I personally love it when sports converge. Ever since I was little, you could catch me watching anything that had to do with sports, and at that time of fewer networks to watch, every game seemed like an event all on its own, especially with little options (who else remembers putting foil on the actual television antennas?).
Needless to say, if sports were on, I was watching over almost everything else. I guess it’s no surprise then that I ended up here at Buckeyes Wire writing about — you guessed it — sports, at least of the Scarlet and Gray variety.
We ran across a piece that has the sports world converging again, and this time it is golf and college football. You may nor may not know, but former Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer has been invited to play Augusta National a few times. And, according to Doug Stutsman of The Augusta Chronicle, the Masters has a near and dear place to his heart.
“My father and I never missed watching Sunday at Augusta,” Meyer told Stutsman. “The first time I was invited to play Augusta National, I teared up driving down Magnolia Lane. It brought back all the memories with my father.”
That first time was as a guest of former Notre Dame and South Carolina head coach Lou Holtz. And in a stroke of luck, longtime announcer Jim Nantz followed the pair on the golf course as he was playing his own round.
“So we’re on No. 1 fairway and Jim Nantz shows up on a golf cart,” Meyer said. “He followed us for four holes. Nantz, us and Augusta – it was pretty surreal.”
I can only wonder if Nantz’s smooth voice ever provided any play-by-play color to any of Meyer’s shots?
A few years later in 2009, Meyer was invited to play Augusta National once again, this time after winning his second national championship with Florida. This time a Gator alum invited him to play the course.
“We win the national championship and I get a phone call from Fred Ridley — a friend of mine,” Meyer said of the now-Chairman of the Masters Tournament and Augusta National Golf Club. “Fred says, ‘I have great news for you. As a gift for the championship, we’re going to invite you and Tommy Shannon to Augusta.’”
While playing in a threesome composed of Meyer, Shannon, and Ridley, Meyer got sentimental and showed some rare, intimate emotion he rarely shows outside of his family.
“I’ll never forget what he said,” Shannon recalled to the Augusta Chronicle. “Urban looks up and goes, ‘I would rather be here with you people, at this location, on this day, than anywhere else on earth.’ It almost brought me to my knees. It was an incredible moment. That’s a statement you don’t say often. You look at your wife and say it when she gives birth to your child — you say it in moments like that. It was such a sincere ‘thank you’ from Urban to Fred. I was just a victim of circumstance. I happened to be there.”
Pretty cool stuff. It just goes to show you there are some pretty special sports scenes out there, and even the most rockstar sports personalities understand when they are in that moment, in that space, and in that time.
Urban Meyer and The Masters? Let’s just thank our lucky stars its a green jacket betrothed to the winner and not a blue one.
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