Breaking Down the Masters Photo Finish- Wall Street Journal Sports

By David Roth

The whole “a tradition like no other” and Jim Nantz’s whispery reverence and all the pomp and circumstance that surrounds the Masters can feel a bit much. But when the field made its way into the home stretch at Augusta National on Sunday, all that mythos began to feel almost appropriate. The final day of The Masters delivered just about everything a golf tournament is supposed to have, and did so in grand style. From a thrilling – if ultimately just short-of-the-mark – comeback from Tiger Woods to the supernova flameout of early leader Rory McIlroy to the shootout between the smorgasbord of players with share of the lead at some point on Sunday, the 75th Masters was one that instantly placed itself among the finest and wildest in the tournament’s history.

Reuters

In an upset, Jim Nantz thought better of proclaiming, “It’s Charl in charge!”

With many of the world’s best players playing at their best – and a few more obscure players enjoying the best rounds of their lives – and multiple five-way ties for the lead on the back nine, it was certainly one of the more suspenseful Masters in recent memory. If all, or any, of that pressure registered with eventual champion Charl Schwartzel, though, it wasn’t immediately apparent.
You know, Charl Schwartzel? Actually, chances are good that you don’t, unless you’ve paid a lot of attention to European PGA Tour events. The South African golfer has long been a trendy sleeper among the golf intelligentsia, but the average golf fan knew little of the 26-year-old golfer vaporizing the field and course at Augusta National. After he became the first golfer ever to birdie the last four holes to sew up a Masters win, though, Schwartzel was officially a sleeper no longer.
As impressive as Schwartzel was, though, this Masters will likely be best remembered for the reawakening of Tiger Woods and the nightmare finish of Rory McIlroy. Woods, who hung around the fringes of contention until Sunday, was doing his familiar shrunken giant routine for the first three days of the tournament before abruptly rediscovering his Tiger-ness. The result was as exhilarating to watch as any Tiger attack of old, even if his putter did let him down around Amen Corner. “That watershed was arguably as important as winning, even if Woods, a ruthless competitor and incorrigible perfectionist, would not quite have seen it that way,” the London Daily Telegraph’s Oliver Brown writes. “The unmistakeable message, ringing out in the glorious chaos of Augusta last night, was that Woods is back.”
And Rory McIlroy will be back, too, in time. On Sunday, though, McIlroy went from owning a four-stroke lead on the field to crashing into a tie for 15th, thanks to a historically disastrous Sunday. Eventually, CBS simply cut away from McIlroy. The kid from Northern Ireland will reappear soon enough, and how haunted he is by his Masters collapse will determine just what kind of golfer we wind up seeing. “Professional golfers are a prideful bunch – it is a necessary part of their make-up – and they fear embarrassment almost more than they fear losing,” the Guardian’s Lawrence Donegan writes. “McIlroy has proved he has the game to win a major championship. What he needs to prove now is that he has the mental capability.”

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Of course, it wouldn’t be The Masters if there weren’t some reminder that Augusta National’s dedication to tradition includes some that are a bit less admirable than giving the winner a green blazer. The Bergen Record’s Tara Sullivan was barred from the locker room after the tournament, which is a violation of both standard media practice and, it turns out, Masters policy. The story quickly exploded on Twitter, although Sullivan did much to tamp down the controversy by explaining what happened on the Record’s website and running the apology she received from Masters media official Steve Ethun.
In the end, Sullivan’s mistreatment at the Masters looks like nothing more than a big misunderstanding. Or, as Yahoo’s Jay Busbee has it, a big, symbolically rich and kind of predictable misunderstanding. “Naturally, this is a story because of Augusta National’s less-than-sterling history with including anyone who’s not white and male within its ranks,” Busbee writes. “Credit to Augusta National for stepping up and immediately addressing this head-on. … Thing is, there will be plenty who don’t believe it’s sincere. For that, and for the continuing perception that it’s a relic of a mindset long past, Augusta National has no one to blame but itself.”

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More even than private jets, backup mansions and round-the-clock estate-planning teams, the coolest new accessory for American billionaires is controlling an English Premier League soccer team. On Sunday, Stan Kroenke, the investor who also owns the St. Louis Rams, Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche and Colorado Rapids, joined the club by agreeing to purchase a giant chunk of Arsenal FC. (He already was a minority owner.) The purchase, if it goes through, will make Arsenal the second big-ticket EPL team to pass into American hands in recent months, after a group headed by John Henry and Tom Werner bought Liverpool FC.
Arsenal is one of the richest and most storied franchises in the EPL, and one of the world’s iconic soccer clubs. Factor in the troubles that fellow-American Malcolm Glazer has had as owner of Manchester United, though, and it was inevitable that Kroenke’s purchase would attract a ton of scrutiny. In the Independent, Jack Pitt-Brooke examines Kroenke’s ownership style, and the London Daily Telegraph’s Jeremy Wilson journeyed to Denver to survey Kroenke’s sports empire.

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Say what you wish about the Miami Heat’s new big three, but regardless of when (or if) Miami bows out of the upcoming NBA postseason, LeBron, Dwyane and That Other, Taller One deserve credit for creating a few terrific new rivalries in the NBA’s Eastern Conference. On Sunday, the Boston Celtics and Miami Heat – the reigning big three and those who would inherit the throne – met in what may well prove to be a postseason preview. As with all of their previous meetings this season, the vibe in the arena fell somewhere between tense and someone-is-going-to-get-hit. Unlike those other meetings, though, Miami’s players were the aggressors this time, and wound up handing the Celtics their worst loss of the season.
It wasn’t just that Miami’s 100-77 win was their first win against Boston this year. It was how resounding and impressive that win was. “It’s as if, with one game, all that momentum and confidence the Celtics built up in beating the Heat three times this season has evaporated,” the Miami Herald’s Israel Gutierrez writes. “It’s as if the Heat, having beaten the Celtics just once in four tries, has the upper hand, and not just by a little bit. You don’t want to say that one game means that much more than any of the previous ones, but how can’t you say that?”
It was that impressive, and Miami’s win may signal a shift in the Eastern Conference’s balance of power. And, if you read the usually spectacularly even-keeled Boston sports press, the last days of the Celtics’ most recent mini-dynasty. The playoffs can’t start soon enough.

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The retirement of Manny Ramirez Friday afternoon came suddenly, unexpectedly and – most saliently for our purposes here – after that day’s Daily Fix pubbed. The very great Carl Bialik jumped in that afternoon with an examination of Manny’s manifestly complicated case as a Hall of Famer that afternoon, because he’s good like that.
For a reminder of just what we’ll be missing and why, check out Ben McGrath’s terrific 2007 piece from the New Yorker on the mystery and magic of Manny. For better or worse, it’s hard to imagine anyone else quite like him.