‘Ser-gee-oh!’ easy to root for in major golf breakthrough
At age 19, Sergio Garcia looked like a would-be world beater with a limitless ceiling. By the 72nd hole of the 81st Masters, Garcia looked like a world-weary man whose athletic limits were sad and real.
Nearly two decades since he burst onto the sporting world’s radar, Garcia faced a five-foot putt to win the Masters — five feet to win his first major championship in 74 tries. So when the putt missed badly — tracking a wide berth right of the hole, never even hinting at dropping — there were those who could have easily been convinced that the Spaniard was destined for another epic failure. Maybe nobody who putts so shoddily has any business winning one of golf’s biggest tournaments. More than once in his career, Garcia himself has publicly expressed his feelings of unworthiness.
But Garcia, in his long journey from teenaged prodigy to 37-year-old greybeard, has lately been insisting that, for all his self-acknowledged faults, his number was due to come up. Four times he’s finished second in majors. Many other times he has vaulted into contention, only to bottom out.
“But I keep giving myself chances,” he reasoned earlier in the tournament.
If he stayed true to playing the percentages, in other words, surely the breaks would one day go his way. So consider a key percentage of Sunday’s happiest of career breakthroughs. Garcia, whose miss of that five-footer forced a suddendeath playoff with Justin Rose, led the Masters field in fairways hit for much of the tournament, piping it at 81 per cent. So it was fitting enough that Garcia ultimately won his first green jacket — ultimately broke that 0-for-73 major streak — not with a putt but with a driver blasted onto short grass. While Rose’s wayward tee shot on the playoff hole set up a second shot obscured by trees, Garcia’s fairway finder gave a clear-view approach, which he promptly zinged to about 10 feet.
When Garcia rolled in the resultant birdie putt that won the tournament and cued a long-awaited celebration — sending the adoring throng into chants of “Ser-gee-oh!” — he did it with a stroke to spare.
Rose had already missed the par putt that would have put more pressure on Garcia’s birdie try.
“If there’s anyone to lose to, it’d be Sergio,” Rose said later. “He’s had his fair share of heartbreak.”
Why did it take 18 years as a pro and 74 major championships all told for a talent as immense as Garcia to finally win one? Maybe he was damned, in some ways, by that early fame. Not that anyone should feel sorry for him. His dramatic entrance to the golf conversation — scissor-kicking down the fairway at the 1999 PGA Championship amid an epic duel with Tiger Woods — made him beyond rich, a worldwide brand. But it also set up Garcia to be something neither he nor anyone else could ultimately become: a true rival to Woods.
That didn’t stop people from trying to make the match. Even Woods’ coach at the time, Butch Harmon, proclaimed Garcia a worthy foil for the world’s best player. “What golf has now is two great young stars who will be around for a long time,” Harmon said of Woods and Garcia in 1999.
When Garcia first arrived at Augusta in 1999, as the reigning British amateur champ, he couldn’t even drive down Magnolia Lane; he didn’t have a licence. But there were those predicting he would own the place soon enough.
“Augusta is made for Sergio,” Baldomero Ballesteros, the great Seve’s brother and manager, told reporters.
A year later, the 20-year-old Garcia sounded as though he saw his supremacy as a foregone conclusion.
“I think I’m going to get a green jacket some day. Hopefully, a lot of them, although I don’t know how many,” Garcia said.
Well, everyone starts with one. And few do it with the symmetry of Sunday’s grand occasion. In becoming the third Spaniard to win a Masters, Garcia joined two beloved countrymen in the pantheon. One was the man he has called his “second fa- ther” — the late Seve Ballesteros, a two-time green-jacket winner and five-time major champion who would have celebrated his 60th birthday on Sunday. The other he once likened to an “older brother” — Jose Maria Olazabal, another twotime winner here, who wrote Garcia an inspiring note to begin the week.
“(Olazabal) said, ‘I’m not sharing my locker (in Augusta National’s champions’ locker room) at the moment. And I hope I one day do with you,’” Garcia said.
Those links, and Garcia’s eons of on-course suffering, had plenty in the golf world pulling for him on Sunday. Around the time the playoff began, world No. 2 Rory McIlroy tweeted out a clear endorsement of the Spaniard: “Let him have one . . . VAMOS!!!” Earlier in the day Adam Hadwin, the only Canadian to make the cut, expressed his soft spot, too: “I’d love to see Sergio pull through,” said Hadwin, who finished tied for 36th.
After it was over Garcia acknowledged he’d thought of Seve during his final round. “I’m sure he helped with some of the shots, some of the spots,” Garcia said of Ballesteros, who died in 2011.
But ghosts and good vibes generally don’t steer drives into the fairway or guide putts home on Augusta’s devious greens. Most of the day, Garcia did that just fine on his own. Beginning the round tied with Rose for the lead at six under par — on a day when past Masters champions Jordan Spieth, Charl Schwartzel and Adam Scott couldn’t mount a challenge, Schwartzel finishing third three shots back — Garcia found himself two shots in arrears through 13 holes. A timely birdie-eagle combination on 14 and 15, while Rose parred and birdied, pulled him even at nine under par. And while Rose gained a stroke with a birdie at 16, Rose gave it back by failing to convert a sand save on 17.
That set up Garcia’s five-foot birdie attempt for the win on Sunday’s first go-round at the 18th hole, this after Rose scraped the edge with his ninefoot birdie putt. When Garcia’s putt missed, the golf world groaned. Same old Sergio, many thought. And yet, not quite. Once an easily exasperated specimen — after a flameout here in 2012, he famously announced he didn’t have the internal equipment to win “any major” — the Garcia who sat in the interview room late Sunday was a different man. He spoke of being proud of himself for staying positive through all of Sunday’s setbacks, for remaining serene in the chaos, for patiently wading through those torrents of negativity and self doubt until his number finally came up. “Where my head was at sometimes, I did think about, ‘Am I ever going to win one?’ I’ve had so many good chances, and either I lost them or someone has done something extraordinary to beat me, and I did think about it,” he said.
Winning a major wouldn’t change him, he insisted. “I’m still the same goofy guy,” he said.
But somewhere along the journey from teenaged prodigy to a picture of pent-up promise, his world view of winning changed, too. He said he came to realize that “if for whatever reason it didn’t happen” — if he played and retired and never won a major — “my life was still going to go on.”
He paused and smiled, tugging a green jacket tight to his chest: “But it did happen.”