Americans are fascinated by defeat. We celebrate victory, but losing intrigues us. And the bigger the fall, the better. The vanquished - and the agony of their collapse - becomes the bigger story than the champion.
There were two classic examples this past week: Phil Mickelson blowing the US Open on the final hole, and the Dallas Mavericks becoming only the third team in the history of the National Basketball Association to lose the championship after having a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven finals.
Notice we didn’t credit Australian Geoff Ogilvy for winning the US Open. Or the Miami Heat for becoming only the third team in NBA history to rebound from a 2-0 deficit to win the championship. No, these were blown opportunities, clear and simple. Choke jobs become the story. And these were major self-inflicted strangulations.
First we go to Mamaroneck, New York, and the US Open, where Mickelson had a two-stroke lead with three holes to go in his quest for that elusive first US Open title and third straight victory in a major. Mickelson bogeys the 16th. No problem. Then Ogilvy chips in from 30 feet away on the 17th to save a par four and remain a stroke from the lead. Again, no problem.
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All the 36-year-old Mickelson has to do is par the finishing 450-yard 18th hole at Winged Foot to claim the title. Throttle-back a bit, as we like to say in America. Be cautious. Take the win. But Mickelson has a history of not being able to do exactly that. And he doesn’t do it again.
Choosing a stronger driver than necessary, Mickelson opens the 18th by slicing 25 yards to the left of the fairway, positioning himself in a line of trees where a smaller club might have placed him safely on the fairway. Rather than playing it safe with his second shot, Mickelson tries to find a path through the trees. No luck. He hits a tree.
He finally gets out of the trees with his third shot, but buries it deep in a bunker to the left of the green. With his fourth shot, he blasts out of the bunker - and past the pin down a hill into the far rough. His fifth shot - now for the tie - isn’t close.
On stroke six, Mickelson finally putts into the hole to tie an equally self-destructive Colin Montgomerie and Jim Furyk for second.
“I am in shock that I did that,” said Mickelson after his final round 74. “I am such an idiot. I haven’t made a double bogey all week and then the last hole. I just can’t believe I did that.”
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Neither could Ogilvy. “I think I was the beneficiary of a little bit of charity,” said Ogilvy, who watched Mickelson’s collapse on television from the clubhouse after finishing his round. “It was pretty surreal,” said Ogilvy.
Nightmarish if you were Mickelson. “It hurts because I had it in my grasp and just let it go as opposed to having somebody make a long putt,” said Mickelson, whose collapse ranks right up there with the worst in golf history. The only previous US Open collapse to match Mickelson’s fold was back in 1939 when Sam Snead triple-bogeyed the final hole when needing only a par to win the title. Instead, Byron Nelson won by two strokes. British Open fans will remember Frenchman Jean Van de Velde blowing a three-stroke lead on the 72nd hole in 1999, his triple-bogey leading to the three-man play-off won by Paul Lawrie.
While Mickelson was dealing with his private hell, the Dallas Mavericks were suffering en masse after the Miami Heat rallied to score a 95-92 victory in Dallas last night to win their first NBA title.
Not only had Dallas opened the championship series with two straight wins, they led the pivotal third game in Miami by 13 points with six minutes to go - and lost. At the time, Miami fans were booing their own team and heading for the doors. Somehow, Miami rallied. The Game 3 win was the first of four straight for Miami, marking the first time since December 2003 that Dallas had lost four straight.
Dwayne Wade paced Miami with 36 points and 10 rebounds in the final and averaged 34.7 points for the championship series to earn the 24-year-old the Most Valuable Player honors for the series. But the story was the collapse of Dallas, who were openly celebrating on the sidelines in Game 3 as Miami’s head coach Pat Riley called a desperation timeout with his team on the ropes.
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From the point that Riley wrote “season” on his clipboard, Miami took over as the deep-and-athletic Dallas totally collapsed. Everything went wrong. Before what turned out to be the final game, maverick Dallas owner/fan Mark Cuban was fined a record $250,000 by the NBA for “numerous acts of misconduct”, including what the league perceived to be intentional intimidation of the referees. However, while it was always easy to find Cuban in the crowd, it was not so easy to find 7ft 1in Dallas megastar Dirk Nowitzki, who disappeared in key moments during the finals. For example, Nowitzki scored 29 points and had 15 points in the final game. But he scored only two points with the result hanging in the balance in the fourth quarter and was not in the picture as Dallas desperately tried to tie the game in the final seconds.
The championship was the fifth for Miami coach Pat Riley and the fourth for centre Shaquille O’Neal, both of whom gained their previous titles in different eras with the Los Angeles Lakers.
One championship did play out to form. The Carolina Hurricanes defeated Edmonton 3-1 in the decisive seventh game on Monday night to win the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup. Twenty-two-year-old rookie goaltender Cam Ward won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the MVP of the finals. Ward, who started the season as Carolina’s backup, was the first rookie goaltender to lead his team to the NHL title since Montreal’s Patrick Roy in 1986.
Carolina, who posted the second-best record in the regular season, ruined the Cinderella story that was Edmonton. Not only were Edmonton the first No 8 seeds to reach the finals, they had won two straight games to force the decisive seventh game in an attempt to become only the second team in NHL history to win the Stanley Cup after trailing 3-1.
Both the NBA and NHL finals were tremendous conclusions to the season. The strike that wiped out the 2004-2005 season was a distant memory as the Carolina-Edmonton series wowed fans in two nations. And the NBA finals produced four of last week’s five top-rated television shows in America - a huge step forward for a league that had seen a loss of viewers over the past five seasons.