Sergio Garcia always has been golf’s fastest-beating heart. In retrospect, the clue to his long struggle was contained in his first promising moment, when that excitable 19-year-old boy nicknamed “El Nino” scissor-kicked his way up the fairway in the 1999 PGA Championship at Medinah. After he hit that 6-iron from behind a tree on the 16th hole, he broke into a dead run chasing it up the fairway. When he spotted commentator Peter Kostis on the side of the green, he walked over to him, and placed Kostis’s hand on his chest. “Feel that,” he said, smiling.
Kostis could count the trotting beats of the kid’s ventricles. “Sergio, you’re going to experience that a lot more in your life,” he said.
But it would be 18 years before Garcia felt that kind of pure pumping exhilaration again. Instead, he felt certainty turn to doubt. He felt frustration. He felt injustice. He felt conspired against. He felt a kaleidoscope of things before his 37-year-old pulse finally slowed enough to win the Masters in a playoff over Justin Rose. So maybe what Kostis should have said to him all those years ago was this: “Son, it’s a mistake to feel too much in this game.”
In retrospect, it should not have been surprising that such an open-hearted, unchecked temperament as Garcia’s would fight so hard to find ultimate reward in a game that demands patience and calculation. He had so many problems, complexities and opponents to master: massive self-expectations, impulsivity, all that loose-limbedness that Johnny Miller called “noodle-wristed,” and then there was the wind, sand, rain, 18 holes, other players, 14 clubs in the bag, and of course, his brooding self, the ultimate enemy. In 73 major starts, he finished among the top five fully a dozen times without winning.
“I’ve had so many good chances, and either I lost them or someone has done something extraordinary to beat me,” he said Sunday evening.
It should not have been surprising either, that Garcia wanted it a little too much, not just for himself but for others. He’s the son of a former caddie from Madrid, Victor Garcia, who had to sneak on to courses to learn the game, and who struggled on the old European Tour in the 1970s before becoming a modest club pro.
“That kind of thing builds a lot of love for what you do,” Garcia told me in an interview several years ago. “The harder it is to get something, the more you want it, and the more you try and get it.”
Sergio wanted it so much it was palpable. In ‘99 when he shot an opening-round 89 at the British Open, he sobbed on his mother’s shoulder in front of the entire press corps. Sometimes the wanting turned into tantrums. At one tournament, when he slipped out of his stance, he took off his shoe and hurled it at a leader board. In another, he spat at the cup when he missed a putt.
By the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage the joyful kid was gone, replaced by an anxiety-ridden player with a furrowed brow who had developed a compulsive club waggle. The gallery audibly counted his re-grips, and when they taunted him for it, he gave them the finger. The New York tabloids named him “El Groucho.”
By the 2007 British Open he was convinced there was an invisible force working against him, after he lost a playoff to Padraig Harrington. He was playing against something “more than the field,” he said. In the 2012 Masters, he announced that he had all but given up. “I’m not good enough . . . I don’t have the thing I need to have,” he said.
Through it all, there was the sense that Garcia wasn’t a bad guy; he was just a great golfer who had been fooled by early ease and promise, and was trapped in his snowballing disappointments. His sheer vividness was part of his problem. Even in his worst periods, he had a confessional quality and a self-honesty that made it difficult to dislike him.
“I’m not built yet,” he said after the Bethpage debacle.
There are few things more satisfying to watch in sports than the slow development of a champion. There is something about Garcia’s years-long labor that seems instructional for everyone. He is proof that people change. They can self-fashion, get better, as long as they’re unrelenting. Golf is unique among sports in offering this kind of extended maturation; we get to know them as boys and watch them grow into graying men of tremendous dignity. Nick Price was 35 before he won his first major, after enduring half a dozen top-five disappointments first. Ben Crenshaw was 32, Curtis Strange 33. Angel Cabrera 37, Mark O’Meara 41. Tom Kite turned pro in 1972 and didn’t win his U.S. Open until 1992. He was 42 years old.
What Garcia was proudest of after it was all over Sunday night was not a particular shot or putt, but rather this overall growth. The “demonstration of my character,” he said, “and my mentality.”
He led, then he trailed, and he stayed “positive when things weren’t going that well.” He hit it in a hazard on the par-5 13th, and instead of surrendering to that old invisible negative force, he found a way to salvage par and played on with his heart prepared for any fate.
“I was like, ‘Well, if that’s what is supposed to happen, let it happen,’” he said. “Let’s try to make a great 5 here and see if we can put on a hell of a finish to have a chance. And if not, we’ll shake Justin’s hand and congratulate him for winning.”
On three occasions in the last six holes, he appeared to have lost the tournament in classic Sergio self-sabotaging fashion, but he just kept laboring, and waiting, and laying those magnificently high shots close to the pins. In place of the hard-chasing boy was a slow-walking man. A sedate and sublimely contented one, engaged to Golf Channel reporter and former player Angela Akins. An “accepting” one, as he described himself, with a sure sense that he has not been unlucky in this career, but rather lucky beyond measure.
“I have a beautiful life,” he said afterward. “Major or no major, I said it many, many times: I have an amazing life. I have so many people that care for me and love me and support me. I feel so nicely surrounded.”
Of all the surprises Garcia’s victory offered, maybe the most purely delightful and unexpected was this sense that he is a newborn player. At the age of 37, after all the years of trying, he said, “I pretty much just started.” Garcia the racing boy was exciting to watch, but Garcia the champion, with a more muffled drum in his chest, is somehow just as thrilling.