Tommy Martin: The real lesson from Rory's win - stop fiddling with sport

The great thing about McIlroy's Masters win was that everyone knew it was big.

Rory McIlroy celebrates on the 18th green after winning his playoff during the final round of the Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, USA. Photo by Kyle Terada/Sportsfile

It’s four days on and people are still talking about Rory McIlroy.

New angles keep coming. How many majors can Rory win? How many majors can Rory win this year? What Leinster can learn from Rory McIlroy. Arise, Sir Rory – King Charles to knight golf champ. The lonely passion of Harry Diamond. Masters mindset – 10 business lessons from Rory McIlroy’s triumph.

The last one is LinkedIn. I’d avoid there for a while if I were you, unless you agree that hitting your ball into Rae’s Creek on Masters Sunday is the exact same thing as missing a quarterly sales target.

Four days, and everyone still wants to talk about it. I ring my parents, who normally prefer an episode of Death In Paradise on a Sunday evening, but they watched it too. I got to the barbers, and he talks about the drama of the final round for the entire duration of a haircut. Admittedly only ten minutes these days, but still.

I take my son to get a check up on his braces. The orthodontist usually likes to explain what he is doing while he is rummaging around with pliers and wire cutters.

I think he feels the need to justify why I am paying the price of small second-hand hatchback just so the kid might get a slightly better looking girlfriend some day. But this week he is all Rory this, Harry Diamond that and I almost forget about the hatchback for a moment.

A few people have pointed out that Sunday night reminded them of the Dennis Taylor snooker final in 1985. That’s exactly right. Both protagonists were charismatic Nordies taking on dour automatons.

For Taylor against Steve Davis, read Rory and every other golfer (apart from Shane! Please, don’t swear at me Shane!). Both stretched on into the night and were unbearably tense expositions of the limits of human performance at things that don’t require that much exercise.

Both happened on Sunday nights, so unless you are a reprobate you were probably watching both at home with family. I remember my granny watching that one with us; she loved the snooker, which was mandatory for grannies at the time.

This one I watched with the kid with the future girlfriend, who was so gripped by the action that he stopped machine gunning people to death on his PlayStation for most of the back nine.

Most people, even the LinkedIn guff merchants, agreed that it was great, the whole thing, everything about it. Rory. The Grand Slam. The ups, the downs. Nick Faldo’s barnet. Butch Harmon’s wobbly lower lip. Harry Diamond and the way he might look at you. Augusta. The Masters.

The great thing about it was that everyone knew it was big. The Peter Allis of the barbering world, the orthodontist who definitely doesn’t drive a small hatchback, my parents skipping Midsummer Murders for a night. You didn’t need to know anything about golf or sport or even life to know this was big.

That’s because the Masters is always there and always the same. They don’t fiddle around with the format or move it around the calendar. The course is the same as it always is. The only way it changes is when a storm blows a tree down or when they buy some land off the lowly peasants in the neighbouring country club to push back a tee box.

It’s the same plinky plonky piano music, the same birdsong, the same flowers, the same cheese sandwiches. Well, not actually the same cheese sandwiches, but you get the point. There are always old duffers milling around the place in green jackets (Faldo again). They do replace these, but the old ones are so rich that they serve as excellent fertiliser and are therefore cremated and scattered on the flowers.

The point is that Rory’s win, as well as everything else, is another argument for not fiddling around with sports things. Golf has been fiddling around like mad lately, or being fiddled with more accurately. By the Saudis mostly, who are frankly fiddling with everybody. There has been so much fiddling with LIV and the PGA and TGL and FedEx this and Rolex that, that nobody watches golf anymore, apart from the Masters, precisely because they know it hasn’t been fiddled with.

And it’s been a good run of that sort of thing lately. Take the recent Grand National, where Willie Mullins, Ireland’s most composed man, broke down in a blubbering mess after saddling the winner for his son, Patrick. Willie Mullins has only ever shown one emotion publicly before – hat-wearing contentment – so it took something special to get him crying like a parent who has just seen the orthodontist’s bill.

That’s because the Grand National is the Grand National. Yes they have reduced the field and lowered the fences because – woke nonsense! – people don’t like watching horses die on telly anymore. But it has fundamentally been the same thing for nearly 200 years – horses jumping over lots of fences cheered on by Scousers wearing too much fake tan (pretty sure I read that in a Jane Austen).

The same day as the Grand National was on, they were advertising coverage of something called the Dubai World Cup, which despite also involving horses and being called a World Cup, nobody was remotely interested in and certainly not crying over, because it was clearly something that had been fiddled.

The Champions League has been endlessly fiddled with – indeed, might be described as fundamentally a fiddle – but its best bit is the knockout stages, which are basically the same as they always were, even back when it was Puskas and Di Stefano rather than Yamal and Dembélé trying to calculate aggregate scores in their heads. Yes, they have sadly fiddled with the away goals rule – source of the best comedy TV arithmetic this side of 8 Out Of Ten Cats Do Countdown – but it is essentially unfiddled.

Best example of all comes closest to home. The GAA’s decision to move the All-Ireland finals out of their traditional September slots shows the dangers of sports fiddling. Where once the association had these sacred dates etched into the national psyche, now the finals are some vague time in midsummer, when everyone is mowing the lawn or slapping sunscreen on a child in an overcrowded French campsite.

So that’s the big lesson from Rory’s win – stop the fiddling. Put that in your LinkedIn.