Pure Chaos

I’ll always remember the light. The way the sun, low in the sky, was descending into the trees behind the first and second fairways. Everything felt dappled in honey—soaked in the golden hour. In that light, the texture of the immaculate 18th fairway looked almost edible. This makes me sound like I was on mushrooms. To my knowledge, I wasn’t, but I’m not sure the experience would have been much different. Hours were seconds and minutes felt like a week. At 7 p.m. on Sunday, April 13, 2025, it felt as if this sliver of Georgia had bent the space-time continuum.

Inside this lucid dream, Rory McIlroy stood over the approach on his 72nd hole—a sensible gap wedge and a two-putt away from exorcising the demons and entering the pantheon. I was parallel with him, sweaty and pressed up against complete strangers in the pine straw. McIlroy took a swig from his Yeti and leafed through his yardage book, which told him what he already knew: a committed swing would land him long on the green, which would gently feed the ball back toward the pin and the gaping maw of history. A man behind me on his tip-toes was softly panting in my ear. I checked my watch, which registered my heart rate at 130 beats per minute. Our gallery was beginning to produce its own humidity. A man next to me, who I’d never seen in my life, stared into my soul. His voice, thick with an Irish accent, croaked out 10 words I’ll never forget: “We’ve never been as close as we are right now.” McIlroy took the club back. The gravity of our pine straw pod changed as we collectively sucked in our breath and leaned forward. Scientists won’t tell you this, but in the following 1.9 seconds, the world briefly came off its axis.

People tend to use the most reverent vocabulary when talking about Augusta National. “Sacred place.” “Hallowed ground.” “Cathedral of the sport.” Even people who just found out Rory McIlroy existed on Sunday have heard of “Amen Corner.” Those lucky enough to make the pilgrimage to the Masters describe it as a religious experience. It might sound saccharine, but it’s hardly hyperbole. Augusta National is one of the few places I have been that lives up to the hype. The sappy superlatives are earned.

But here’s another truth: When the tournament is in the midst of producing one of its historic Sundays, it’s pure, uncut chaos out there. To follow the final group with the intention of seeing nearly every shot is its own peculiar endurance sport. It requires preparation—know your spots, stay just ahead of their shots, find the shortcuts (a real pro can double back from the fourth green, past the concessions stand, around the back of 7 tee, past the sixth green and up the hill to catch all the action on No. 5 without getting trapped in a patron bottleneck). You have to know when to cut bait on seeing an approach to get a good spot at certain greens. You must be on the move almost constantly—a four-hour paddle through Class IV rapids of performance polos and sundresses.

I began learning these maneuvers in 2011. My first day inside the gates of Augusta National Golf Club was a Thursday. My father and I made an arbitrary decision to follow a young stud named Rory McIlroy, oohing and ahhing as he carded a 65. That settled it: We’d do it again the next three days. You know what happened next. My first taste of Augusta’s unique brand of chaos. Scoreboard confusion, distant roars, split-second decisions about where to go to hopefully witness something historic. Or, in the case of McIlroy that Sunday, to witness heartbreak.

McIlroy was in the bunker on 18. I speedwalked up the unyielding hill in the direction of the clubhouse to elbow my way into even a millimeter of eyeball room to watch history. Or heartbreak. I’ve been in stadiums and festival fields with crowds north of 100,000, but the mass of humanity around the 18th green on the final hole of the Masters has the optical illusory effect of feeling much larger. And unlike other sports events and concerts, this ocean of pasteled bodies can, all at once, go eerily still. But the electricity of the moment remains. On Sunday, it bordered on unstable. All this energy had to go somewhere.

I weaseled my way into a nook, my chest pressed up against a tree 90 yards from McIlroy. My new pod of patrons and I were straining to see through a window on a low hanging branch. “How many feet?” A man asked. “Oh God, I don’t even want to know,” a woman in a straw hat wearing a backpack replied. A weary photographer appeared, hauling his telephoto lens. He leaned in for a look but there was no good shot. “I suppose it’s for the best,” he groaned. “I don’t think I can watch this anyhow.” We strained. A child broke the rules and hopped up on his green folding chair. He blocked some views but nobody seemed to mind. I decided it would be best to close my eyes. Let the crowd tell me his fate. There was no roar. Just a sickening, collective groan. No one spoke. Finally a voice from two rows up said to no one in particular, “Where do we go now?”

The glorious irony of being a patron at the Masters is that millions of people, some tens of thousands of miles away, have more information than you do about what is happening 300 yards away. This is by design. No phones and strategically placed analog scoreboards means that information travels at pre-information age speeds. Complete strangers become gossip partners, many become little detectives, some turn into town criers. Out of the silence, you will hear a distant roar, which is immediately triangulated by you and your neighbors. It can be frustrating but it’s mostly a delight—there is no experience in sports like walking over from a different hole, bringing news of a fresh birdie or a leaderboard swing to a rapt audience. The confusion and chaos of a hectic Augusta weekend is a bonding agent. Relationships in this Golf DisneyWorld are forged in collective joy and trauma. And on Sunday, one player’s collected joy and trauma accelerated this feeling in ways I didn’t think were possible.

