Sergio bounces back - Sergio Garcia interview

Victory at last. Sergio Garcia’s return to confidence to win the Players Championship at Sawgrass in May was his first success for three years. He led the field in driving accuracy and greens in regulation and, finally, in Florida, the putts began to drop. “There are times when you doubt yourself,” Garcia admitted after his round. “But when I believe in myself, there are not a lot of guys that can beat me.”

Perhaps now he can finally draw a line under his gloomy exit from Carnoustie last year, where he lost that playoff to Padraig Harrington at the Open. He has at least taken some pressure of his Ryder Cup captain, Nick Faldo, by all but securing his place on the team for September’s match in Valhalla, Kentucky.

“There’s no doubt that Sergio has done a great job of identifying what he needed to work on and it seems he is starting to turn around those problems,” Faldo told me. “His achievements at the Players Championship are made all the more impressive bearing in mind the difficulties he had at last year’s Open.”

Now that Garcia has won the so-called ‘fifth major’, perhaps he can now also look forward with renewed hope to ending his drought in one of the only four majors that really count. Just as well, really, because 12 months ago it was a bad tempered Garcia who left Carnoustie on Sunday evening after an undignified and prickly press conference.

The poor press officer from the R&A had the unenviable task of introducing the loser to a roomful of golf writers. Garcia walked in, head bowed, jaw clenched. “I know you’re bitterly disappointed,” the R&A fellow stuttered. Garcia looked up. “No, I’m thrilled,” he said sarcastically. “Happiest man alive.” He then wallowed in a soliloquy of self-pity where he mostly moaned that he is the unluckiest golfer in the world.

Fast-forward six months to January’s Dubai Desert Classic. Time enough for the wounds to Garcia’s pride to heal and for him to reflect upon and regret his petulant behaviour. He answers his hotel-suite door carrying a PlayStation consul. We sit down on a sofa and Garcia returns to playing football on his PlayStation.

There is a brief awkward moment as he taps away on the keypad. He has agreed to talk about Carnoustie for the first time but his body language suggests he doesn’t really want to begin.

So Sergio, about Carnoustie…

“I don’t regret anything,” he says, still clicking away. “I have always been this way: honest and wearing my heart on my sleeve. Probably too much. There are people who love me and people who hate me. I’m not going to change. Some people love it when you are not doing well. But you can’t be loved by everyone. Sometimes I can control myself.

Sometimes I can’t. You only hear about it when I can’t control myself, so it seems a bigger deal.” Fair enough. If Garcia is to be criticised for his sometimes tetchy behaviour, it should also be acknowledged that he’s a superstar who is often approachable, sociable, generous and fun. That he signs autographs until his wrist stiffens, and gives countless balls and gloves to kids.

“I am a role model, and that’s not easy to live with,” Garcia told me in 2002. “There is a bit of Seve in me. I have to fight to control my emotions.” Six years on, and he is still fighting. Still searching.

It was Garcia’s exuberant flashes of emotion that thrust him into the spotlight as a 19-year-old in 1999. Remember that hop, skip and jump after that miracle shot from under a tree trunk at the USPGA Championship at Medinah, Chicago? The media and fans loved him then. Remember that fist-pumping debut in the Ryder Cup a month later at Brookline in Boston? Here was a human rival for the robotic Tiger Woods. Garcia won gloriously and failed fabulously.

He swaggered, he cried, he smiled, he waved, he laughed, he entertained. Sergio and Tiger were about to forge golf’s next great rivalry. “He came out like Tiger, and it looked so easy,” says his former Ryder Cup partner Jesper Parnevik. “But in his mind he hasn’t lived up to expectations.”

