because that woop has bites. That band
that a lot of the golfers go to if they
don't like stuff on their wrist and woop measures your
oxygen level, your heart rate and all that kind of stuff.
I guarantee when he pulled out his data yesterday that
stuff was off the charge.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, somebody probably thought he was having a heart attack,
but uh yeah, you know, it's if nothing else, it
was it was cool to see somebody finally, and especially
at you know, Augusta, because even Tiger congratulated him for
winning the Grand Slam, but winning the Grand Slam at

(09:05):
Augusta just I think it meant even more to amagine Jack.
It had eluded him so many times.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
See Jack and Ben Hogan won their Grand Slams and
Tiger all won their Grand Slams by winning the British
That was there, the last of the four to do that.
And now Rory does the Masters to get his And
then we didn't even know that it was the Grand
Slam when Jean Sarason did it, because the Masters wasn't
even considered a major yet. But Jean sarasn gets credit

(09:33):
in retrospect because he did win that tournament. And then
once we started talking about the Grand Slam in the
nineteen fifties, they went back and batted at him to
the club. I think Gary Player, I would have to.
I'm not sure where Gary Player won his, but now
that there are six golfers there in that illustrious group,

(09:55):
I think winning the Masters was the most important thing,
but also so getting the Grand Slam is something that's
that's pretty pretty important as well.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
I thought when he was when he was doing the
walk up after he won, I forgot who he was
talking to, but they laughed for quick and a good
job by CBS, by Jim Nansen, all them just letting
that two and a half three minutes of just the crowd.
Nobody's saying anything, You're picking up the crowd mic and him.
But the best part of it was I think it

(10:25):
was he was talking to his Irish friends that were there.
He was like, Hey, I gotta go get a good jacket.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
And I was like, I'm gonna go get my green jacket.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
And I was like, there you go, right. I was like,
I don't like you, I Scotty, but you know what.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
I was gonna mention that. And and you talk about
whether it's Jim Nantz or whatever Vince Scully is. We
go back to the hank araon Home Run in nineteen
seventy four, and Miltt Hamilton gets credit for the call.
Vin Scully's call was light years better because for fifty
seconds he said nothing. He just said he called the

(11:01):
home run, and he turned the story goes. He took
his because they used stick mics back in the time
and not headsets. He took the stick mic on the stand,
turned it around to the crowd. They also had the
crowd mic on and he went and got a cup
of coffee, and fifty seconds later then he painted the picture.
And Vince Gully has always said, the worst thing that
announcer can do is talk over what everybody else is seeing,

(11:22):
watching the drama of it all. And Jim Nantz knows
how to let the let the pictures and the sounds
tell the story. And they certainly did that. The next
Major is in a month at Quail Hollow at in
North Carolina in Charlotte, where they play usually play the
Wells Fargo Classic. Rory's only won there four times before
when it was the Wells Fargo and now the PGA

(11:43):
is hosting it on that golf course. It's a long,
long golf course about seventy four hundred yards from the
tips they'll play it from all the way back and
the last three holes are known as the Green Mile,
and it's a mile worth of golf, and Rory is
going to be the favorite, even though Scotty's still number one.
Roy's closing the gap a little bit and i'll uh,

(12:04):
I'll throw this out there too. The US Open is
at Oakmont, which is another bomber's paradise. Now this is
a long long ways away, but if he wins the PGA,
and he wins at Oakmont, he would have a chance
for the in season Grand Slam at Royalport Rush in
Northern Ireland. And you said nobody's done that before. Nobody's

(12:25):
done that. Tiger's won four in a row, but it
wasn't in the calendar year. Nobody's ever won four in
a row except for Tiger. And I think that's just
as important as anything else because because he uh, he won. Well,
if you look at Tiger, he won. He finished on
top ten at the Masters in two thousand and then
won US Opened by fifteen shots, the Open Championship by

(12:50):
a bunch, won the PGA in the playoff with Bob May,
and then had to wait nine months before he got
to put to win the fourth one. He won the Masters,
and then came back in two thousand and two and
won that one as well. Here's the other thing I
liked about Rory. At the end of the real celebration,
they do the one for TV for Jim Nance and

(13:11):
the Master's Chairman of Fred Ridley, But out on the
putting Green they do the one for the patrons and
for all the spectators and stuff there, and Rory's asked
to give his speech and he says, well, I really
thank Scotty for putting this jacket on me, but I
want to be like him. I want to come back
here next year and put it on myself again. So

(13:32):
there we'll go, all right, moron on the Masters. In
a little bit, we'll come back. We've got the NBA
playoff picture to discuss, We've got an ESPN All Time
low story, and I've got a few other thoughts about
the Masters as well. Art Strickland joins us in the
six o'clock hour. He'll give us his perspective because he
gets to go to the Masters. We just get to
live vicariously through him. All of that coming up on

(13:54):
the tickets