Rory McIlroy’s triumph at the Masters was glorious in so many ways, part of which was the absolute engagement of the fans, or as they call them, patrons at Augusta.
No mobile phones are allowed on the course, and the impact on those present and those watching on TV is palpable.
Watching the crowd react as the scoreboards, manual and the same as they have been forever, could not fail to raise a smile. There was universally shared drama, not dependent on the speed of the news service you are following.
After the winning putt, witnessed through the eyes rather than the phones of those present, the US commentary team did not speak a word for just over four minutes. Four minutes of dead time in broadcasting is like an eternity, but this was far from dead.
The power of the pause, allowing the events to tell their own story, and the reactions of everyone at Augusta dialled completely into the moment. Pretty special.
Even in Rome at the weekend, as Pope Francis circled St Peter’s Square for the last time, every shot of the crowd was of a bank of raised phones.
We are all guilty. There is a sense that if you cannot capture the moment, it did not happen, and you have to prove you were there.
In sports marketing, we speak about the desire to fully engage with fans and the fan experience. Yet the coda for this is that it is delivered digitally, shared digitally, and memorialised digitally, and in that lies a distance from the pure emotion of being there.
Augusta is an outlier in many ways as a sporting event. No grandstands, no online merchandising, no phones, no distraction.
It has perhaps gone too far in other spaces and places, where we are now default committed to saying yes.
The irony is not lost; it was through the TV screens that the moment was brought to a broader collective consciousness, but wouldn’t it be nice to live the moment a little more often?
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