At the Masters, a unique view of a champion

I rise on tiptoe, and crane my neck, and turn my shoulder slightly, and peek through the daylight between the heads of strangers. I can glimpse it. The fluttering yellow flag on the 18th green of the Masters.

- Rohit Brijnath

Then people shift and my view is blocked.

It's a few Sundays ago in Augusta and Rory McIlroy is somewhere on this green trying to win the Masters with a four-foot putt in the play-off. Four feet is nothing; he'll do this blindfolded tomorrow. Four feet is everything because to cross that distance successfully carries the promise of history, relief, satisfaction, redemption, vindication, immortality.

The crowd has that particular stillness which comes with the anticipation of the extraordinary. No one wants to breathe in case a breath of collective wind pushes him off the tightrope. People are tense, as if willing McIlroy, as if gathering themselves to celebrate him and turn this church into a carnival. The evening is dying. Light is being slowly lost. At the back of a crowd that's 10 deep or more, I can see nothing. But I am connected to the crowd, and to the moment, and it is an extraordinary sensation.

This has never happened to me before. Sport is to be seen, isn't it? In a journalist's life this will encompass a multitude of vantage points. The press box; the boundary line; behind Harsha Bhogle, Peter Roebuck, Jim Maxwell in an ABC radio booth; in the stands with a player's parent who can barely look, mutters an incoherent prayer and wears a tight smile.

Everyone has a story about sports' brilliant angles. The singular Sharda Ugra stands under a leaking shamiana in Mizoram once, her seat wet, watching Aizawl FC play Mohun Bagan through the rain, making hurried notes on damp paper and then hiding her notebook under her shirt. Then a cloud rolls in and the players start to resemble ghosts in a mist. "Too good," she remembers.