Advertisement

It won’t fix the world but Matsuyama’s Masters win lifts Japan in time of anti-Asian hate | Opinion

Sometimes sports delivers us a result that just feels right, like there is a heart behind the hand of fate.

The Masters golf tournament did that for us Sunday. Hideki Matsuyama did that. You couldn’t help but feel good, for the player, for the Japanese people — and for more than that — as he wrapped himself into the most beautiful ugly green jacket in the history of men’s wear.

No event in sports means to tug at the heartstrings or does it better than the Masters, an air of history and reverence within golf’s singular cathedral, the gentle description of CBS’ Jim Nantz the perfect soundtrack. The troika of treachery called Amen Corner. The riotous bloom of azaleas. The impossible quaintness of Butler Cabin.

The Masters unfurls as a visually stunning tableau, an oil painting come to life.

An infamous past is a part of the portrait. For too many decades Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club was a society open only white men. Blacks and women need not have applied. The Masters deserves little praise for being goaded reluctantly to join the 21st Century.

That is why this particular Masters felt special. Different.

It felt that way in Thursday’s annual ceremonial start, when old-timers Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player were joined on the first tee by Lee Elder, who 46 years earlier had become the first Black man permitted to play this tournament. Now 86, Elder was not up to hitting a tee shot but rose elegantly from his chair, with help, to acknowledge the applause of onlookers.

(The sound of golf fans clapping is itself a small delight, a thousand hands coming together to make a gentle noise like a flock of geese taking wing).

The ceremonial honor given Elder, better late than never, was book-ended Sunday when Matsuyama became the first Japanese man to win the Masters — the first man from golf-mad Japan to win any major.

Matsuyama, 29, began Sunday with a big four-shot lead. When his drive off the first tree sliced into a stand of trees you had a fast sinking feeling the pressure if the day might crush him. But he held on for a 1-shot victory, a $2.1 million check, a green jacket and his slice of immortality.

Seven times he had finished top 10 in a major, including a runner-up finish in the 2017 U.S. Open.

Sunday, he finally delivered for his country as Japanese golf fans awakened in the dead night of 3 a.m., Tokyo time, to watch his final round begin. The sun was rising in Japan as he made the turn mid-round. It was a bright new morning when Matsuyama raised his arms in triumph.

Matsuyama speaks little English and uses an interpreter in most interviews but his smile was universal as he said afterward, “I’m really happy.” Through an interpreter he added, “Hopefully I’ll be a pioneer and many other Japanese will follow.”

Tiger Woods tweeted congratulations and called Matsuyama’s an “historical” triumph that would “impact the entire golf world.”

Matsuyama had become the first Japanese to win a men’s major and only the second Asian, after South Korea’s Y.E. Yang won the PGA Chamionship in 2009. At least one Japanese golfer has played in The Masters every year snce 1968, but the green jacket fit none until Matsuyama.

The timing? Just right. It was another layer to Sunday that made you feel that heart behind the hand of fate.

A man from Japan, making golf and sports history, at a time when prejudice and crime against Asians have spiked, when #StopAsianHate is a necessary hashtag.

Even top Asian athletes are not immune from the racism. Just last week, U.S. Olympian and seven-time national karate champion Sakura Kokumai, a Japanese-American, was the victim of a racist rant as she practiced at a park in Southern California.

She had just spoken about recent anti-Asian hate at a media event ahead of the upcoming Summer Olympics in Tokyo, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 and now scheduled to begin July 23.

Sunday, Matsuyama won the Masters just 120 miles west of where eight people including six Asian women were killed in a series of shootings at spas or massage parlors in Atlanta less than a month earlier.

Sports can never be a panacea to fix real life, but, at a time when anti-Asian hate is a wound that needs healing, Hideki Matsuyama slipping into a green jacket at least has the power to lift the spirits of the Japanese people for a sweet minute.

And that just feels right.