Pitchmarks #95 - "Once in a Pink Moon"

“Once in a blue moon
Someone like you comes along”
Van Morrison, from “Once in a Blue Moon”

Perhaps enough has already been said about this year’s Masters. Millions of words, across a great many channels, but not a single one of them will encapsulate that whole, great sporting drama like the few seconds when the new champion’s torso heaved with emotion, collapsed on the tight creeping bentgrass of the seventy-third green. I doubt I need to include an image of this; it is engraved upon our collective memory, I suspect. Iconic.

In an essay in the spring edition of the wonderful LINKS Magazine, I’d written about my memories of being allowed to stay up late for the BBC’s coverage of the back nine, and that my streak began with Jack’s final major in 1986. From there, the ride included some thrilling wins for Europeans, following in the footsteps of Seve and Langer, and a particular highlight in 1992, when some sense of universal justice prevailed over the laws of gravity, and Couples got a new blazer for his wardrobe. “Green Sunday”, I called it - a beacon of hope ahead for us Brits, written in the depths of a bleak midwinter, though I couldn’t have dared hope that Freddie - golf’s Peter Pan - would once again put in a shift.

So I settled in to watch with my son, and we observed the slings and arrows of fate being cast across the luscious carpets of Augusta. Early in the back nine, it began to look like a procession, so we made a plan to get Henry into bed around the fourteenth; an early start on Monday morning loomed. Of course, Rae’s Creek at the thirteenth got in the way of all that, so not only did we stay rooted to the sofa, but by the time we did both hit the sack, we were exhausted, nervous wrecks. We’d seen something truly extraordinary unfold, and the occasional magic dust of sport was sprinkled once more on this humble old game of golf, as it seemed to be so often when I was Henry’s age.

We’d shared a few such thrilling events before, of course. Tiger’s last roar in 2019, for example. Or the men’s singles final of 2023, all the youthful brilliance of Alcaraz finally wearing down the dogged, robotic determination of Djokovic. Or the final of the 2020 European Championships - England done on penalties yet again; the hero Donnarumma buried among his ecstatic Italian teammates. Now and then, some battle reaches then exceeds all expectations, and it becomes clear why we follow sport, for you never quite know when the ones you mustn’t miss might come around. “Once in a Blue Moon”, as the idiom goes and Van Morrison rasps.

I’ll probably never find it as hard to sleep as I did on 7th May 2019, and I doubt Henry slept a wink that night either. Or rather, he did, until Liverpool somehow got a second, which is when I woke him up just in case something mad happened, and we sat barely breathing as a third and then a ridiculous fourth went in, and Barcelona’s heads dropped while the reds on the field found a slice of immortality. It was the stuff of fairytales, and every single miserable defeat seemed suddenly tolerable; we were just doing the reps for the time when a few minutes like those would appear. It’s the same thing we do when we play golf. We stay hopeful despite reams of damning evidence, and when we’ve all but given up that hope, it comes together in some freakish spell.

I almost never watch golf these days, but writing that piece about Augusta made me want to give it another go, and I will be forever grateful to have sat beside my boy and watched it all unfold. Maybe golf isn’t completely broken after all, I thought to myself as the light of the full Pink Moon came flooding through the blinds, and the gentle birdsong came chattering through the telecast. There are no blue moons in 2025 as it happens, but I’ll gladly take the pink one and forevermore associate it with that heady night on the sofa, and the moment one of golf’s all-time greats finally got the job done.

Rory, “once in a blue moon, someone like you comes along”. Thank goodness you’re here…

In case you don’t already subscribe to LINKS Magazine, a link is provided here, and there are print and online versions of the subscription model. The bye-line of the magazine says it all: “The Best of Golf”. And “Green Sunday” can be found here.