In 1999, as he was playing in the final round of the P.G.A. Championship, at the age of just nineteen, Sergio Garcia reached the eighteenth hole one shot behind the leader, Tiger Woods. As he stood on the tee, he reportedly said, “Guys, I’m having so much fun. This is so great, I don’t even care if I win.” All week, the crowds had thrilled to the young, good-natured Spaniard. He made par on the eighteenth, took second place in the tournament, and declared the week the greatest of his life. The sport of golf seemed to have, along with Woods, a second prodigy on its hands. It would, it appeared, be just be a matter of time before Garcia—El Niño, they called him—won his first major tournament.
It took almost twenty years. On Sunday, at the age of thirty-seven, with gray in his beard, Garcia won the Masters, his first major championship, in what was his seventy-fourth appearance in one of the sport’s four big tournaments. After he rolled in a birdie putt on the first hole of a sudden-death playoff, against Justin Rose, the crowd around the green rose to cheer a golfer who was no longer the skinny kid in the baggy khakis with the toothy smile. Over the years, Garcia had grown and revealed himself to be a flawed, emotionally vulnerable man, and one willing to be candid about a subject that few other professional athletes allow themselves to talk about in public: doubt.
Garcia got close in the majors several times—he missed a straight putt that would have won the 2007 British Open, and finished in the top ten at more than twenty other majors—but usually, by the final holes, his balky putting had sunk him, or else he had suffered a lapse of focus and double-bogeyed a crucial hole. Meanwhile, his public image suffered. In 2002, at the U.S. Open, at Bethpage, a public course on Long Island, spectators in the crowd taunted him as he lingered over his shots, spending an inordinate amount of time regripping the club. Beset by these seemingly involuntary waggles, as they were known, Garcia appeared fussy and nervous. He nursed an ongoing feud with Woods and, in a low moment, made a racist joke at an awards dinner about inviting Woods over for fried chicken. (He apologized, and Woods later said that it was time for everyone to move on from the feud.) Garcia could be surly, petty, and, as with his comment about Woods, oblivious and mean. All this made him a villain to some fans, and he took notice. After a loss at the British Open, he said that it felt like everyone was against him.
By 2012, Garcia seemed to have given up any hope of winning a major. “I’m not good enough,” he told reporters at the Masters that year, after a poor third round knocked him out of contention. “I don’t have the thing I need to have. In thirteen years, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to play for second or third place.” Later, he added, “I had my chances and opportunities and I wasted them. I have no more options. I wasted my options.” In a decade of golf, Garcia had gone from not caring about victory because of the sheer joy of playing to not caring about victory out of a kind of psychologically protective necessity. He had won more than twenty smaller tournaments, at one point was ranked second in the world, and had made millions as a player and product spokesman. But, when it came to the majors, Garcia, by his own admission, lacked the “thing.”
To some, Garcia’s frankness sounded like surrender—golf is a lonely game in which players compete against the course, and themselves, as much as against one another. Sports psychologists are as in demand as swing coaches—and a player admitting that he doesn’t think he can win makes him a bad bet, especially when he is carrying the extra burden of being known as the greatest golfer, perhaps ever, never to have won a major. Yet, by giving up exuberance, Garcia discovered persistence. He might have been doomed, but he kept showing up.
On Sunday, as he and Rose turned to the back nine, it seemed that Garcia was once again playing for second place. Errant shots on the tenth and eleventh holes led to bogeys, and, after his tee shot on the par-five thirteenth lodged itself at the base of one of Augusta’s famous azalea bushes, forcing him to take a penalty, the scene had a familiar look. Then Garcia managed to save par on the hole, while Rose failed to add to his lead. As suddenly as he’d unravelled, Garcia righted himself. He birdied on fourteen and followed that with a stunning eagle on fifteen. Three straight pars to finish the round were good enough to force a playoff.
As the cheers surged around him during the final round, Garcia gave the energy back—smiling, pumping his fist, displaying the joyful nature of El Niño. But it wasn’t that kid who won on Sunday. It was the other Garcia—the one who had mystified, and occasionally maddened, fans over the years—who finally caught a break. He missed a makeable birdie putt on sixteen and a putt on eighteen to win the tournament outright, to the dismay of the fans standing behind him. The word “choke” was suddenly everywhere on Twitter. Rose might have seized on any of these mistakes to take the day. Instead, in the playoff, Rose hit his tee shot into the trees, and from there all Garcia had to do was make par from the fairway. All day, as he had for nearly twenty years, he had made golf look hard, its outcome tenuous and potentially cruel even for one of the most talented players in the world. After Rose tapped in a putt for bogey on the playoff hole, Garcia had two putts for par to win. And then, because every once in a while there is joy in the game, even for Garcia, he made the birdie.