Range of emotions:
A confident Sergio
en route to victory
during the 2008
Players (left) and
frustrated on the
72nd hole of the
2007 British Open.
But there was a lot to exorcise. There was the would-be
winning putt that lipped out on the 72nd hole of the British
Open at Carnoustie the previous summer, and the sour
grapes expressed after losing the playoff to Padraig Harrington. Those with longer memories can recall how Garcia
whined about favoritism toward Tiger Woods during the
2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage or when, at an earlier Players,
he made an unseemly show of slapping and punching the
face of his putter in anger on the practice green.
As it turned out, his victory at Sawgrass didn’t quite do
the job. Later that year Garcia suffered another dispiriting major loss to Harrington at the PGA Championship at
Oakland Hills, and things have been mostly downhill since.
And so it wasn’t a shock when the now 32-year-old
Spaniard, after the third round of this year’s Masters, let
the negativity come out again under the clubhouse tree
at Augusta National. He had gone into the day with high
hopes—having matched the best 36-hole score in his last
10 Masters’ appearances and was paired in the next-to-last group with close friend and pre-tournament favorite
Rory McIlroy. But both players bombed out on the front
side to fall out of contention. Afterward, McIlroy took his
77 well. But Garcia was in a dark mood after his 75.
“I’m not good enough [to win a major],” he told the
Spanish press. “I don’t have the thing I need to have.” Gar-
cia didn’t back off his comments on Sunday. Asked what
specifically was missing in his game, he said, “Everything.”
Those who like Garcia the person—and there are
many—put the comments down to his open spirit. “It’s
probably just Sergio being a little bit passionate and in
the moment,” says Luke Donald, with whom Garcia is 4-0
in Ryder Cup foursomes matches. “He obviously wears
his heart on his sleeve, and he’s going to tell you how he
feels about it at the exact moment. You ask him now and
he probably doesn’t feel the same. You have to like his
honesty ... He speaks his mind more than we all do.”
Perhaps, but it’s not the way champions tend to talk.
Champions do not capitulate. They do not reveal weakness.
Garcia at Augusta reverted to El Niño, unable to handle
adversity, letting the bad breaks of the day get to him, dwell-
ing on past defeats. “You associate enough negativity with
anything and, of course, you’re going to manifest fear and
anxiety and frustration,” says Gio Valiante, who works with
many tour players, but not Garcia (who has never said he
has a sport psychologist). “It’s psychological arithmetic.”
