Even the greatest can choke at the pinnacle – it just proves they’re all human

In sport, to adapt Billie Jean King’s maxim, the chance to bottle it is a privilege. The phenomenon of choking on the biggest stage is well-documented and, for the sports fan, there is no experience so intensely cruel as the realisation of what you are watching. The choke is on.

Individual athletes’ collapses lodge deepest in the collective memory in full 4K, with golf perhaps the most well-adapted for the choke.

It would be a glorious thing if Rory McIlroy’s win on Monday at the Players’ Championship were to set him up to finally complete the career Grand Slam in three weeks at Augusta National.

Despite everything he has achieved, repeated high-profile collapses (last year’s US Open, the 2011 Masters) have come to define McIlroy.

It would be a poor exchange if at the end of his career he were mainly seen as almost enough. To complete Billie Jean’s actual words: ‘Pressure is a privilege, champions adapt.’

Jean van de Velde is the king of the choke. I can see him now at Carnoustie in 1999, shoes and socks off in the Barry Burn, hoping… but knowing, really, that the dream is off. The previous three days on this hole: par, birdie, birdie. Today, a double-bogey would do.

That journeyman golfer who had won a single title on the European Tour – and that coming at the Roma Masters, an event so minor it was discontinued a year later.

The Open in his hands. Three shots clear. Even today I can’t believe he didn’t make it. Van de Velde’s example is so gut-wrenching because you knew this chance would never come again.

Such moments affect us so profoundly because you can almost see yourself there. He is you: you have somehow managed to earn a tour card and you potter along in your career, doing your best, far from special.

Then you have one perfect week – and you’re standing with driver in hand (why the driver, Jean?) teeing off on the final hole, romping away to the win. There was a reason he had the fizzing joy of a Play with the Pros competition winner on that tee box.

Teams can be bottlers too. Steven Gerrard’s slip in 2013/14 represents Liverpool’s failure to take the title with almost the clarity of the Burn.

And in last season’s Carabao Cup final, Liverpool were themselves beneficiaries of a flabby second-half Chelsea performance that led Gary Neville to memorably call them the ‘Blue billion-pound bottle jobs’.

I’d argue that Chelsea defeat did not have the true hallmarks of a choke – Mauricio Pochettino’s young side had offered little evidence they could win silverware, despite being assembled at huge expense.

And what of presumptive Premier League champions Liverpool this season? At 12 points clear with nine games to play, they would have to produce a truly spectacular collapse to miss out on a title that could be won as early as April 13.

The Champions League exit to PSG was no slight on their ability – PSG seemed to finally come of age in that second leg. And Newcastle United were possessed in the Carabao Cup final, shafting Slot’s men with their own inconvenient Burn. But still.

England men’s football team have a history of being branded bottlers. In low moments I still obsess about the timing of Gareth Southgate’s substitutes in the final of Euro 2020.

Was that a rare example of a managerial choke, per 2021 Pep Guardiola? If so, that cuts to the heart of the phenomenon.

And that’s why I so admire the chokers. It is impossible to choke in the first round. You have to be at the pinnacle to fail in this way.

Researchers believe choking in sport is a potent cocktail of performance anxiety, distraction and self-consciousness.

These represent the inconvenient discovery in the crucial moment that all the things that came so naturally before the final, that last hole, the decider, are alien.

You know how to do them – you have aced them 10,000 times – but now, there are all these questions and you’re trying to remember how on earth to serve. You were sublime, now you’re human.

And that’s worth respecting. They scaled the heights but, in the end, they were just like us.

Kate has been nominated as columnist of the year at the prestigious SJA British Sports Journalism Awards. Read more of her columns here

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