I doubt if there has ever been a moment in sports when as many fans were pulling for someone as there were Sunday at the British Open golf tournament.
Tom Watson, 59, came within an eyelash of winning the oldest of all golf tournaments. If you aren't a golf fan, you may very well wonder what is so special about that.
What is so special about it is that the oldest champion ever of a tournament was 48.
Granted, golfers last a little longer than most athletes, but can you imagine a pitcher winning the final game of the World Series in his 50s? Could a basketball player ever lead his team to a NBA championship that's 11 years older than Michael Jordan was when he won his last title?
Maybe it is an impossibility because Watson didn't quite pull it off. He failed to protect a one-shot lead on the 72nd and final hole of the tournament. He led or was among the top three for four days and he played the kind of golf he was known for 20 years ago.
On the last hole of the tournament, however, he used too much club and his approach shot went over the green. He was unable to make his par putt and then lost in a playoff.
Had he won, many would have acclaimed Watson's feat as the greatest in the history of sports. One of the commentators on The Golf Channel called it that even though he lost.
However you rate it, it was a tremendous moment for the oldest sport we play. This tournament, known by many as simply "The Open," has been played since the 1860s at various courses around Great Britain.
This year's site, Turnberry, is known for a couple of things. Located on the west coast of Scotland, it has one of the most beautiful settings in all of golf. It overlooks the Irish Sea and you can see Ireland on a clear day. I had two close friends that played the course and both said it was a very special experience.
Turnberry is also known for something far removed from golf. When England faced the threat of Axis Germany in 1939 and 1940, the golf course was converted to an air base and from its runways, the young men that helped save Britain took to the airways daily to fight off the evil threat the country faced.
Many of those young airmen never returned from their missions, which prompted Prime Minister Winston Churchill to make one of the most memorable statements of war.
He declared, "Never in history have so many owed so much to so few."
Can you imagine playing golf on such a historic site? What a privilege and thrill it must be.
Roy Waters is a sports columnist for The News Herald. Waters was baseball and basketball coach at Salem High School from 1955-66, where his teams won 18 championships. In 2007, he was inducted into the Burke County Sports Hall of Fame.
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