2012
players
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Fellow players, especially in the locker room, tend to be
more direct. Jim Furyk says, “I don’t believe a guy that
good or that competitive doesn’t believe he can’t win a
major.” And one major champion who requested anonym-
ity went further: “If [Sergio] had Seve [Ballesteros’] or
José Maria [Olazábal’s] heart and guts, then even with his
putting stroke he would be a world-beater.”
That’s harsh. Garcia has had a hard road. Huge expecta-
tions were heaped upon him as a teenager after he won
twice on the European Tour and then nearly the 1999 PGA
Championship at Medinah. But he has been 0-for- 51 in
major championships as a professional, the consistency of
his 17 top-10s making his close calls that much more painful.
Being a relatively poor putter makes it extra difficult to win
tournaments, while constantly being outscored by those
who he outplays tee to green is frustrating. As a golfer, Gar-
cia has reason to be, as Valiante says, “a tortured soul.”
Or as swing coach Pete Cowen, who has worked with
Garcia, puts it: “Sergio has probably got more skeletons
than anybody. At 19 he was supposed to win more majors
than anybody. Now he’s in his 30s, and he doesn’t have
any. It wears you down.”
The thing is, the great champions bounce back. There
are plenty of examples Garcia can draw from. Phil Mickel-
son was 33 and 0-for- 46 in majors when he won the 2004
Masters and has won three more since. Ben Hogan was 34
when he won his first major at the 1946
PGA Championship, after having lost the
previous Masters and U.S. Open on the final green. Vijay
Singh was 35 when he won the 1998 PGA.
Mickelson is probably the most relevant comparison.
Lefty was second at the 1999 and 2002 U.S. Opens and was
third four times at Augusta National before he finally prevailed there in 2004. There were whispers that he wasn’t
tough enough to win a major, that the close losses would become too much to overcome. But unlike Garcia, Mickelson
didn’t dwell on those defeats, rarely expressing a woe-is-me
state of mind so prevalent in Sergio’s down periods.
The worst one was the most recent. At the end of 2008,
Garcia was No. 2 in the world after winning the HSBC
Champions in November. By 2010 he had fallen to a
career-low ranking of 78th, prompting a 10-week sabbatical from the game.
Garcia admits he lost motivation and focus after Greg
Norman’s daughter, Morgan-Leigh, broke off their nearly
three-year relationship in March 2009. In an interview
conducted at the end of 2011 for his Golf Channel show,
David Feherty got Garcia to be candid about his first lost
love. “Not the whole heart, but there was a little piece that
[was broken],” Garcia told Feherty. “It was [sore], and
obviously you could see it, see it not only on my game but
on the course that I wasn’t there.”
