Trunk Club|The Trunk Club
August 12, 2009
Trunk Club|The Trunk Club:Ten years have passed since Sergio Garcia nearly won the PGA Championship at the Medinah Country Club near Chicago.
Garcia, then 19, finished second to Tiger Woods and, in the years since, has yet to win the PGA or any major. (Surely nobody would have predicted back then that he would still be without at least one.)
Another PGA Championship is set to start tomorrow at the Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska, Minn. Could this be his week?
Garcia tied for second place last year, two shots behind Padraig Harrington. He was right there with two holes left, but hit his approach into the water on the 16th hole at Oakland Hills in Birmingham, Mich., and then watched as Harrington putted brilliantly coming in to win.
Garcia, ranked sixth in the world, has climbed as high as second in the past. He hasn’t fared well in this year’s majors, tying for 38th at the Masters, for 10th at the U.S. Open, and for 38th at last month’s Open Championship. Meanwhile, he’s often continued to blame outside forces for his problems.
After shooting 74 in the last round of the Masters, for example, Garcia took a run at the Augusta National Golf Club. Such heresy.
“I don’t like it, to tell you the truth,” Garcia said of the course. “I don’t think it is fair. Even when it’s dry, you still get mud balls in the middle of the fairway. It’s too much of a guessing game.”
This was a strange comment in a way, coming from a golfer with a flair for inventing shots. One would think Garcia could come up with shots and commit to them, even in unpredictable situations. Instead, he took a shot at the course and the conditions.
That wasn’t the first time Garcia was petulant after not performing to his and others’ expectations. He had aroused the ire of the boisterous crowds during the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage State Park’s Black course in Farmingdale, N.Y. when he milked, or regripped, the club time after time before starting his swing. He let the crowds know he didn’t appreciate their jeers.
That week, Garcia was caught on the course during a heavy rainstorm. Play wasn’t suspended, and he said later that the United States Golf Association would likely have called off play had it been Woods out there.
Then, five years later, Garcia, having just lost the Open in a playoff to Harrington at Carnoustie, looked forlornly to the media and invoked a conspiracy theory. “I’m playing against a lot of guys out there, more than the field,” he said.
Garcia seemed like a lost young man who wondered what had gone wrong in his career. Still, the appealing image of 19-year-old Garcia late in the final round at Medinah in 1999 persists in the mind’s eye.
The teenager was two shots behind Woods, and had pushed his tee shot on the 16th hole against a root behind a thick tree trunk. He pictured a big banana ball, starting way left and then curving way right.
“So I opened the clubface,” Garcia said later, “made a full swing, closed my eyes and hit the ball, and went backwards just in case the ball hit the tree and [came] back to me.”
The shot came off, and then Garcia took off. He took a sharp left and sprinted up the fairway to a high point to see where the ball landed. It finished 50 feet left of the hole.
Ben Crenshaw, who would captain the U.S. Ryder Cup team to a win over Europe that fall, said later: “I don’t think anybody’s ever seen a shot like that.”
The shot didn’t win the tournament for Garcia, but it did define him then as a potentially great player – and a likely major championship winner. Woods himself said Garcia “has a tremendous amount of fight.”
That was 10 years ago, and only Garcia knows whether he retains his intense fight and desire.
“Not many people can say that they’ve been [the] No. 2 player in the world at their sport,” Garcia said recently. “There’s a lot of people out there in the world. It’s not that easy to get to that spot. So I’m pretty happy with that.”
But he also said something slightly different recently when asked whether it would mean anything to him to get rid of the label as the best player not to win a major: “I’d love to get rid of it, yes.”
The PGA is the last major of the year.
As Garcia closes out his 20s, it would be an ideal time to get rid of the label and become the major champion that destiny a decade ago appeared to have in store for him.
