By Brett Cyrgalis
Funny, isn’t it, that Rory McIlroy finally wins the Masters and one of my first thoughts is about a book focused on losing?
Win at Losing was written by my friend Sam Weinman, now a bigwig at Golf Digest, where he is a vice president and digital editorial director.
I met Sam something like 18 years ago when we were both newspapermen covering hockey. I looked up to him and still do. Sam is about 10 years older, and when we met, I was just out of college and he had just won a first-place award from the Golf Writers Association of America, his second. He lives in Rye, N.Y., in Westchester County, and plays at Rye Golf Club, often with his two sons whom he also coached in hockey.
Sam’s book came out in 2016, and it hit on a lot of the things I found most compelling about sports. Most notably, why the losing locker room is always far more interesting than the winning one.
McIlroy spent more than a decade doing all of that, taking inventory for why he had not won a major championship since 2014 and why he had never won at Augusta. The final round this year was a full-on melodrama in collared shirts and slacks. McIlroy won it and lost it about four times, somehow managing to beat Justin Rose in a playoff.
“As much as I’m a huge believer that losing is beneficial and character-building and provides this amazing feedback,” Sam said, “there’s also the danger of it feeding a narrative and perhaps leading you to believe it’s a predetermined outcome.”
So often, pro golf is unrelatable – especially from McIlroy. The ball speeds, the sound of the strike from his irons, the touch around the greens. But the double-bogey on the first hole Sunday to immediately give away his two-shot lead? Yeah, that I get. And he did what every great golfer has done before him and will do after him, which is move on from a mistake as quickly as possible.
If anything is true about golf, it’s that things you do not want to happen inevitably will. You have to be accepting of the fact that we are all striving for perfection knowing full well that it is impossible. Just a few months ago, Viktor Hovland, a previous winner of the FedExCup who got carried away tinkering with his mechanics, made an incredibly salient point:
Hovland said that the week he won in Tampa he did so with a golf swing that felt uncomfortable. So, who are we as amateurs to think that if we get the right swing tip, we can put it on cruise control? Far more beneficial is working on dealing with your emotions. It is detrimental to reject the idea that you’re feeling nervous or pretend you didn’t think about some disastrous outcome. That’s all human nature. But you have to acknowledge it and let it go.
This idea is the basis for Sam’s next book, which he is currently working on.
“It’s a myth to think all the toughest competitors are the ones who just have ice water in their veins,” he said. “That’s not true. They’re just the ones who don't breathe oxygen into their emotions that much. The psychological phrase that they always say is, ‘Name it so you can tame it.’”
With a green jacket draped over his shoulders, McIlroy admitted that he was incredibly nervous on the first hole, and there were moments on the golf course when he thought he might be letting it slip away again. Goodness me, he dunked one in the water on No. 13 from 86 yards – 86 yards! – and then dumped one in the bunker on No. 18 from 126. Brutal stuff. The text chain from a bunch of fellow MGA competitors all got to same point:
Golf is hard.
But McIlroy came back and got it done because he has continued to learn from losing, accept results, and stay in the moment. It might sound like psychobabble, but it helped McIlroy complete the Grand Slam, and that’s about as cool as it gets.