Every year I’ve been on the grounds, McIlroy’s burden has been a palpable, almost atmospheric element of the tournament. You’ll hear it everywhere on the course—whispers trickling in that he’s on a heater, followed by the big roars. But this week felt different. Each day it was as if energy was being created and destroyed over and over again via every analog scoreboard update. Because it’s Rory, around 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, that energy became feral. Trapped behind the fourth tee, I watched McIlroy strut up the rise from his birdie on 3. The moment his white hat became visible, our tee box exploded. A genuine, back-nine roar—not for draining a bomb or sticking a long iron, but for just showing up. The “RORY! RORY!” chants began immediately. Behind him, Bryson DeChambeau egged on the crowd, asking them to get louder. It felt like a prize fight on ryegrass.

And then somewhere around the turn, it became something else entirely. At the Masters, the golf course is often both the setting and the leading role of the play. Not on this Sunday—McIlroy subsumed even this grand old place. Darting with my father through the crowd and sliding into viewing nooks, all of my conversations on the back nine involved prolonged armchair psychoanalysis. McIlroy has shared enough of his burden over the years that many of us have come to believe that we knew what it was to also carry it. Maybe even solve it. We don’t, but what was undeniable on Sunday afternoon, as the light began to soften, is that some small percentage of his heartbreak over the last 14 years somehow became absorbable through osmosis. And for us mere mortals, the weight, his burden, felt more real than ever before.

On 13, I stood 30 yards from McIlroy, next to a British journalist and four tattooed Irishmen from Galway, when Rory dumped his wedge in Rae’s Creek. “This is sadistic,” one quipped, staring at the ground. “He’s gonna hand it over to an Englishman,” another wailed, “and that alone may kill me.” Then, after the bogey on 14 made our shoulders slump further, I stood on 15, three patrons down from a man in a European Ryder Cup polo. We all thought he was laying up. It seemed like the only option. I promise you, that ball hung in the air for 350 years. Seasons changed, landmasses shifted, and empires rose and fell before it landed on the green. When it finished mere feet from the hole, I turned to the man in the polo. He was crying. So was the man next to him.

McIlroy's moment. #themasters pic.twitter.com/ii5NCjvLmA

— The Masters (@TheMasters) April 13, 2025

All these words feel like stolen valor. A man—already rich and famous and talented beyond imagination—wins a golf tournament and somehow I feel a small claim to it because I’ve chased him around a course, inhaling $1.50 sandwiches for a few weeks of my life? There were a few moments on the back nine, mostly when I was feeling dehydrated and vaguely nauseous, that logic tried to sneak through the gates of Augusta National and back into my brain. All of this is ridiculous, it tried to tell me. And it’s true. The Masters is not the real world—the club and tournament committee work 52 weeks a year and spend unfathomable amounts of money to make sure that’s the case. But it’s precisely this surreality that makes things feel bigger. There’s a genuine feeling of whiplash exiting the gates each day and, if I’m being completely honest, a touch of relief. If you care deeply about golf, it feels like your nerve endings are exposed out there. It’s beautiful, and exhausting, and weirdly personal. That effect is multiplied by orders of magnitude when the career grand slam is on the line.

And so it only makes sense that, as the golden hour began to give way to gloaming, that I cried in front of 20 or 30 complete strangers when a stupid ball that I couldn’t even see went into a dumb hole. I stood in roughly the same position six years ago, catching my small, obstructed glance at Tiger Woods making history. The moment gave me chills, but what Tiger did that Sunday was improbable and difficult to fathom. I remember being in awe of the joy on his face. But the moment felt like undeniable proof of what we’ve known all along about Woods: He’s a bit of an alien. Singular, mostly unknowable, and superhuman.

The way Rory dropped to his knees is what got me. From almost a football field away, I could tell there was nothing performative about it, as if all those burdens he’d been carrying for all those years had become a load-bearing part of his exoskeleton and when they finally evaporated into the cloudless Sunday sky, his body simply gave out. This glorious lack of composure was, in so many ways, an opposite declaration of Woods in 2019. And it offered undeniable proof of what we’ve known all along about McIlroy: He’s singular, somehow relatable, and utterly human.

Before I began my exhausted journey toward the gates and my real life, with all the little joys and traumas more befitting my station, I could make out McIlroy letting out a howl. I imagined all that pent-up heartbreak, joy, humanity, and chaos spilling back out into one of the places it all began 14 years ago. It felt perfectly cyclical. All of his emotions, and our emotions, would be reabsorbed by this weird, wonderful, beguiling golf course, which, assuredly, will dole it back out again to us on another golden Sunday in April.

Featured image by Andrew Redington/Getty Images