Let me tell you about the very famous. They are different from you and me. Upon achieving prominence or notoriety, they live their lives in the public eye, which can lead to effusive praise from their noble peers but also scrutiny from the hoi polloi.

Take Rory McIlroy, the pro golfer from Northern Ireland who just completed, a month short of his 36^th birthday, a career Grand Slam of his sport’s four major tournaments—after he had been struggling for 11 years to win the last one, the hallowed Masters.

McIlroy, you may recall, appeared on the pro tour at 18 among considerable fanfare, the epitome of the rugged young hairy-chested hero, cited by some as the Next Tiger Woods. Given that early station in life, Public Figure, McIlroy not only was in the cross hairs for the deafening storms of applause but also for gossipy “human interest” tales.

So, when he began a three-year romantic relationship in 2011 with Danish tennis star Caroline Wozniacki—she, like McIlroy reached the world’s No. 1 ranking in her sport—it quickly became fodder for the masses. A match of sporting royalty. But was followed, just three months after their official engagement, by McIlroy’s 10-minute phone call informing Wozniacki that he was jumping ship. The magnifying glass of celebrity made that news bigger.

And led to one of the most memorable ledes in sports journalism history—summing up, as it did, the People Magazine syndrome.

That came at the 2014 U.S. Open tennis championships. Two years earlier, at a major tennis exhibition in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Wozniacki, in the midst of her match, had playfully summoned McIlroy out of the capacity crowd to play a pitty-pat point against Maria Sharapova. Very cute.

At the 2014 Masters that April, Wozniacki had caddied for McIlroy, only to have McIlroy lower the boom shortly after—just as Wozniacki, at the height of her popularity among fans, commenced competition in the tennis Open that August, when she was passionately embraced by spectators’ repeated shouts of love.

And Filip Bondy, an elite recontour chronicling the event for the New York Daily News, began his report—this may be a paraphrase since I couldn’t lay my hands on the original copy, but I read it at the time with great appreciation—“Everybody wants to marry Caroline Wozniacki except Rory McIlroy.”

Naturally, that brilliant line, about how fame makes private lives everybody’s business, leapt to mind at this year’s Masters’ Sunday as McIlroy’s winning putt on the first playoff hole dropped, and what amounted to celebratory gunfire burst from the crowd and from television’s commentators.

The fellow had been, at 23, the youngest player to reach $10 million in career earnings on the PGA tour. He had spent more than 100 weeks ranked No. 1. Right from the start, he was regarded as one of the most marketable athletes in the world, behind only the global soccer stars Neymar and Lionel Messi as long ago as 2013.

He had become, in 2011, the youngest player ever to hold a first-round lead at the Masters and was in front of the field by four strokes after 54 holes. Only to shoot an eight-over-par 80 in the final day, a crash imprinted on the public’s mind—and likely his own—especially when he double-bogeyed the first hole in the Masters’ final round this year to relinquish his lead. He called it “a burden” to have repeatedly fallen short at Augusta until this tournament.

Meanwhile, ESPN included in its coverage of the event an interview with none other than Caroline Wozniacki, the other party in that 2014 fractured fairytale. That, too, was a reminder how the constant exposure of the very famous can blur the lines between public and private life and mess with personal space. There had been stories, back then, that McIlroy ended the relationship after Wozniacki posted an unflattering photo of McIlroy sleeping with his mouth open. (Too much information about a celebrity!)

It was another tennis star who—at the end of a 21-year career of being very famous, having publicly evolved from a mere athletic talent into a champion and a man of substance; who had arrived as apparently undisciplined and self-centered, the latest in tedious parade of misbehaving tennis personalities; whose first short marriage (to actress Brooke Shields) led to his enduring union with tennis great Steffi Graf—articulated how his situation differed from yours and mine.

There were regrets, Andre Agassi said shortly before his final pro tournament in 2006, of “dragging some of the closest people in my life, and the fans of the sport, through some of my most difficult moments.”

To have the eyes of the world on each step of one’s life story, he said, “is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”