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By Giri Nathan
[vc_empty_space height="15px"]One of the hardest lessons for me to grasp, as a relatively green sportswriter, has been disentangling these two things: my hope that certain things would happen for narrative reasons, and my credence that those things would actually happen. No player wins a title because you think it would be interesting if they did so. Progress happens slowly, or in fits and starts, or—most often—not at all. You can pray for someone under the age of 47 to win a major on the men’s tour, because it makes the work of finding fresh angles for your next column far easier, but the trophy cannot be written into the infant’s hands. You can’t purple-prose your way into seven wins in best-of-five. The player actually has to go out there and beat the old goats. And beat the everyday journeymen. And it turns out it is very hard to do those things. And it turns out that it takes otherworldly consistency and focus to actually hold on to a spot at the top of the tour, and the game is deeper than it has ever been, and teenagers simply don’t do that anymore.