The Last American Hero is Rory McIlroy! Yes!

The Last American Hero is Rory McIlroy! Yes!

Inside Television 559
Publication Date: 6-24-11
By: Hubert O’Hearn

It would have been in the March 1965 issue of Esquire, when that magazine was the home to the best journalism written in America, that some young writer named Tom Wolfe made a serious splash on the national scene. His article was a long profile about a stock car driver from Appalachia running under the title: ‘The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson! Yes!’

I was seven at the time, and I’d never seen anything like it. Several multiples of seven later, I still have never seen anything like that story, which is frankly sad. Personalized journalism runs in long cycles - from the Lincoln Steffens/Upton Sinclair generation to nobody - to Wolfe, Gay Talese and Hunter Thompson to nobody - and now it’s re-emerging again (thank God) thanks to bloggers, the Huffington Post and papers like The Guardian. No one else though has had Tom Wolfe’s style. Perhaps it is just too unique to him, no matter how many ellipses, sound effects and exclamation marks crackling like Fourth of July sparklers one scatters across the paragraphs. But I digress.

Tom Wolfe...the scary part is, he was about
to mow the lawn when this was taken

Both the subtext and the selling point of Wolfe’s story was that an America in recovery from the JFK assassination and risking being swamped by the wave of cultural change that would flip the mores of the 60s like a 45 record that had Doris Day on one side and Sunshine of Your Love on the other - that America was looking with lonely eyes for something simple and understandable that it could embrace and understand.

Which leads, perhaps not naturally but it leads, to last week’s U.S. Open at Congressional. I’m not in the habit of writing about recently completed sports competitions, except to apologize for misleading betting tips. But I was watching Rory McIlroy’s absolute crushing of the record book (it was like McIlroy was the second guy to have ever played golf, and the first guy had sucked) while at the same time emailing back and forth to Scott Murray of The Guardian who was live-blogging the event.

Scott and I had done this before - at The Masters in April - when young Rory had collapsed quite literally in tears on the back nine on Sunday afternoon. We’d been horror-struck then; we were awe-struck now. It wasn’t even so much the golf - it was the gallery and the instant iconography that were wonders to behold.

American sports audiences and the media which feed them tend to the jingoistic. It was on this same Congressional golf course in 1997 that heckling crowds had unglued the Scotsman Colin Montgomerie to the point that he blew perhaps his best chance at a major championship. Fourteen years later, I think that almost any in the gallery would have offered a pen for the 22 year old Northern Irishman to sign his immigration papers. NBC’s Jimmy Roberts and the rest of the crew described the curly-haired kid with the sweet putting stroke in near-Biblical terms. There was a saviour amongst us! Hallelujah and pass the Titleists!

As I wrote Scott at the time, it figured. Who was there on the sports scene to take America’s mind off two wars, an empire in decline, an economy in worse decline, a clown car of Republican presidential candidates, et al ad infinitum? All the other sporting pretenders had failed. America loved Brett Favre until he turned into just another horn dog, and similarly Ben Roethlisberger. Kobe Bryant is an arrogant, sullen star and LeBron James makes Kobe look like Mr. Rogers. No one cares about baseball or tennis anymore and Tiger was … well we know what Tiger was.

I don’t know whether to feel happy for young McIlroy or be frightened for him. He’s on the wave now, like Laird Hamilton 60 feet in the air on that big curve that wants to take you closer to the sky but if you slip it will drive you into the rocks below. But for one Sunday afternoon, you could believe in something good again.

Be seeing you.