Even in its absence, the tournament plays a powerful force—punishing and rewarding, both at once—in the lives of one golf-focused family. On Tiger and Augusta, mortality and tragedy
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SportsTranscript
00:00Today's edition of the Daily Cover, I'm joined by senior writer Michael Rosenberg.
00:03Michael, your story is about the Hall family in Augusta.
00:07Tell us why their tale resonated so much with you.
00:10Well, it's a family of golfers in Augusta, so obviously right near Augusta National.
00:15And if you live in Augusta, the Masters is sort of a 365-day event,
00:20and that week is just really special.
00:22And right before the Masters started last year, the patriarch of the family, Daniel Hall,
00:28had a stroke.
00:29And he was dying all week in the hospital.
00:32And his sons were watching the Masters.
00:33And it just struck me as really interesting, because I have found, certainly in my life,
00:39and I think probably other people have as well, that even in your darkest, saddest moments,
00:45you still find yourself looking for sports, looking for laughter, looking for music,
00:50looking for these things that kind of keep you going.
00:52And it feels like those things shouldn't matter, or it's not appropriate.
00:55But actually, you kind of need them and rely on them.
00:57And so that just interested me.
01:00And talking to the family, I found that that was a big part of their process,
01:06their grieving and then their healing process, was sport.
01:10Yeah, I mean, the Hall family was rallying around the Tiger Woods'
01:15win in the midst of the tragedy.
01:17Is that why sports are important and eventually, as a society, will help heal us when they come back?
01:23Well, I think sports help us think.
01:25They help us connect with each other.
01:27They help us relate to each other.
01:29There's a lot that sports do.
01:30And obviously, right now, we're all without sports.
01:32And that's not nearly at the top of the list of things that we're dealing with.
01:36We all understand that.
01:37But there is something missing.
01:39I mean, there's something that connects people.
01:41I think when you're sitting in a stadium full of people who may be different from you,
01:44who may have different backgrounds, different ethnicities,
01:48but are at the same event, cheering for the same team, or at least watching the same game,
01:52I do think it brings you closer to other people, whether you know them or not.
01:56And I think we're missing that.