(NOTE – as the year winds to a close, the Shreveport-Bossier Journal staff is sharing a few of our favorites written during 2025. This column ran on Tax Day, Tuesday, April 15.)
Midnight matters two days a year. Welcome to the first one.
You have until a minute before 12 a.m. Wednesday to pay Uncle Sam your 2024 tax tab. Even with Elon’s IRS firings, AI will know if you’ve forked up in time, just like Santa knows if you’ve been good or bad.
It’s 260 days until the next time midnight really counts. The next one is cause for celebration – New Year’s Eve.
Tax Day can be cause to celebrate. I saw it on my first adult April 15th, many moons ago at the U.S. Post Office in Lafayette on Moss Street, a mile or so from where future Yankees legend Ron Guidry played baseball at Northside High School.
I proudly pulled in to drop off my return and drove right into a tailgating party. Those Cajuns had the Zydeco boom boxes blaring, grills fired up, and ice chests filled with fuel. It would have been rude to refuse.
Or to fail to return each of the next two Tax Days I spent in the Hub City.
Those were planned celebrations. Nothing on the scale of what we saw Sunday at Augusta National, when Rory McIlroy, America’s favorite sporting Irishman, finally finished a Masters triumph.
Two similar outbursts burned into the memory banks happened a couple of months apart in summer 1999: Braindi Chastain ripping off her jersey and falling to her knees in exultation after scoring the winning goal in the women’s World Cup final July 19 to beat China at the Rose Bowl, and on Sept. 26, the raucous USA Ryder Cup eruption after Texan Justin Leonard holed a 45-foot putt that completed a fantastic Sunday comeback by the Americans, including Shreveport’s Hal Sutton.
Years earlier, Jim McKay narrated the opening sequence for the iconic ABC’s Wide World of Sports and introduced the phrase “the thrill of victory,” immediately followed by “the agony of defeat.”
Rory has way more than his share of those miserable moments in his Masters memories. It began with his 2011 back-nine-on-Sunday collapse when he carried a four-shot lead into the final round and shot 80. He was 21. He won his first major two months later, by eight shots at the U.S. Open, and in 2012, also won by eight in dominating the PGA Championship. In 2014 he took the British Open and PGA titles and kept collecting PGA Tour victories, 28 of them, 15 more on other pro tours around the world.
But not another major. Not until Sunday evening. Not until a rollercoaster ride that added more than a few gray hairs on his temples and left all watching, at Augusta or on TV, exhausted and exhilarated whether or not you were rooting for Rory.
He’s won $100 million with more to come. His days will surely be joyful and so will those of his kids and grandkids and many more surrounding him.
But nothing will compare to April 13, 2025, when he broke through, and broke down.
He said he was eager to get home to Holywood – not the glitzy place on the Left Coast, but a community in Belfast, Northern Ireland – and his parents, Rosie and Gerry.
His dad, a scratch player at Holywood Golf Club, quickly realized his little boy had immense potential. His parents took on extra jobs to support that ambition. Gerry reportedly worked 100 hours weekly at three jobs, including cleaning toilets and showers at a local sports club in the mornings, then pulling a couple of daily bartending gigs. Rosie kept track of Rory during the day, then packaged rolls of tape at a 3M factory.
It was knowing what his “mum and dad” did to give his dreams a chance that had McIlroy speechless at times Sunday evening.
You can see Rosie and Gerry. You probably know them. You may BE them. They’re all around, at a ballpark, a gym, a golf course or tennis courts, a recital hall, a theatre, a library, a church, or perhaps, a rehab center or a juvenile facility. They are parents, grandparents, big brothers and sisters, mentors, counselors, volunteers, making extraordinary efforts to provide hope and opportunity for kids – some they love, some they barely know.
Hopefully they get to celebrate victories, many that will barely be noticed by anyone other than those involved. Still, at whatever level, it’s nice to have hope that better days could be ahead, and to be reminded that dreams do come true.
It’s easy to be happy for Rosie and Gerry, for Rory, his wife Erica, and their delightful little daughter Poppy, whose putt in Wednesday’s Par 3 Contest evoked a different type of pure glee.
Golf fans have watched McIlroy twist and turn and unabashedly reveal his competitive agonies over the past decade-plus as he’s pursued royal status in his game’s history. Now that he’s the sixth golfer, and only the second in 50 years, to capture the career Grand Slam, the chase is over and the celebration is well underway. Lift a glass.
Even on Tax Day.
Contact Doug at sbjdoug@gmail.com