I Don't Understand Golf. I Do Understand Spectacle.
With The Masters in the Rearview, Let's Chat About the World's Most Confounding Sport
I checked into the Slack of one of my jobs today and my co-workers and vendors were all abuzz about what transpired this past weekend at The Masters Tournament. Golfer Rory McIlroy won the whole shebang in grand fashion, after over 5,800 days of painstaking attempts. The raw emotion was palpable, the people who had grown up watching Rory play were emotional, and it went on to dominate the sports news cycle ever since:
You see that? The emotion…the commentary…the moment!
There’s kind of an unspoken contract when you read an article on this here Just The Sandwich blog. And while I like to think I have an informed perspective when it comes to sports, golf just confuses me (more on that later). What I do know however is that Rory McIlroy was the biggest household name in golf not named Tiger Woods and to see him get so excited by a championship is infectious. I also know that playing in the Masters is an accomplishment in of itself, regardless of the outcome. Lastly I especially know that after years of “going viral,” the ridiculously cheap menu prices for the concessions have officially crossed over into mainstream knowledge.
I used to scoff at the fact that tickets can be $500, so what’s a cheap snack mean in the long run, but I know the Super Bowl would NEVER do something like this.
But I meant what I said earlier about golf in that it’s one of the most confounding sports I have ever witnessed in my life. It’s considered a sport, but you can perform it at your leisure. It appears that golf is tailored for the affluent to play, but there’s been an uptick of working-class people picking up the game. It’s supposed to be the paragon for “tradition,” but pro golf just came out with a “In Yo Face” version of the game called TGL:
Dare I say it looks like the XFL of golf? And what’s better, SoFi Loans is the sponsor of the 2025 season. And if you know anything about SoFi, they don’t sponsor anything I can afford.
Growing up the financial barriers to learning to play golf made the whole thing inaccessible to me and my family. Baseball isn’t cheap either, but it’s a lot easier to get a lefty baseball glove than lefty (youth) clubs for a reasonable cost. Even at noted money pit TopGolf, a driving range meets gastropub that is a baby-step up from a Dave & Busters, ordering lefty clubs at the desk is an absolute pain.
But the confusion doesn’t stop there. In advance of writing this post, I was genuinely curious of the state of the game. Was it more popular or less popular than 30 years ago? I could see it going either way. On one hand, the President of the United States does it nearly weekly and there seems to be more “golf meets streetwear” brands popping up everywhere. On the other hand, you hear about Pickleball being the wave, but virtually nobody is talking about the hot new country club to roll up to after work after paying a $25,000 initiation fee to smack a couple of balls around. The Internet was no help either:
So we have a “sport” that’s both accessible and cost-prohibitive, that’s virtually unchanged from its early days except for its radical team sport TGL offshoot that can be played by anyone, but it is typically the game of choice of the affluent that costs hundreds of dollars to see while having a dirt cheap food menu at one of its larger tournaments? Sign me up! Unless I’m not allowed to sign up…? I’m not sure what to do here.
That said for a moment this weekend, I had a slice of what it meant to be a fan of the sport with Rory McIlroy’s win. Somebody knocking on the door of a dub for years and finally achieving it is the kind scenario we would act out as kids during playtime. And even though some elements of golf may seem like a foreign language (a “breakfast ball” is something you cannot eat, I looked it up), getting the monkey (and haters) off your back is universal.
Good show, Rory.