To Runner-Up, This Is Far From a Lost Cause

He barged inside the most exclusive of clubs, stormed to the lead in the most exquisite of tournaments, endured through the most traditional of playoffs.

At which point, the most human of golfers wept.

“I hate to break down like this in front of you but ... it’s a crazy game, you know?” said Len Mattiace, tears streaming down his burnished cheeks and pooling on the collar of his light-green golf shirt.

He was asked, was he crying because he had just lost the Masters championship in a one-hole playoff with Mike Weir?

Or was he upset because he had just hit shots into the woods on both the final hole of regulation and the first hole of the playoff?

Mattiace smiled between sobs and shook his head.

He was not crying because he had lost. He was crying because he had lasted.

“You stay strong, you focus and focus ... and now that’s over, it all comes out,” he said. “This is not a bad thing. This is a wonderful thing.”

And so a week of Masters controversy ended with a gloriously uncontestable Masters truth.

This golf tournament does not discriminate. This golf tournament does not exclude. Anyone good enough to qualify has an equal opportunity to kick it in the teeth.

Even if he is a 35-year-old journeyman who went 219 tournaments before his first win.

Even if he hasn’t set foot on these grounds in 15 years.

It would have been a good story if Mattiace, who was tied for eighth and five strokes behind after three rounds, could have used a stunning Sunday to win the tournament.

But it, perhaps, is a better story that he was thankful in spite of it.

Faced with the possibility of a coldblooded young star conquering it for the third consecutive time, the Masters was desperately in need of someone for whom the mere journey to the jacket was enough.

They found this person in Mattiace, who surely set a record for smiles and waves and wonderment.

“I heard the people all day,” he said, and when’s the last time you can remember a golfer saying that? “And I acknowledged them because they’re a big part of the game. So I think that’s the right thing to do.”

The crowd first noticed on the eighth hole, when he chipped in from the bunker in front of the green, laughing as the ball rolled into the cup for a birdie.

“Very lucky and fortunate,” he said.

The ovations grew on the 10th, when he sank a long putt for another birdie.

“Such a great feeling,” he said.

Then, on the 13th hole, he knocked a three-wood over Rae’s Creek to within inches of the hole for an eventual eagle, and the improbable charge was on.

“It’s funny because I hit a great shot and the ball was one yard from going in the creek,” he said. “So it’s crazy stuff.”

Mattiace knows about crazy stuff. His past is filled with it. Late Sunday he was asked whether his tears were about anything specific in his past.

“They’re about everything in my past,” he said.

As a former Florida high school champion and member of Wake Forest’s national championship team, he thought stardom would come easily.

He was invited here once as an amateur. He thought he would be a regular.

“Zipping right into the pros ... win my first and second year ... all those good things, that’s what I was thinking,” he said.

Yet during his first eight years on tour, the only thing he won was a camera. Made a hole in one in a tournament sponsored by Canon.

In 1997, he played in 35 events and made the top 10 once. A year later, he was one shot out of the lead on the 17th hole at the Players Championship when he sank his tee shot and took a quintuple bogey.

Is it any wonder that when he finally won his first tournament last year at the Nissan Open at Riviera, he cried then too?

“I just kept trying my best, trying hard, trying to improve,” he said. “Just keep going. Just keep trying to go further.”

When he birdied the 15th hole Sunday, taking a lead and eliciting a roar that could be heard behind him in Weir’s twosome, it seemed this journey might lead to Butler Cabin.

But then, with a two-shot lead heading into the 18th hole, he flared his tee shot behind a tree to the right.

“Totally blocked out to go for the green,” he said, and he eventually settled for a bogey.

Then, on the first playoff hole, his second shot rolled into the trees beside the green.

“Directly in my way of the pin was a tree,” he said.

And directly in the way of his victory was Weir, whose bogey was good enough to end the tournament in a most unusual scene:

Weir’s hands were thrust in the air, but it was Mattiace who had the bigger smile.

Weir wore the green jacket, but it was Mattiace who captured the larger crowds of cynical media unaccustomed to a big-time athlete celebrating virtue in defeat.

“I know one is going to win and one is going to lose,” he said of the playoff. “So I’m OK with that. I’m trying to win. If I don’t win, I lose. And that’s OK.”

Night had fallen in Augusta, the course was empty, and the second-place finisher could not stop talking.

“To come here and put it all together like this on a Sunday ... I dreamed about it all the time,” he said. “When I was 10 years old, keep going, 20 years old, 30 years old ... and why not?”

And so a week of angry debate ends in dreams.

“Now this means we get to come back next year, right?” said Mattiace’s wife, Kristen.

Thank goodness, yes.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.