Watching Greatness (and Struggling to Know How to Achieve It)

“The long journey is over. McIlroy has his masterpiece.”  

Jim Nantz’s famous voice booms over the TV speakers as the Masters tournament yet again comes to a close. Rory McIlroy has won the 2025 Masters tournament and completed the most vaunted achievement in golf: the Career Grand Slam. The feat requires a player to win all four “major” tournaments in  professional golf: the Masters, the U.S. Open, the (British) Open, and the PGA Championship. Since the start of professional golf in the 1870s, only five players have done it. On Sunday, Rory McIlroy became  the sixth, launching himself toward the title of being the greatest player of the post-Tiger Woods era.

Rory McIlroy has chased a win at Augusta National for over fourteen years, when in 2011 he entered the famed  back nine of Augusta with a three shot lead and a look at cementing himself as one of the game’s greats at  just twenty-one years old. Just one shot later, Rory found his ball screaming left off of the golf course and into the  back yard of one of the ornate cabins overlooking the course. Within two holes, Rory was out of contention  for the Masters.

(Writer’s note: If you are not a fan of golf, or your interest in the sport is severely hampered by (reasonable)  questions about the sustainability and current class and gender dynamics of the sport, I hope you will continue to follow Rory’s story with me for another moment).  

Rory would continue his rising stardom following that heartbreaking loss at the Masters, winning his first major tournament just two months later at the 2011 U.S. Open (by an astonishing eight shots), a [British] Open in 2014, and a pair of PGA Championships in 2012 and 2014. Another top 5 finish at the Masters in  2015, and Jim Nantz uttered a phrase that became all too common: “He’s going to win one of these eventually.” 

Except he didn’t.

Ten years would pass with countless “so close yet so far” moments. Four runner-up finishes. Twenty-one top 10 finishes. Forty-four attempts to win a major. Many blown leads in the final rounds of major tournaments.

For multiple years he was crowned as statistically the best player of the year; yet golf is said to be a story told by the victors of major tournaments, and Rory was increasingly absent as one of the storytellers of the  game.

The darkest point of the journey may have come at the 2024 U.S. Open in Pinehurst, North Carolina, where Rory missed two putts shorter than the leg you’re currently standing on to lose the tournament, having led the tournament with less than nine holes left to play. The generally amicable McIlroy walked straight to his leased car, clearly on the verge of tears, not speaking to a single soul on the tournament grounds before disappearing for several weeks from competitive golf entirely.

The emotion of each loss, each failed attempt, was clearly weighing down more and more. It seemed all too likely that these emotions were blocking him from ever reaching his golf of winning another major tournament, let alone the Masters tournament needed to complete the Career Grand Slam.

Last Sunday looked no different than most of the forty-four major tournaments since Rory’s last win.

With a two shot lead at the start of the final round, Rory would quickly give away this lead as he had in countless majors over the past decade. A roller coaster of golf would ensure, with McIlroy suddenly gaining a five shot lead before giving all five shots all away again as he missed several easy putts and sent a disastrous eighty-yard wedge shot straight into the creek on the thirteenth hole. Instead of a coronation ceremony on the eighteenth green as was anticipated just a half hour before, Rory missed an easy shot into the eighteenth green and whiffed a three-foot putt to force a playoff with Englishman Justin Rose.

The playoff quickly placed Rory in the exact same spot he had just hit his beleaguered approach into the eighteenth green. The moment was a rare second chance in a sport that is known for its lack of them. Instead of  missing the green wide right, Rory hit his ball to three feet from the hole once again. This time, he made the putt, and became the 2025 Masters Champion after one of the most dramatic rounds in golf history.

But the greatness of the moment was not told by the accolades the win earned him—though graphics splashed across the TV screen declaring what Rory had accomplished: Masters Champion, Career Grand Slam winner, five-time major winner.

The greatness of the moment was instead being written through the emotions of Rory McIlroy, as he fell to his knees on the eighteenth green of Augusta National Golf Club, sobbing openly by himself on the green. Over ten years of top tens and runner-up finishes, missed short putts and narrow mistakes, the pressure of a constant cycle of self-improvement and self-disappointment in the view of all sports media and the world, came crashing down on him in a single moment.

The broadcast became silent, the usual “calls” and commentary given by broadcasters fighting to commemorate the moment fading into unusual quiet as Rory’s emotions were laid bare, his face red as he shouted at the ground in joy through hard sobs. With a firm hug to his caddie, Harry Diamond, Rory walked toward the crowd of 50,000 patrons cheering wildly, so close and yet a world away from the gravity of the emotions clearly being experienced by one man.

