Garcia's journey from 'El Nino' to established veteran

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Garcia family

From his days growing up in Spain with his father Victor (top left) by his side, Garcia was expressive on and off the course.

No one should be fooled by what Sergio Garcia said in the wake of his win at last year's THE PLAYERS Championship. Though he insisted, "I definitely don't consider myself a kid anymore," the kid in Garcia remains not too far below the surface and always will. It is what makes him the player that he is.

Often, Spanish golfers are at the other end of the spectrum to those who keep their feelings securely under wraps. First came Seve Ballesteros, whose face always told every bit as much about his latest shot as the flight of the ball. Then there was Jose Maria Olazabal, who broke into that never-to-be-forgotten jig at the end of the 1987 Ryder Cup at Muirfield Village.

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Garcia kisses THE PLAYERS Championship trophy after winning in a playoff against Paul Goydos.

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"In Spain," explains Garcia, who started swinging with a broomstick at age 2 and was the proud owner of some cut-down clubs at 3, "we play golf with our hearts. I cannot tell you whether that is because of our culture or whether it is because we have discovered how we play best. Others don't show as much excitement as we do or, alternatively, they don't want to show it."

The more precociously gifted are often apt to have a hard time of it from their fellow men. Garcia, who made 21 cuts in the 28 professional tournaments he played while still an amateur, was no exception. He made the cut at a European Tour event at age 14 and captured the Catalonian Open, his first professional title, as a 17-year-old amateur. But where Tiger Woods had Mark O'Meara batting for him from the start, Garcia had Ernie Els.

Els sensed at once that Garcia was "a good kid." He played practice rounds with him and found his "energy" refreshing. The South African predicted that Garcia would win a major before too long and the then 19-year-old Garcia came close to proving him right at the 1999 PGA Championship at Medinah where he finished one shot behind Woods.

Garcia, who had turned professional in April 1999 and made his PGA TOUR debut that May at the Byron Nelson Classic with a first-round 62 and an ultimate tie for third, was hailed as the next Woods after the PGA Championship performance. Yet his heady publicity was coupled with great self confidence in his battle with Woods at Medinah.

Garcia was still on a high after his memorable shot to Medinah's 16th green -- the 6-iron from the edge of a root behind a tree with eyes closed followed by a run and a jump up the fairway. Garcia then holed a good putt at the short 17th before turning around to Woods back on the tee to make him aware of the emotional moment.

It was not the wisest of moves, but as Els was the first to point out, Garcia was still a teenager. Others speaking in his defense pointed to the great respect he always had shown to his parents, Victor, the club professional at the Mediterraneo Golf Club in Castellon, and Consuelo.

In the early 2000s, when altering his swing, Garcia suffered that very individual affliction of gripping and re-gripping his club anywhere up to 25 times before he could bring himself to hit. The father-son relationship could have cracked under the pressure. After all, the whole golf world was chipping in with suggestions as to how the problem might be solved.

Some thought that Garcia should see a David Leadbetter or a Butch Harmon, noted swing instructors. Others felt that he should be working with a psychologist. The players, meantime, looked on in embarrassed silence.

All except for Colin Montgomerie, that is.

The Scot did at least something to diffuse the situation by bringing a touch of humor to bear. Montgomerie was playing a practice round with Garcia at the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage Park when Garcia's ball fell from the tee at a time when he had already clocked 16 or so grips and re-grips.

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Garcia grins after earning the title at TPC Sawgrass.

Utley's influence

Sergio Garcia's putting had arguably cost him many tournaments before he started working with Stan Utley at the 2008 World Golf Championships-Accenture Match Play Championship near Tucson, Ariz. Utley, a former PGA TOUR player who works with many current players, teaches a putting technique of the swinging-gate variety beloved by Ben Crenshaw as opposed to the square-to-square style preferred by others. Utley's way marries with Garcia's natural, original style and has helped to take him back to those childhood days in which he won his senior club championship at age 12 and had the feeling he could hole anything and everything. "My objective with Sergio," Utley said, "was to make him as instinctive with his putting stroke as he was with his swing and it really wasn't that difficult to achieve. Within an hour of us starting to work together, I knew he was going to be all right. He had recovered something of his old feel, he was making solid contact with the ball and he was finding putting fun again. I didn't know when the improvement would show up in competition but the signs were all in place." The moment which forced others to much the same conclusion came when Garcia holed that clutch putt at the 72nd at Sawgrass to make the playoff with Paul Goydos. It was at once a straight putt and one which, in years to come, will almost certainly be seen as a highlight of the Spaniard's career. -- Lewine Mair

"Heavens," cried Monty, "We're not going to have to go through all that again, are we?"

It was interesting to see how Garcia would react. A snap and a snarl could not be ruled out, but instead, the lad responded with an equally humorous, "Yes, but it will be worth it." The renewed spate of gripping and re-gripping over, he smacked his ball down the fairway, something he does more often than most with a driver in hand.