The expectations – and the endless din of “When will you win a major? – have worn on the Spaniard. Sergio, now 28, has 17 worldwide wins and has played 38 majors, with 13 top-10s – but no victories. Carnoustie, and that 12-foot lip-out, was his best major chance to date. “I still see that putt in my head every once in a while,” says Garcia, who pauses his PlayStation. “That Sunday night, I didn’t cry. But I could feel that my body was heavy. I walked around the beach at home [in Spain] for a couple of days to clear my head. Sometimes I definitely feel I am an unlucky golfer. But you can’t live your life thinking ‘if only’.”

Garcia is convinced the answers lie within. Unlike the previous ‘Best Player Never To Win A Major’, Phil Mickelson – who changed his aggressive style to break through at the 2004 Masters – we won’t soon see Sergio: Extreme Major Makeover.

“What is clear in my mind is I am not going to change my whole life to win a major,” Garcia says. “It is not worth it. I love my life. Nobody is telling me that, if I change, I am going to win 10 majors. I would rather win 30, 40 or 50 tournaments and no majors than win one major and that’s it. Just winning one tournament, even if it’s a major, doesn’t prove to me that you’ve had a successful career. If you can tell me that if I put my hand in the fire and not get burned, and I will win, then maybe. But nobody has that kind of will. Except maybe Tiger.”

Unlike Woods, Garcia is not blessed – or burdened – with an obsessive nature that propels him to greatness. There is no beast inside that feeds only on major silverware. “Roger Federer said recently that he feels like he has created a monster that needs to win every tournament,” Garcia says. “Tiger is like that. But he enjoys being that way. Just because it is the right way for him doesn’t mean it is the right way for somebody else. I probably wouldn’t enjoy that kind of intensity. Golf is not the only thing in my life.”

Garcia’s unwillingness to try to change can be traced at least as far back as 2003, when, frustrated with tinkering he’d done to his swing, he almost walked away from golf for good. “I thought about quitting because I felt I was losing control,” he says.

“When you are a good player and you start losing your feel, and you can’t control the ball as much as you want, you lose that drive. That’s a little bit of what happened to David Duval. Thankfully for me, I got it back. But if…” He pauses. “I don’t even want to think about doing something else. If I spend 15 years without winning, then I’d think, Jeez, what the hell’s going on here? At the moment, there is nothing else I want to do. But I am sure I would find something. It depends on what age I am.” He adds with a smile, “It’s too late now to play for Real Madrid.”

Sergio Garcia is torn between two lovers. It is the eve of the 2008 Dubai Desert Classic, and he’s hitting – and mostly missing – five-footers on the practice green, alternating between his short putter and belly putter. His caddie, Billy Foster, grabs the long putter to demonstrate a technique and holes several in a row. Garcia is visibly frustrated. Above, on the second-story clubhouse patio, a lounge singer strums his guitar and serenades drinkers with an Eagles ballad, providing a fitting soundtrack for the scene on the green: “Take it easy, take it easy. Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive your crazy...”

Despite turning to putting guru Stan Utley early this year, through April Garcia had experimented with four grips (conventional, left-hand-low, claw, and split-hands), and he ranked 168th on the US PGA Tour in putting, average with 1.83 putts per green. He even placed a short putter and long putter in his bag at the same time. “I just had a safety net in case I didn’t feel 100% with the short putter,” he explains.

Of course, safety nets are for performers who expect to fall. But his victory at the Players Championship showed for the first time in three years that Garcia’s putting could now maybe stand up to the pressure of a major championship weekend.

“It’s been hard work,” Garcia said after the tournament, in which he beat Paul Goydos in a playoff. “But I don’t want to get stuck here. I want to have a good year and keep giving myself chances to win and having a major if I can.”

Yet when writers ask Garcia about putting and majors, they still prepare for a short-tempered response. He’s tired of the questions. The criticism, he admits, “Definitely motivates me – gives me something to prove.” He’s also tired of what he considers double standards. The media loves straight talk (see: Colin Montgomerie) and wishes Tiger Woods would say something – anything – beyond the safe and sound. But Garcia is frank, direct, genuine – and, yes, sometimes petulant. And he gets slammed for it.

