Sport gives us beauty when there is pain and darkness elsewhere

THE Masters crowd had left town the evening before and Broad Street in downtown Augusta was quiet in the midafternoon heat. A few old guys sat around the statue of singer James Brown, chatting and laughing in its shade. It was a short walk from there to the intersection with 13th Street and the bridge over the Savannah River that spans the state line between Georgia and South Carolina and leads to SRP Park.

The cars clicked and clacked over the tiny gaps in the roadway but on the way to the ballpark, it was hard to stop the mind straying back to Sunday afternoon and the view from the back of the 18th green at Augusta National. As we had watched Rory McIlroy striding up the fairway at the end of one of the greatest closing rounds in Masters history, the man next to me said he had heard McIlroy was a good guy and I’d nodded.

A few minutes later, we were staring at each other in amazement, united by the joy of having witnessed sport at its most beautiful and most captivating. It wasn’t just that McIlroy pulled off the most astonishing bunker shot, lifting the ball out on to the green and allowing it to hit a point where it rolled down the slope and curled into the hole. That was just the start of it.

McIlroy went mad with the joy of it, pumping his fists, flinging his club into the sand, hugging his caddy, chucking his ball into the crowd, knowing that only seven other men had shot 64 in their final round at the most hallowed venue in golf. I noticed something else, too. A few yards away, Collin Morikawa, who was waiting to play his own shot from the bunker, raised his arms in the air when McIlroy’s ball dropped into the hole, celebrating his playing partner’s brilliance.

When the bedlam had subsided, Morikawa played his bunker shot. The trajectory to the hole was flatter than McIlroy’s. His ball raced across the putting surface and went straight into the hole. It felt like a miracle. Or maybe two miracles. McIlroy celebrated Morikawa’s shot almost as much as Morikawa. The two men hugged each other. They strode off the green side by side, still bursting with the joy of what they had done.

Thank the gods of sport for that. Thank them for the escapism of that. Thank them for giving us that kind of beauty and brotherhood and generosity of spirit and relief at a time when there is so much darkness and pain outside sport’s walls. They will always be linked by that moment, McIlroy and Morikawa. For all the Majors they have won, those moments on the 18th at Augusta will be part of their immortality.

T

he cars clicked and clacked over the gaps in the roadway and the ballpark, on the far bank of the river, came into view. By the time the stroll across the bridge was over, a few of the kids from two of the local high schools, North Augusta and Midland Valley, were starting to arrive for that day’s double header. They unloaded a few pitches in the bullpen. They were calling these two games that were about to unfold a ‘showcase’. It was a big day in young lives.

The Junior Varsity game between the Midland Valley Mustangs and the North Augusta Yellow Jackets was up first, a game for less experienced players not quite ready for the Varsity match that was scheduled later. We’d probably call them the reserves. They swung for the fences but they didn’t have the strength to clear them. It never stopped them trying.

Before the Varsity game began, the mayor of North Augusta strode out on to the diamond with a microphone. There were some special guests he wanted to introduce, he said. Then he began to tell the story of the Boys of 1997, the Yellow Jackets team that had won the South Carolina State Championship at the end of the last century for the first time in 48 years.

He told the crowd, which had swelled to a thousand or so now, that the Yellow Jackets had sneaked into the play-offs 25 years ago at the last gasp and, after more wins at home and on their travels, had gone on to defeat West Florence 6-2 in Game 2 of the final series. That was their moment of immortality, their McIlroy-Morikawa moment, something that would stay with them forever.

And then the mayor gestured to a group of men in their early 40s, who were standing proudly and perhaps a little self-consciously near third base. And he began to call their names, one by one. And they walked forward towards the diamond, some balding, a few with a paunch, a few as upright and straight and lean as when they were teenagers, one or two waving to the crowd, local men transported back to their childhoods and a sporting brotherhood that had sustained them through all their adult lives.

This was South Carolina’s version of Friday Night Lights, the book about ‘a town, a team and a dream’ that captured high school sport’s hold on American communities three decades ago. As the Boys of 97 took their place in the line, the last of them was Kevin Lynn, now the coach of the Yellow Jackets. How sweetly sport sings across the years.

We left before the end and walked across the bridge into Georgia. It was night by now and the river ran silently below us. When we turned to look, the baseball field, echoing to the shouts and the hopes and the dreams of young lives, lit by the floodlight glare, was an oasis of light in the darkness all around it.