Newly married Garcia ready to pursue major victory No. 2
Two weeks ago, Sergio Garcia was preparing for something far more life-changing than another major championship.
His wedding.
“It was a great day,” Garcia said Wednesday at Quail Hollow Club ahead of the 99th PGA Championship. “It was a wonderful day, and we’ll cherish it for the rest of our lives.”
But Garcia comes into golf ’s final major of the year with no illusions about his next task: winning another piece of major silverware to complement that green jacket in his closet and gold ring on his finger.
“We’re here at a golf tournament. We’re not going to start talking about the wedding and everything that went on,” Garcia said. “We’re going to get on a good run and see if we can have a good week.”
Coming into his 18th professional season, even Garcia’s most loyal fans were beginning to lose hope that he’d ever win the major championship that had been so elusive. Even Garcia began singing a more philosophical, conciliatory tune.
“I love playing golf,” Garcia,
37, said in Dubai at the start of the year. “Just the possibility of doing it year in, year out for a living, it’s something that is magnificent to start with.”
It was that laid-back attitude that paved the way for his eventual breakthrough.
At the Masters, as most everyone knows by now, Garcia turned his early three-shot lead into a two-shot deficit by the 13th hole, and it wasn’t until an eagle on the 15th that he pulled back into the lead. It all came to an end on the 73rd hole when Garcia broke his 0
for-73 run of winless majors with a 12-foot birdie putt on the first extra hole of the sudden-death playoff against Justin Rose.
“It was awesome,” said Rory McIlroy, a close friend of Garcia who attended his wedding. “For it to be there, at Augusta where he’s had his struggles before, I don’t think you could have written it any better.” And he celebrated it well. Garcia’s green jacket tour took him across the globe, from the floors of the New York Stock Exchange to the stands in Wimbledon to the field of El Clasico for his beloved Real Madrid’s match against Barcelona. The jacket even appeared at his wedding.
“Our wedding wouldn’t have been complete without a little touch of green at the reception,” Garcia wrote on Instagram, sharing a picture of himself in his green jacket dancing with wife Angela Akins.
But the honeymoon is over. Now he’s ready to get back to work.
Garcia comes into the week fifth in the world rankings and with a host of experience at Quail Hollow Club. In eight appearances, he has missed one cut and lost in a playoff in the 2005 Wachovia Championship. His recent form hasn’t quite matched his pre-Masters level, registering one top-15 on the PGA Tour since his Augusta triumph, but he’s ready to put that right this week.
And in doing so, put an exclamation point on the best year of his career.
“I’ve already won the Masters, and it’s amazing,” he said. “But, at the same time, it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to go out there and try as hard as you can, because that’s what we do. That’s the only way we know how to play.”