TEN YEARS ago, he was touted as the man who would be king. Sergio Garcia was a player who strutted to the first tee with the bravado of a matador, and possessed the trickery of a magician. Remember his shot from a buried tree root at Medinah in 1999? The USPGA that year was a duel to the end, and – still a teenager – El Nino took on El Tigre and he only barely lost out.
He was destined to become Tiger Woods’s main rival. Between them, they would divvy up the majors and . . . then, it all went askew.
Now, we wonder, what rivalry? We wonder where did it all go wrong? We wonder where the sparkle of this now 29-year-old Spaniard has gone? Ten years on, Garcia has rolled up at Hazeltine National Golf Club for an 11th successive appearance in a USPGA championship and he finds himself so much in the shadow of Woods he would need a GPS system to find a way out.
Yesterday, he talked to us. And the words were of a man lacking in confidence and unsure of what lay ahead. A man chasing his destiny? It didn’t sound that way. He talked of his game.
“I’ve been working on it, (it’s) still not where I like it to be . . . hopefully, I can get it sorted out.”
He talked of what’s been missing in his quest to win a first major. “If I were to aim a putt an inch farther right, nothing would have been missing.”
The thin line has dealt Garcia a poor hand, but, as Stewart Cink observed, the act of winning a major is a difficult one. “I hesitate to say I’m surprised Sergio hasn’t won, because there’s only four a year and a lot of things have to go right for you to win a major, unless your name’s Tiger Woods and he wins a handful. Sergio’s got a tremendous game, (but) I think it goes without saying that his putting and his difficulties with putting have held him back.”
Garcia’s form this season has been indifferent since his last tournament win, in the HSBC Champions in China last November. It has been a particularly poor season on the US Tour, where he has had only one top 10 – 10th in the US Open – in 12 tournaments.
Of this week, in a championship where he has had three top-three finishes, Garcia remarked, “I seem to be struggling . . . it’s all a matter of gaining confidence, to keep being more and more comfortable on the course and, if I manage to do that, I’m sure we’ll get better. It’s getting there.
“I’d love to say that I will be 100 per cent for this week, but I can’t guarantee that.”
He is no longer touted as the player who could become Tiger’s main rival. But, then, Garcia made the point here yesterday that very few can be put into the position.
“If you look down at the numbers, unfortunately for us, I don’t think Tiger’s got a rival at the moment and he’s not letting up. He keeps playing really well. To be able to win an average of five, six, seven events a year is very, very impressive.”
We listen, and we hear a man very much in the shadows of another. Who’d have believed that 10 years on, he’d still be waiting for a major win? Who, now, would believe he will have garnered one in the next decade?
