Spectator Sport

4 April 2009

Right now in the States there’s a televised event they call the Mega March Madness.

Right now in the States there’s a televised event they call the Mega March Madness. This is the college basketball play-offs, and the eight nightly games are all played simultaneously. So if you go into a bar anywhere from Hoboken to Hawaii, from Manhattan to Monterey you can take your pick from eight screens to watch with your Bud. Or all at the same time. And it’s looking like next week’s Masters will be golf’s equivalent to the Mega Madness.

Sport has many heralds of spring — but nothing makes you get that endorphin rush quite like the first sighting of the bougainvilleas at Augusta National.

Just when you thought the build-up to the Masters couldn’t get any better, up pops Tiger Woods to claw back Sean O’Hair’s five-shot lead in the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Orlando in a nerve-shredding climax late on Sunday night. It was, astoundingly, Woods’s 66th PGA tournament win and has propelled him straight into short-priced favourite for next week’s Major. It was the same for the last two years though, and at even shorter prices, when Woods lost out to Zach Johnson and Trevor Immelman. The Orlando epic has turned Masters thinking on a sixpence: from ‘Did Tiger make his comeback too soon?’, it’s now ‘Can anyone beat Tiger?’ It looks like Woods is coming to the boil just nicely, and who will bet against a fifth green jacket for the Florida walk-through closet?

Or will you be watching one of the other huge storylines that could unroll this year? Look at Rory McIlroy, Belfast’s finest, and the centre of a perfect storm of media frenzy. Can he? Will he? Just 19, and with a girlfriend still at school, is Rory the man to conquer Augusta as a teen? Well, it’s hilly and long and rough on most youngsters, but then McIlroy’s not most youngsters. In truth, it would be a triumph of sorts if he makes the cut. A top ten finish would be nuclear.

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