The radio silence elevated into something truly unprecedented scene in sports broadcasting: for nearly eleven minutes, a single camera followed Rory McIlroy in silence across the property of Augusta National, never leaving the face of a man on the verge of overwhelmed emotion and exhaustion, who was realizing that he had achieved that which his entire golfing career (and thus most of his life) was aimed toward, and what the agony of the last ten years had been endured in order to achieve.

No words were necessary—the facial expressions, tears and the brief but passionate embraces of loved ones told the world what this meant for McIlroy and perhaps the entire sport of golf as a whole, which watched agonizing defeat after agonizing defeat by McIlroy for the previous decade. The weight of what the moment meant for the triumph over the personal demons and heartbreak of a single man drew even people paid to talk about the moment in front of them into a reverent silence. Many Masters Champions had made the same walk; this was different.

This was greatness occurring in real time.

In a rare moment, what is impossible for all but about 300 people in history and is inaccessible to us all—winning a major golf championship—transcended the accomplishments of professional sports and tapped into something that all could understand and feel deep in their souls.

The term “greatness” hardly feels relatable in our current moment.

The word is overused, becoming the cliché term of trite leadership seminars and inspirational posters in the drab offices of middle managers, evoking a feeling but rarely describing something tangible to work toward or blend into the daily rhythm of one’s life.

“Greatness” bubbles with turmoil in the mileau of the current cultural moment, as people are made out to be great on the backs of falsehoods, and traits in one’s character that seem violent and harmful and wrong are crowned as necessary to live a great life.

The very concept of “greatness” sometimes feels like an outdated relic entirely, invoking images of conquerors and charismatic leaders as “being great” is brandished as a prideful and oddly patriarchal epitaph for those carrying on in the sanitized versions of their own myths.

In most instances, greatness is defined by the sum of what is achieved by a “great person.” Yet as towering as the feat of winning the Masters tournament is for anyone, the stark difference between McIlroy’s win on Sunday and past Masters victories points to greatness being something far grander than the how we normally conceive it. The immensity of greatness in the McIlroy win belonged not to the defeat of ninety-four other golfers but to the deep adversity that he had no obligation to overcome.

No one would blame McIlroy for drifting away from the pursuit of winning golf’s major championships over the years and choosing to focus efforts elsewhere, whether other tournaments or something else in life entirely. Most people assumed he would. At some point, why keep setting yourself up for failure and shame again and again?

It’s a familiar feeling. No one would blame us either for giving up on a sport after failing enough times, giving up on family after they’ve failed us enough times, giving up on improving our own sins and follies after falling into them again too many times. The question for us is the same: at some point, why keep setting yourself up for failure and shame again and again?

As humans, even those with immense social and financial privilege like a professional golfer of the caliber of Rory McIlroy, we are all set with adversities that plague our lives and keep us from achieving that which we wish to achieve and becoming that which we wish to become. And perhaps it is a cynical statement, but I don’t believe there is an intrinsic reason to challenge them: life in a sinful and broken world is hard, and it will always be hard. The status quo of the world is one of adversity and discord and pain, and nothing we do will change that on our own power. No one truly blames you for accepting those adversities and getting on with your life.

But how beautiful is it when one of us resolves to take on the challenge of overcoming these adversities and succeeds? That moment becomes a rare rupture in that damned and broken status quo. It’s jarring and unexpected and requires a public commitment to rejecting that status quo. It’s…great.

Here, a moment of “greatness” simply becomes the fulcrum on which the course of the world changes, whether in our own hearts or the world around us.

I watched Rory’s win on Sunday and felt a deep urge I believe many people feel in those moments: I want to do something great, too. When we take a step back, we realize the greatness we’re in awe of is a kind that we can all be connected to. It comes when we choose to not accept the lies and adversity and pain around us, choose to do something about it (even something infinitesimally small) and overcome it. Small changes to the status quo in ourselves or those around us suddenly have the same glorious quality that Rory’s win was bathed in on the eighteenth at Augusta.

If you didn’t have a chance to witness the moment of Rory’s win on Sunday, I implore you to go back and watch it, even if you have no desire to watch golf or even if you wish every golf course was torn down and transformed into an affordable housing project or a nature preserve. It’s a rare moment where someone’s triumph over themselves is on full public display, and it is a sight to behold.

Rory now has his “masterpiece.” Let’s go get ours, too.