Garcia takes honours with 65

Sergio Garcia isn't about to get ahead of himself.

"I'm not going to say everything is sweet now and I'm ready to win every week," the 23-year-old Spaniard cautioned.

Garcia does feel the swing changes he made under his father's supervision have taken hold, though, and he has the lead at the World Golf Championships-American Express Championship to lend credence to his words.

Garcia fired a 65 on Thursday to jump in front of a star-studded pack from around the globe that has assembled here in this Atlanta suburb to play for $6 million. He didn't make a bogey on a day when Tom Fazio's par-70 Crabapple Course played to an average of 72.320.

"I definitely played some really good golf out there," he said with a smile. How good was it? Well, of the 27 players who finished after Garcia, only three managed to shoot in the 60s and only 12 broke par all day long.

Thanks to that solid performance, Garcia owns a one-stroke advantage over Tim Herron and Rocco Mediate. Herron didn't make a bogey either on this crystal clear autumn day, while Mediate's six birdies led the field in that category.

K.J. Choi and Tiger Woods, who is defending his American Express Championship title for the second time in four years, are deadlocked at 3 under. Garcia's compatriot, Ignacio Garrido, and Niclas Fasth are another stroke behind.

Masters champion Mike Weir, who, like Woods, is chasing the PGA Tour's Player of the Year Award, is among five players tied at 1-under 69. He actually played his first 12 holes in 4 under but couldn't sustain the surge on the homeward stretch.

A year ago, when the American Express Championship was played at Mount Juliet Estate in Kilkenny, Ireland, Garcia fired a course-record 62 to bolt into a tie for seventh. He's only had two top-10s on tour in 2003, though, and finished just four of 18 tournaments in red numbers for the week.

The swing changes orchestrated by Garcia and his father, Victor, his only teacher, have felt natural for several months now. But he says his putter has been holding him back, and the numbers don't lie. Garcia ranks 163rd in putting average and 186th in putts per round.

"I've been striking the ball quite well for the past couple of months," he said. "You know, sometimes if you're not putting well, it puts too much pressure on your game and you try to get it closer and closer and you don't want to miss greens.

"It's hard to play with that type of atmosphere."

A stern test like the Crabapple Course with its linoleum-fast greens might not seem like the ideal place for Garcia to recapture some of the magic that has made him one of the game's most popular players. Quite the contrary, though.

"I've always felt better on difficult courses because I don't feel it's so much of a putting competition," Garcia said. "I'm a bit more relaxed on the course. I know I don't have to go for every pin -- only the ones I feel comfortable with."

Garcia wasted little time asserting himself, hitting a lob wedge to 15 feet to set up a birdie at the second hole. The rest of his birdie putts came from inside 12 feet.

Herron prospered by being "aggressive when he could and conservative when he should," he noted. Like Garcia, the 33-year-old from Minnesota has also been undergoing a slight crisis of confidence that appears to be lifting.

Herron won the 1996 Honda Classic in his seventh PGA Tour start, then followed that victory with two more wins before the turn of the century. He lost confidence in his putter, though, and only recently began to feel comfortable near the top of the leaderboard again.

"I had a couple of years there where I was really struggling," said Herron, who corrected his problems with the flat stick by going to the "claw" grip. "You lose your confidence, but my confidence has come back. I feel like I hit the ball well, I putt well and (there's) nothing really to stop me.

"I just have to stay out of my own way."

Mediate, on the other hand, just decided to lay low for a while. A five-time winner on the PGA Tour, he'll defend his most recent title in two weeks at the Chrysler Classic of Greensboro.

Mediate, though, took most of July off to spend time with his wife and three sons. Troubled by chronic back problems, he didn't feel all that well during the spring so the break couldn't have been timed better.

"I said I'm going to back this off a little and go home and try to be normal," Mediate said. "I figured if I came back out once school starts … and get back working hard, I've got a legitmate chance to get in The Tour Championship or win another tournament.

"That's what I wanted to do. So far it's working."

Mediate has finished second and tied for fifth in his last two events, where he shot 11 under on the weekend in both cases. Those finishes give him four top-10s and boosted his earnings over $1.6 million that place him 29th on the money list.

"The more intense it seems to get out there, the more comfortable I've been feeling," Mediate said. "Even today, I got right in the mix quick, and all of a sudden, I'm feeling that for some reason the shot seems to mean more.

"I enjoy that feeling more than I used to. The last three or four years I've gotten to enjoy that. I don't know how to explain it but I feel better under the gun than I used to 15 years ago."

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