That Garcia could take such ribbing on so sensitive a subject was all due to Victor. All along, Victor, Garcia's only teacher, had refused to allow his son to think they were in the midst of a crisis. He said that the best way of dealing with things was to try for one fewer grip and re-grip at a time and, little by little, Garcia brought things back under control.

For years, Victor was a familiar sight at all the bigger events, walking around with his familiar prop, an old club, in hand. For the last half-dozen seasons, though, there have been weeks -- and that includes the 2006 British Open at Hoylake -- when he was not on site for the entire week. The explanation, here, provides an interesting switch of emphasis in the pair's relationship.

Since the family is nowadays blessed with no shortage of funds, Garcia has encouraged his father to play the competitive golf he missed in his younger days. The European Senior Tour beckoned and, out there with his old Spanish amigos, Victor is very comfortable. "He doesn't have to win," said Garcia, when asked how his father was faring not so long ago. "All I want is for him to play better each time." Victor plays approximately a dozen tournaments per year, with a career-best tie for 28th at the 2005 Barbados Open.

Garcia has also encouraged younger sister, Mar, in her golf pursuits. She played with him at the 2001 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am and played collegiately at the University of Arizona before opting to use her linguistic skills for work in Castellon's regional government tourist department. The oldest Garcia sibling, Victor, played college golf at Francis Marion University in Florence, S.C., and is the current secretary of the Golf Course Association of Castellon.

Carlos Rodriguez, Garcia's manager, suggests that no one away from the professional game knows too much about "the other side of Sergio."

On the one hand, he still meets up with old school friends to play soccer and tennis, with the latter a sport in which he has the equivalent of a single-figure handicap. "Unlike most other top sportsmen," said Bjorn Borg, after the two played prior to last November's HSBC Championship in China, "Sergio actually looks like a tennis player."

Garcia, whose 19 titles as a professional include seven on the PGA TOUR, also pours a lot of himself into his foundation, a vehicle designed to teach golf to disabled children. Garcia brought in Peter Longo, an American golf professional who specializes in teaching people with disabilities, to pass on his knowledge to 270 Spanish club professionals. Thus far, more than 850 Spanish children have benefited.

"If," said Rodriguez, "there is a shy child who does not want to join in, Sergio will go to great lengths to talk him round. He's brilliant with kids."

Garcia is good with people in general. You would have thought that he would have enjoyed being the baby of the Ryder Cup side and having a fuss made of him in his earlier appearances in the matches. Instead, it was very soon apparent that he was looking after others rather than vice versa. When, for instance, the then newly divorced Montgomerie was cutting a particularly miserable figure at the 2004 matches at Oakland Hills, Garcia was the one to put a comforting arm about his shoulder.

No one doubts that Garcia will make a great Ryder Cup captain one day, but for the moment, he is free to make the most of his pristine promise.

After he had putted poorly to finish runner-up at both the 2007 and 2008 British Opens and hit an untimely shot into water en route to falling short at the 2008 PGA Championship, his 2008 PLAYERS Championship victory represented a watershed moment, a May week where his enthusiasm and talent combined to achieve greatness. He would go on to finish third in the FedExCup standings in 2008 -- with playoff losses to Vijay Singh and Camilo Villegas in two PGA TOUR Playoffs events -- and rose to second in the Official World Golf Ranking at the end of the year.

Above all, it was the first occasion on which the work he had put in with Stan Utley on his putting was beginning to take noticeable effect. During his 2008 victory, he led the field in Driving Accuracy and Greens in Regulation.

Adding a hot putter was a remedy for success. He made a string of putts in his opening 66 and, though he was ordinary on the greens on Friday and Saturday, he rediscovered his touch for Sunday's final round. However, it was hardly surprising that there were doubts when he faced a 7-foot par putt on the 72nd green to join Paul Goydos in a playoff. That was the distance that had bedeviled him in the past.

To Garcia's very visible enthusiasm, the ball disappeared into the hole on the par-4 18th at TPC Sawgrass, and he went on to beat the game Goydos at the first extra hole, the 17th. On an afternoon ripped by wind gusts of up to 40 mph, Goydos' tee shot had ballooned before plopping into the water. Garcia, for his part, successfully negotiated the elements on the famous par-3 hole to finish but 4 feet from the flag.

He was ready for the questions which followed his win. Ever since he turned pro in 1999, the press had bombarded him with the query about meeting his potential. Now that he had won such a prestigious title as THE PLAYERS under difficult circumstances, the questions moved up a gear.

"What," he was asked, "does this result tell you?"

Whatever the inner kid might have been thinking about how he now felt ready to catch Tiger Woods, the older, wiser Garcia had more sense than to say anything even remotely inflammatory.

"The only thing this tells me," he responded, with those running, jumping feet of his oh-so firmly on the ground, "is to keep working hard and to believe in myself."

Lewine Mair was the first woman to serve as the London Daily Telegraph's Golf correspondent -- and the first to have been given a specialist position on the sports pages of a national paper. She is the author of numerous golf books and is currently working for a range of golf magazines including the Daily Telegraph's "Create" or supplements section.