A few years ago, in other places, I wrote a brief dissertation about the power of the gaze, its shaping effect on reality, something that classical authors have already written about and that modern science has revisited by explaining to us, through quantum theory, that an observer influences the nature of the event they perceive.
The gaze implies attention, bravery, challenge, boldness, curiosity, expectation. The gaze reveals intentions and feelings; it can show calculation, but also indecision, warmth or coldness, indifference or closeness, wisdom or foolishness.
In the sporting realm, there are as many gazes as there are victories or defeats: brave, timid, hopeful, daring, insecure, decisive… They are, and forgive me for resorting to the worn-out cliché, the mirror of the soul and technique, and in some specialties, like golf, they can reflect all the moods and sensations previously described over just a few holes.
We all have in mind a special gaze cast by one of our sporting idols when celebrating a victory. They are brilliant gazes, free from the suffering and pain of the journey, where the previously dashed expectations, the “almosts,” the vain efforts, the prior frustrations are no longer seen. The gaze of Seve at St. Andrews in 1984, attentively following the ball’s trajectory, that slight curve perfectly drawn that led it to the hole, those eyes fixed on the white sphere disappearing into the cup of the 18th at the cradle of golf, those eyes then turned towards a crowd as jubilant as Seve himself (“I made it, I made it!”) while his fist became an extension of his heart. Those gazes immortalised by the great David Cannon, photographic notary of historic moments for Spanish and world golf.
But what happens when happiness is unmanageable, almost unbearable? What occurs when the culmination of your greatest triumph demands a pause because you are overwhelmed and your senses can’t take any more impulses? How do you “unsee” (and forgive me again for the “word”) something you’ve already seen? Why is the gesture so vain, so useless, yet so necessary?
All of this happened to Rory McIlroy after resolving the playoff against Justin Rose in the recently contested Masters. McIlroy couldn’t take it anymore, he put his hands to his face, knelt down, and began to cry. No one knows what went through his mind at that moment, whether he intended to treasure something unique, shield it from the outside, protect himself from the sensory avalanche, or if he simply let himself be carried away by a reflex action in a moment of protection, extreme vulnerability, helplessness, and modesty.
Regardless of what went through his mind, it was a beautiful moment, something personal, exclusive (even though in his mind were also his parents, his partner, his daughter, his caddie, his people), a perfect example of how much things that may seem trivial to many matter in a complicated time when, undoubtedly, the world is such that we might feel like putting our hands to our faces daily.
And we spectators shared that feeling, at least those of us who followed it from home, because we knew the background (since that hard blow the Northern Irishman took at Augusta in 2011) and we spent the entire broadcast on the proverbial roller coaster of emotions, incredulous at the Northern Irishman’s master strokes, but also stunned by his few but notable mistakes, like the double bogey on the 13th hole.
I confess that I resorted to the oldest trick of the novice horror movie viewer and covered my face, leaving just a slit through which I saw how his ill-fated shot ended up in Rae’s Creek.
But it was worth continuing to watch, not missing a detail, the duel with Rose and his other rivals, until the final moment, when what mattered was not what was seen, but what was felt.
