When you are 38, have won seven European Tour money titles, been in two major championship playoffs and have won more than $18 million around the world, you do not expect a 21-year-old to be able to teach you anything.

But Colin Montgomerie has been given a reminder going into the PGA Championship of not only how good a player Sergio Garcia is, but what confidence he possesses.

And it will not surprise Montgomerie one bit if on Sunday night Garcia is back in Europe's Ryder Cup side as the winner of the final major of the season.

Montgomerie practiced at the mightily-long Atlanta Athletic Club with two-time U.S. Open champion Ernie Els, reigning U.S. Open champion Retief Goosen and Garcia.

"Funny, he was giving us tips - all over the place, from the first hole on," said Monty of Sergio. "And the scary thing was that they were actually very good tips. Things that we didn't know.

"Ernie and I looked at each other on the second tee and thought 'this is different'," he added.

And it continued. "I would have thought 'what a cheeky little blighter' if I didn't think he was any good," he said. "But he is - he is a great talent and has a fantastic future ahead of him.

"I wasn't that confident at 21," Montgomerie said. "But he's playing very, very well right now and he does truly believe he can finish in the top three, two or one to clinch his berth in the Ryder Cup team. That would give us a great boost."

As Garcia tries therefore to improve on his second place behind Tiger Woods two years ago, Montgomerie has high hopes himself after taking the positives out of leading the British Open for two days last month and going on to win his very next event, the Volvo Scandinavian Masters in Sweden.

"Yes, Lytham was disappointing in a way. But I'm trying to look at the positives of it," Monty said. "And because of that I went out and won the following tournament. That's a change for me - possibly in years gone by I would have left the Open with different feelings.

"From March to June I wasn't really performing to anything near my ability and was getting quite down," he added. "I was talking myself into bad shots and bad putts before they had actually been hit.

"I felt that I had to become more positive in my outlook and have worked on that," he said. "It's working well and long may it continue, but it's quite difficult to come off after a 75 or 76 and think positive about the thing. You've got to try to do that, though."

Meanwhile, Lee Westwood and Darren Clarke - 33 yesterday and given a cigar holder by coach Butch Harmon - are optimistic too about having a good week.

Westwood, not even close to winning a title in the first half of the year, was runner-up to Montgomerie in Sweden.

"I'd like to keep playing how I am at the moment. If I do I've got a chance to win every tournament I enter," said Westwood, last season's European No. 1. "And even if I don't win from now until the end of the year, I'll come out of it having learned a lot. You learn a lot more when you are playing poorly than when you are playing well."

Asked what he might learn, Westwood replied: "I'm not going to divulge that, obviously. You like to try to stay a step ahead of everybody, so if you learn something you don't tell anybody."

Clarke was joint third at Lytham and is delighted that the Atlanta Athletic Club is as tough a test as it is because he thinks he has the game for it.

And for another thing, he has just come from practicing at an even tougher one - Pine Valley in New Jersey.

"I feel very comfortable at the moment and it's great to see a course where you have to hit driver," he said of the AAC's Highlands Course. "It's a refreshing change."

There may be a good omen for the Ulsterman too. He lost to his manager Andrew Chandler, a former European Tour player himself, just as he did before winning the Andersen Consulting World Match Play Championship in California last year - albeit after giving Chandler 10 shots.

The favorite, inevitably, is Woods, seeking to become the first player to win the title three years in a row since Walter Hagen in the 1920s and the first to win any major hat-trick since Peter Thomson at the Open in 1954-56.

Second favorite, also inevitably following his British Open triumph, is David Duval and of those who have not won a major yet equally inevitably the favorite is Phil Mickelson.

No European has won the PGA Championship since "Silver Scot" Tommy Armour in 1930 - even that is questionable because he became a U.S. citizen. But no fewer than 24 are trying this time.

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