On April 13, 2025, Rory McIlroy won The Masters. With that victory, the Northern Irishman joined Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary, Jack, and Tiger as the only professional golfers to win each of the four major championships. He also, by making a birdie in that playoff against the gritty-as-hell Justin Rose, ended an eleven-year major championship drought. When the story of sports in 2025 is written, there will not be a more significant event. Nothing even close. The Eagles, Panthers, and Thunder have all won championships. The Dodgers will probably win the World Series. None of these titles belong to history. Rory, at Augusta National, does.
On April 15, 2025, Jason Sobel, one of the better voices covering the game of golf, published his gambling guide for that weekend's RBC Heritage at Hilton Head. By the middle of the week, my two favorite golf podcasts - No Laying Up and Shotgun Start - had completely shifted their focus away from the achievement. NLU posted their RBC Heritage "Happy Hour" on Tuesday and "Exploring Argentine Golf" on Wednesday. Shotgun made Rory the featured story until Wednesday, at least, but we're talking about Puntacana and Disney World soon enough. I wanted to soak in Rory's win. I wanted so much more. But there was nothing. To quote Ricky Roma from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, "Where is the moment?"
In the merry month of May, just weeks after Rory's historical breakthrough, Scottie Scheffler won the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow. Rory was awful. Complicating matters, a story leaked that week about Rory's driver failing a test nobody understands and, pissed off about ONLY HIS results being leaked, Rory blew off the media that week. But what was remarkable about the coverage from CBS that week was just how short-sighted the entirety of the conversation was. Rory was being ripped for no showing at a course he'd previously dominated and, listening to the broadcast, Scottie was now securely back atop the mountain as the best golfer in the world. It was Scottie's tour again, even though it was Rory who'd won The Masters, The Players, and a signature event at Pebble in the three months previous. Those achievements had become things of the past. "This is May, folks, we can't be bothered with what happened in APRIL!!!" With another major in the books, June's US Open at Oakmont, Rory McIlroy is still golf's player of the year. But you'd never know it when engaging the current golf media.
This is the sports media we hath wrought. In another time, there would have been multiple Sports Illustrated pieces on Rory's magically schizophrenic Sunday at Augusta. The late John Feinstein might even write a book about the week. Someone would have produced an "oral history" that included Rory's caddie and Justin Rose's wife and Augusta chairman Fred Ridley. There would have been a range of newspaper columnists around the country looking for their particular angle into the story, and none in particular rush to find it. The moment would have had time to breathe and develop in our historical consciousness.
But that's not the marketplace. We live in the era of "more content, more often." Every documentary on Netflix is six episodes, six hours, even when the story can easily be told in 90 minutes. Whereas I was always content posting five or six times a week on DaBearsBlog, financial viability requires a current sports blogger to post five or six times by Monday lunch. The most influential media members are no longer the columnists who craft our sports stories. Gone are the days of Will McDonough in the Boston Globe, and Jerry Izenberg in the Newark Star-Ledger, and even Mike Lupica in the Daily News. They have been replaced by Shams and Schefty, men who trade in what Mark Leibowitz called "nuggets" in his brilliant book, Big Game. Fans want the scoop, not the thoughtful, well-constructed paragraph. Barstool Sports is one of the most successful sports media enterprises we've seen. Go over to their website and try to find some decent writing. (I'll save you some time. There isn't any.) They don't bother with paragraphs. Paragraphs don't pay the bills.
Rory's Sunday at Augusta was everything great about sports. It was about a man and his historical moment. And while the media focus has been on his "post-Masters funk", his "post-Masters question", and his stature in European golf, we've lost sight of the accomplishment itself, the sport. We're always looking to move on to the next thing, searching for the next take. But sometimes history demands time, requires patience. It's only been two months since Rory completed the career grand slam and yet it feels like it happened a decade ago. We owe the great moment in sports more than that.
