Tradition, like at the Masters, is one of the great seductions of sport

The sacred deserves silent contemplation. So you may gaze at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but never through the lens of a phone. It is forbidden. So is standing 15 feet from Rory McIlroy at Augusta National this week, where the pines stand like looming sentries, and taking a silly selfie.

To watch the Masters, as I did in 2025 with my phone locked in the media building, was a privilege. Elsewhere – say tennis’ Australian Open – sport sees itself as a carnival, here it positions itself as a pilgrimage. And so no phones are allowed, no temptation to idly pose, check X, peek at the stock market or send a lying text to a boss about your whereabouts. Your attention belongs to the golf.

In our over-romantic vision of sport we occasionally like to think of stadiums as temples and athletes as religious figures. Though gods in boots sometimes need divine intervention themselves. Which is why down the tunnel that the players walk at the Camp Nou, there is a small chapel. I’ve never been to Barcelona’s ground, but having attended the Masters once is to never see it quite the same way again.

Technology cannot adequately translate character. Cameras cannot fully transmit history. Television cannot let you feel the orderliness of the crowd, taste the absurdly affordable egg sandwiches (S$1.90), hear the roars which come sliding through the trees like ghosts and wonder at greens whose solving should be rewarded with some equivalent of mathematics’ Fields Medal.

Tradition catches you and won’t let go and in sport it is the greatest seduction. Every year, for instance, we discuss the Green Jacket, a simple item of clothing first used to identify Augusta National members, as if it’s as historic as Napoleon’s bicorne hat.

It’s curious that even as most sports add glamour, insert music, shorten formats, beckon influencers, encourage showmanship, create kids zones and generally polish themselves with modern glitter, it is the past that is still worth peddling.

The Masters has arguably the most progressive app in sport, yet it’s the ancient ritual of the Champions Dinner menu which holds us in its thrall.

Wimbledon expands every year and builds a roof on Centre Court, yet we still talk about green ivy and white attire. Tradition is a lure, a conceit (bowing to royalty at Wimbledon which has fortunately ceased) or just clever (you cannot buy Masters memorabilia online), but it intrigues us. Modernity has a shiny sameness, old cathedrals have a unique calling.

Tradition in sport is mostly a Western fascination, for the East in the old days was too busy for play. Our priorities lay elsewhere, our economies were developing and we were bound anyway by our own daily rituals. Our temples weren’t sporting fields. Yet. 

Every Grand Slam and every golf Major is in the West and so were 19 of the first 20 Olympic Games. We did not see sport as the West does, as something sacred, a cultural touchstone, a link between generations, a rite of passage where the father introduces his son to baseball in the days of summer.

Tradition has value in sport, it offers the illusion of permanence, it binds, it creates a vocabulary (Ka Mate, the All Blacks’ haka) and a soundtrack (You’ll Never Walk Alone).

In basketball, jerseys of greats are hung from the rafters. In cricket, a cap is handed to a debutant by a great player in a sort of passing of the torch.

Tradition comes often from nowhere and embeds itself. A victorious racing driver was pictured drinking buttermilk in 1936, a dairy executive stepped in and the ritual of the winning Indianapolis 500 driver glugging milk was born.

In 1919, L’Auto, the newspaper which founded the Tour de France, decided that the leader’s jersey should be the same colour as its pages: Yellow. And so the legend of the maillot jaune began.

These little things, like Super Bowl rings, give an event personality and significance even as they are useful distractions.

The Masters has an ugly history. No black golfer competed there till 1975 even though the PGA Tour finally dropped its “Caucasians-only” clause in 1961. And no woman member was admitted to Augusta National till 2012. Yet listening to the cloying piano music that accompanies the Masters telecast and you’d think this is a church.

Yet a sport moves on, a club evolves, and like the flowers and the pines, something beautiful is also rooted in this land of the Masters. Tradition gives the tournament a certain timelessness and a heft. The game feels bigger here than its champions.

To hear the chants for McIlroy in 2025, to stand deep in a crowd at the 18th hole, the golfer hard to see but his coronation audible, was profound. Out across the green undulating land that McIlroy had temporarily conquered were the bridges which commemorate Ben Hogan, Gene Sarazen and Byron Nelson. Bridges built of traditional stone. Bridges that join generations and take a game across the waters of time.