Defending champ Garcia tries to build on Masters win

DEFENDING CHAMPION Sergio Garcia (pix) approaches this week’s Byron Nelson Championship trying to restore some focus on his game after the thrill of winning his first major title at last month’s Masters.

Garcia, who made his breakthrough at Augusta National after 73 major failures, returned from a month off at last week’s Players Championship and shared 30th, falling out of contention with a final-round 78.

Garcia said his struggles were, in part, from his reaction to winning the Masters and the time has come to move beyond that triumph, as important to him as it was, and get back to normal.

“I need to get going on that,” Garcia said. “Last week obviously at The Players I had a couple nice rounds and a couple not so nice rounds. But it has been very overwhelming. I’m not going to lie. It’s been amazing to see the reaction from the people and the players and everyone. It has been something amazing to go through.

“But, at the same time, I have to kind of move on. As nice as it is to be the Masters champion, I need to keep doing things, I need to keep improving on every aspect of my game and focus on the week that we are right now because it’s easy to start thinking about what happened, you know, a month ago and things like that.”

Rather than stay lost in past glory, Garcia wants to duplicate the form that saw him end a four-year US win