Seve would be so proud of Garcia
Seve Ballesteros would have so loved this Masters, played over this heaven on earth on what would have been his 60th birthday.
Wasn’t it two-time Masters champ Ballesteros, dead far too young in 2011, who put Spanish golf on the map? Didn’t his genius lie in his ability to turn car wrecks into victory parades? Wouldn’t he have been proud of the way countryman Sergio Garcia followed that very game plan?
Playing on the same edge of calamity as his idol, snatching his long-overdue first major title with the dramatic flair of an air-sea rescue, Garcia outlasted England’s Justin Rose on the 19th hole yesterday to join the Masters elite.
Go ahead and put that slander of ‘‘best player to never win a major’’ to bed.
At 37, playing in his 74th major, Garcia finally achieved the status that at first had been promised
him as a teenager and then sometimes cruelly denied him as his hair thinned and he tilted toward middle age.
And for the second consecutive year, the Masters had itself an international champion, Garcia following the 2016 victory of England’s Danny Willett. No room for xenophobia. This was an undeniably popular victory for every fan of resilience and the power of positive change. How the patrons did go on when Garcia made his 12-foot birdie putt on the first extra hole – when a two-putt would have done – finally shaking free of Rose.
And how Garcia returned the favour, blowing kisses in all directions, howling with long denied delight, at one point crouching on the green and pounding the perfect grass with glee.
‘‘I think it makes it a poignant major championship,’’ Rose had to admit.
It was he who ultimately blinked when pushing his drive off the first playoff hole, No 18, right into the foliage.
All Rose could do was punch out barely past Garcia’s pinpoint drive. Then watch as Garcia applied all the pressure by hitting his approach to 12 feet. It made no difference what Rose did from there (he bogeyed). Because Garcia’s birdie putt swirled around the hole and where other big putts in his life may have spun out, this one dropped.
For most of the day, all the attention was focused on these two.
There would be no clutter obscuring Garcia’s breakthrough moment. To think that it was just five years ago at this tournament that a frustrated Garcia declared that he just may not possess the right stuff to win a major, that, ‘‘I need to play for second or third place.’’
But entering the final round, the new, improved Garcia was practically serene. ‘‘I was very calm, much calmer than yesterday, much calmer than I’ve felt probably in any major championship on Sunday,’’ he said.
He summed up the difference between then and now succinctly: ‘‘I accepted what Augusta [National] gives and takes.’’