Masters Reflection
Only change for Garcia is his status as champion
Sergio Garcia said nothing has changed since he won the Masters last year.
Well, that’s not entirely true. He will return to Augusta National Golf Club next week as a husband, having married Angela Akins last summer. He will have a slightly larger entourage with him, most notably a daughter born three weeks ago who will always remind him of the Masters, its beauty and his resiliency. And he has Tuesday night plans unlike any other as host of the champions’ dinner.
But that’s it. He’ll swear by that.
“I feel very proud for being able to win a major, and to win the Masters on top of that,” Garcia said. “But you know, like what they all tell me: ‘Has it changed your life?’ I don’t think and I don’t feel like it has. I’m still doing the same things. … It’s something that until it happens, you don’t know what it’s going to feel like and what it’s going to do to you. But on my regard, I’m happy that I don’t feel it has changed me. I don’t feel like I’m better than I was before.”
That’s mainly because he made lots of changes before he won the Masters. No one ever had to wait longer — 70 majors as a pro, starting with an 89 in his first round at the 1999 British Open — to capture that first major. Few others were teased quite like Garcia, whether it was a battle with Tiger Woods on the final nine holes of the 1999 PGA Championship or his playoff loss to Padraig Harrington in the 2007 British Open.
As the years passed and gray speckles showed up in his beard, the outlook shifted from when he would win his first major to if it would ever happen. And then it did.
His wife always thought their first child’s name should be tied to his first major victory, and Augusta National, where every hole is named after a tree or shrub, provides some interesting options. Firethorn would have been a peculiar choice to name any child, much less a daughter. But that’s the name of the 15th hole at Augusta National, where Garcia hit an 8-iron shot that nicked the flag and set up a 12-foot eagle putt to tie for the lead last April.
Holly is the name of the 18th hole, where Garcia sank a 12-foot birdie putt in the playoff to defeat Justin Rose, a moment seared into Masters lore when he crouched on the green in a moment of reflection and then pounded the turf with his fist in a mixture of joy and redemption.
Garcia settled on Azalea, the flower so many associate with the Masters and spring in Georgia. It’s also the name of the 13th hole, where so much changed for the Spaniard in the final round.
Tied at the turn, Garcia dropped shots on the 10th and 11th holes, and everyone could feel the 2017 Masters slipping away, just like so many other majors. On the par-5 13th, Garcia’s tee shot clipped trees along the left, and instead of the ball bouncing back toward the fairway, it dropped left on the other side of the Rae’s Creek tributary and into a bush. His only choice was to take a penalty drop and punch back to the fairway.
The best he could hope for was par. Rose was in position to make birdie at worst.
But that wasn’t the end. That was the beginning, all because Garcia learned to change his outlook from “What now?” to “What’s next?”
“Funny enough, most other weeks I would have been thinking: ‘Here we go. What’s going on?’ Obviously, I wasn’t happy,” Garcia said. “But from there, the most important thing was that I felt calm. That calmness gave me confidence. I was like: ‘It’s OK. You’re doing everything right. You’re playing great. It’s your time.’
“I just kept believing.”
Both made par, which shifted momentum, and this time the winning putt belonged to Garcia.
No small measure of credit goes to his wife, whom he met when she worked at Golf Channel. She brought positive energy to a talent who had so many negative memories.
“I remember a year before the Masters, being at Augusta with Sergio and talking about particular things that I thought he should work on,” she said. “I remember he was talking about how somebody had gotten lucky and he had gotten unlucky. We talked about how you can’t control that. You’re just wasting your energy. He’s gotten so much better than that. In golf, you get bad breaks all the time. And you get good breaks.”
Garcia has won twice since the Masters, in Spain and in Singapore. He has yet to win another major, and the effort — and disappointment — is no less because he has a green jacket. But he made peace with Augusta last year during that poignant moment when he crouched on the 18th green. Mostly, he made peace with himself. “It’s something special. It’s always an honor to have that in your career,” he said of his new status as a major champion. “I want to keep getting better, practicing hard, working hard. … But other than that, it hasn’t changed that much. Because I loved my life the way it was before.”