GARCIA LOOKS TO OVERCOME ‘MAJOR’ HURDLE
VETERAN SPANIARD IN FAMILIAR TERRITORY WHILE SHARING THE LEAD AT HALFWAY POINT OF MASTERS
Sergio Garcia has played himself into contention in a major championship, which is sort of like saying a bunch of lemmings have gathered at the edge of a cliff. Doom generally follows. It was five years ago at this very tournament that Garcia, then 32 years old, suggested he was finished with the whole idea of winning majors. He’d almost won one as a teenager, but after 13 years of trying and another weekend implosion at the Masters, the Spaniard had seen enough. “In any major, I am not good enough. I have my chances and opportunities and I waste them,” he said.
Those facts were not in dispute: by the time the 2012 Masters had rolled around, he had played in more than 50 majors and placed second three times ( now four), but no wins. “The conclusion is I have to play for second or third place,” he said.
But with his majors winless streak now at 73, Garcia, with his hairline a bit further back and more grey in the stubble on his chin, has every reason to play for the victory now.
He started Friday’ s second round of the Masters with three birdies on another treacherous day at Augusta National, where the lush fair ways were again buffeted by strong winds, and survived a strange scoring error to shoot 69 and sit at 4 under after two rounds, tied with first- round leader Charley Hoffman, who went backwards with a 75, Thomas Pieters, who had 68 Friday, and Rickie Fowler, who came in with a 67 after shooting 73 Thursday.
“Things are happening at the moment, so I want to make sure I keep riding that wave,” Garcia said.
This being Garcia in a major, the move to the top end of the leaderboard was not without drama. While Hoffman was going through a stretch of five bogeys in six holes to give back all of his early five- stroke lead, Garcia was cruising with a lone bogey in his first 27 holes.
A wayward drive on the 10th hole caused him to hit a provisional, but he found the original ball and played that one to the right of the green, followed by a chip and two putts for a bogey. Except someone recorded it as a triple bogey and, for the better part of an hour, it was unclear whether Garcia had blown himself up.
Eventually, word from the green jackets came down: bogey. Tut- tut, sorry about that, old bean.
“The most important thing was I knew where I stood,” said Garcia. “It was fine.” He has suffered worse in these things.
There is, of course, all kinds of time left for more Sergio- style drama. He’s still the same guy who got into a rivalry with a merciless gallery that teased him about his waggle affliction at the 2002 U. S. Open, still the same guy who missed an eight- f oot putt when he had a chance to win the 2007 Open Championship, then hit the flagstick with his tee shot in the ensuing playoff and saw it ricochet wildly.
“It’s funny how some guys hit the pin and it goes to a foot,” he said that day. “Mine hits the pin and it goes 20 feet away.”
Such hubris was dealt with swiftly by the golf gods, who smote him with another runner- up finish the following year at the PGA Championship, where he dunked his approach into the water on the 70th hole of the tournament.
But a decade after the collapse at Carnoustie, Garcia has been transformed from the whiny brat who never could beat Tiger Woods to a grizzled older fellow who came to Augusta for the 19 th time this week as something of an afterthought.
He’s dropped out of the top 10 of the world rankings, seen a host of younger players — Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Jason Day — win t he majors t hat he could not and saw his countryman Jon Rahm, 22, become widely considered the Spaniard most likely to next win a major.
And so of course he goes out and gets himself into a share of the 36- hole lead — and would have held it alone, but for a short birdie miss on the 18th hole. He said on Friday that he was “frustrated” when he made those comments five years ago and that he i s more calm now. “I’m working on trying to accept things,” he said. Sometimes good shots have bad luck, Garcia said. Somewhere, the golf gods nod knowingly.
Dangerous times await as Garcia, whose name was being stencilled onto the Claret Jug in 2007, knows rather too well. He has a history of lousy Saturdays at Augusta, with a third- round scoring average of 75 here, and the leaderboard is littered with guys who have been there in majors and done that: McIlroy, Phil Mickelson, Justin Rose, Adam Scott and even 57- year- old Fred Couples, who shot 70 Friday to sit at 1 under.
The challenging conditions also bunched the s cores t ogether with 11 other players within five shots of the leaders. Ryder Cup types like Fowler and Pieters, players trying to claim their first major before anyone accuses them of a drought, are there, too.
But Garcia has put himself there again at the wise old age of 37, almost two decades after he was slinging balls around a tree at the PGA Championship, scampering up a hill and trying unsuccessfully to stare down Peak Tiger.
He says t hose doubts about his game are gone. “I feel like I can win not only one ( major), but more than one.”
He has 36 holes left and nothing to change but his legacy.