“It is so difficult to find the right line,” Garcia says. “If you say nothing, then you are worthless. But if you say what you feel, you are worthless still because you get killed. You can only take so many hits. I get on OK with the media. I don’t have any guys that I hate. But it is not the best relationship because when I say what I feel, some people kill me for it.”

IMG’s Clarke Jones, Garcia’s manager since 1999, admits that he’s sometimes disappointed by his client’s behaviour. “But whatever heads Sergio has bitten off, there was no malice intended and nothing was premeditated,” Jones says. “The media puts so much pressure on people. Colin Montgomerie still has to talk about why he has not won a major. Sergio should not have to answer that question any more. Everyone knows he wants to win one. His time will come. He still believes.”

Sergio’s attractiveness as an athlete is because he is an emotional, fiery competitor. But Sergio is Sergio. People either love the guy or get turned off by him. Yeah, there are times, in the heat of the moment, where he gets a little long winded. But it’s because he cares so much. He’s not perfect. Nobody’s perfect.”

Garcia is almost perfect in the Ryder Cup, with an eye-popping career record of 14-3-3. Every two years, the promise that is Sergio Garcia is realised. He loosens up at its very mention. His shoulders relax. He laughs.

“I need to get some of those good vibes from the Ryder Cup into my strokeplay game,” he says. So why can’t he? Because, he suggests, he needs the emotional connection of his teammates. In majors, playing alone, there’s fragility; he’s not swaddled in the blue-and-yellow security blanket of Team Europe. It’s a sporting cliché: focus, focus, focus. But Garcia is a contradiction – for him, too much inward focus is a bad thing. He needs the lifeline of teammates and fans.

“When I play with someone whose company I enjoy, or whom I consider a friend, I play well,” he says. “When I play with somebody that I am not that fond of, I tend to struggle. It’s those good vibes and bad vibes that affect my game. I try not to get that way. If I get too focused, that’s not the way I feel most comfortable.

“And I don’t loosen up. That’s the difference with me in the Ryder Cup and the majors. It’s funny how comfortable I feel in the first two days of the Ryder Cup compared to how I feel in the singles. When I have a friend next to me that I can talk to and keep loose with, I relax more. That’s one of the reasons I have been pretty successful in Ryder Cups.” And in the major championships? “I feel lonely, like there is something missing.”

“The difference between the pressure of Sunday’s singles matches at the Ryder Cup as opposed to the other days is something I’ve identified to discuss and work on with the players,” says Faldo. “But I’m not too keen on giving away any of the things I think will benefit the European team. Zinger [US team captain Paul Azinger] is always listening, you know.”

Unlike Faldo, another major-less Ryder Cup hero believes Garcia would be seeking his second straight Open title this year if he’d changed one thing at Carnoustie – and it has nothing to do with emotional fragility or a flawed putting stroke.

“It was a strategic problem,” says Colin Montgomerie. “He was six ahead of the chasing pack. It was the first time he had been in that situation in a major. There’s a problem there: do you attack or protect your lead?

Sergio was caught between the two. And I have done that. Doing that around a course like Carnoustie is dangerous. He tried to protect too much on the [par-four] 18th when he chose to hit a 2-iron off the tee.

The proof was that in the playoff he hit driver and nearly made a three. It would have been easier if he had been tied for the lead instead of three ahead of Steve Stricker and six ahead of the rest. Someone was going to come up, and it was Padraig Harrington and Andres Romero. What do you do? You panic.”

Garcia agrees that he presses in majors. “Maybe I beat myself up too much and try too hard. The Ryder Cup is different. I get involved with the crowd. Being brought up in Spain, where football is so huge, you are used to that atmosphere where everybody is cheering and screaming. It drives me a little more. If I knew the answer...”

Garcia’s answer trails off and he half smiles. He shrugs. He’s still searching.