April, month of infinite playoff basketball games, is here, but the beginning of April is reserved for two traditions: Major League Baseball’s grand reopening sale and golf’s most famous tournament, The Masters.
[Sports traditionalist writing style on]
Alas, my beloved space-in-time awareness saves you dear and loyal readers from more thoughtful criticism of Kobe Bryant’s lack of respect for his forefather Shaq. Sadly, I await the lovable tradition of the NBA playoffs, a fair and high minded system of determining who the truly best team in the league is.
[Return to Normalcy]
Gag.
If anyone talked about basketball or football the way sports traditionalists speak about Opening Day and The Masters, the nostalgia police would have to resort to drastic measures?like hiring Stalin as chief?in order to prevent major sewage problems resulting from the gag reflexes of millions.
General Custer would also be in style with those poked out ears if NBC decided that this year, during the entire NBA playoffs, it would play the same music CBS subjects its golfing audience to.
And don’t get me started on that stupid cabin or that bridge or Rae’s creek. It’s just a ditch with water!
Despite all the sappiness issues, The Masters is, in most years, the best golf has to offer, and Opening Day is the most exciting day in the baseball calendar.
The odd thing, though, is that these two events make great sports events for exactly the opposite reasons.
The Masters is great because there are no Jan Van De Veldes or Steve Joneses or Joe Durants. By Saturday, the leader board at The Masters is almost always a who’s who of golf.
The problem with golf most of the time is that anyone can win. No matter how hard Tiger Woods tries, he’s not going to win every tournament, and when he doesn’t win, there’s no guarantee that Sergio Garcia or Vijay Singh or Fred Couples will be the ones that do.
At The Masters, one of those guys probably will win. Only sports with best-of-seven formats have such an amazing track record of only the best winning. Michael Jordan won six NBA titles. Jack Nicklaus won six Green Jackets. Coincidence? Yes. Proof of my point? Definitely.
Will Tiger Woods win six Masters before he retires? I would bet on it. He hasn’t won The Masters since 1997 when he lapped the field several times and pumped his fist into the record books, but he is as well suited to the course at Augusta as Nicklaus.
Golf, by its nature, has plenty of unpredictability. The Masters solves the problem of too many no-name fools distracting attention from Woods and the other big names.
Baseball, in contrast, has more than enough predictability. In fact, it has stale-ity (that’s a new word). If you had bet on the Yankees to win the World Series every year for the past 100 years, you’d only need 1-in-5 odds to make money.
Will the Yankees win this year? This might be one of the only questions that a genius and an idiot could both answer correctly.
But on Opening Day, I can maintain the illusion that someone else could win. Barry Bonds could hit 100 homers, and the Mets and Braves could kill each other in a bench clearing brawl. Those terrorists that wimped out and didn’t blow up Times Square for the new Millennium could get their self respect back by bombing Yankee Stadium.
It could happen.
… And Tiger Woods could fly.
