Taking aim at Dell Match Play
Crenshaw, Garcia promote March 21 tournament at Austin Country Club.
Let the countdown to brilliant birdies and calamitous bogeys begin.
There’s a month to go before the best golfers in the world arrive en masse for the WGC-Dell Match Play at Austin Country Club.
On Thursday, two famous golfers with strong ties to Central Texas celebrated one of the biggest tournaments in the country by hitting tee shots off a river boat in the middle of Lake Austin. Ben Crenshaw, an Austin resident and a two-time Masters champion, joined Sergio Garcia, who won the Masters last year, to hit balls toward the No. 13 green at ACC.
Garcia confirmed that he will play in this year’s tournament, which starts March 21. His wife, Angela Akins, a former Texas Longhorns golfer who grew up in Marble Falls, is pregnant with a baby girl. The baby is due late next month, but the couple is hoping she’ll be an early March arrival.
Garcia was 11th in the latest world rankings. Although he loves spending time in Austin, he failed to make it out of qualifying group play at the Dell tournament during the past two years.
“I feel like the last couple of years, I’ve played well,” Garcia said Thursday. “Unfortunately I’ve finished second in the group. It’s one of those things . ... But I guess at the end of the day, the only thing I can do is go out there and play as well as I can, hopefully have two good matches to start with, get to the singles matches and then go on from there.”
The top 64 golfers in the world rankings as of March 12 will receive invitations to the event. They will have until the March 16 to accept the