Sergio Garcia: ‘I’m proud of my Masters win – but I want more’

There can be no greater measure of longevity in this gruelling game than major championship starts. Only 18 male golfers have reached triple digits in history. Sergio Garcia will join the exclusive hundred club when he heads back down Magnolia Lane as a past champion this week.

“I’m very proud of it,” Garcia says. “I’m so looking forward to it. I would have loved it to be at the Open Championship last year because it’s my favourite major. I love it, but unfortunately we couldn’t make it happen.”

It is a sign of this enduring Spaniard’s drive that his mind first wanders towards the last big one he missed out on. Before a positive Covid test ruled him out of the 2020 Masters, Garcia played in 82 consecutive majors. He doesn’t make a habit of missing them. Last summer, he fell just two strokes short of the Open at Final Qualifying.

“But for the Masters to be my 100th major is very special, too,” he adds. “The tradition, how unique it is. It makes it so special.”

‘Special’ is the word that springs to Garcia’s mind more than any other in this chat with bunkered as he reflects on his 25 years at Augusta National. And no wonder. After all, the famed Georgia course is the place that has come to define him.

Garcia burst into the public consciousness at Augusta in 1999, winning the low-amateur medal to make it a Spanish double as Jose Maria Olazabal claimed the Green Jacket.

A few months later, the precocious teenager turned pro and finished runner-up to Tiger Woods in an electrifying PGA Championship debut at Medinah.

Back then, it wasn’t just a case of when and not if with Garcia and the majors; it was a question of how many for Europe’s next superstar. And for Garcia, Augusta initially felt like the place he was going to get off the mark.

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“When I started playing there the first four or five years I felt like it was a good course for me,” he explains. “But then I started not feeling so good there and I always thought that the Open would probably be the one.”

It was at the 2012 Masters that Garcia confessed that it was probably going to be neither. He had spent his twenties chasing the coattails of the unstoppable Woods, and by that stage, his career was punctured by anguish on the biggest stage.

The closest call, of course, came at the 2007 Open when he led after the first, second and third rounds at Carnoustie. The Spaniard’s winning par putt on the 72nd hole lipped out and he was beaten by Padraig Harrington in a playoff, famously later claiming the golf gods had conspired against him. Plenty of other chances had come and gone, too. There was only so long Garcia could carry the burden of being the sport’s nearly man.

“In 13 years, the conclusion is I need to play for second or third place,” he said at Augusta in 2012. “I’m not good enough. “I don’t have the thing I need to have. I have my chances and my opportunities and I waste them.”

Garcia has always had a reputation for outbursts – plenty of them petulant on the fairways – but this public show of weakness and regret felt much different. He was a glorious ball-striker, possessing a fallible putting stroke but still dominating at Ryder Cups. He had won over ten times across both the PGA Tour and European Tours, but was defeated in the ones that mattered most. Garcia had seemingly given up and so had his army fans.

But four runner-up finishes, twelve top-fives and 22 top-tens later, Garcia finally vanquished those nearly moments to win the 2017 Masters on his 74th major start. With a ten-foot birdie putt to edge out Justin Rose in a sudden-death playoff, Garcia’s painful wait was finally over.

“I replay it in my mind,” Garcia says, reminiscing about his crowning moment. “I’m very proud of it. Happiness was part of it. It was a combination of being very proud and just very happy. A lot of memories went through my mind from when I was younger.”

And relief? “I wouldn’t say relief,” he insists. “I said it after I won it, and I even said it before I won it, I felt like my career was already good enough to be proud of it. That makes it even more special and even better but more than relief it was just being very proud of being able to achieve that.”

What Garcia was most proud of was how he won it. After ugly bogeys on the 10th and 11th during his epic Sunday battle with Rose, his drive on the par-5 13th had found an unplayable position beneath a bush. We had seen this movie before, of course.

Garcia’s memory of his response is vivid. He took his drop, advanced the ball within 90 yards of the green and made the most important par save of the week. That not only re-energised him, but reassured him he could make a big putt under this utmost pressure.

“I didn’t hit a bad drive,” he recalls, “but it hit the top of the trees and bounced left into the Azaleas. “The five I made there after having to take a penalty drop – that was big. The birdie I made on the next was huge. That got me on a good frame of mind going into 15.”

Unlike ever before, Garcia had come alive on a major Sunday. After walloping his drive down the par-5 15th, he then set up his first eagle in his last 452 Masters holes. “I obviously hit one of the best 8-irons I hit in my life,” Garcia beams. “To top it off with making that putt was even better.”

This was never going to be a case of Garcia storming to this Green Jacket, though. Neck and neck with Rose all the way up to the final hole, he agonisingly misread a five-footer to steal it from the Englishman regulation play. Remarkably though, rather than being unnerved, Garcia was undeterred.

“Throughout the whole week I just felt calm,” he recalls. “I felt good about what I was doing. felt confident. Because of that, I still had to make sure my breathing was right, but I felt like it was easier to control those things.”

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Then, on the first playoff hole, Rose struck his drive into the trees and could only muster a five. Garcia flushed a ‘three quarter’ nine iron to the heart of the green and had two putts for it. He only needed one.

“It was amazing,” says Garcia. “It was a really good battle with a good friend like Rosey. We probably both deserved to win but unfortunately only one could.”

It says everything about Garcia’s longevity that at one stage it felt impossible he wouldn’t win a major – and almost two decades later it felt impossible he would.

“I didn’t have a number in mind,” he says when asked if his sole Masters win has sated his major ambitions. “I just wanted to play as well as I could and win as many as I could. It wasn’t one, three, five, eight. It was just try to win as many as you can.”

As Garcia enters his mid-forties, that goal hasn’t changed. “I definitely can, that’s why I keep playing them,” he says. “When my game is on I feel like I can beat anyone.”

Which is also why Garcia feels compelled not to give up on his Ryder Cup dream. He may still be viewed as an underachiever in the majors, but in the Ryder Cup the Spaniard stands alone. The event’s record points scorer is determined to match Lee Westwood and Nick Faldo’s European record of 11 appearances at Bethpage Black in September.

Some will undoubtedly baulk at the idea of a 45-year-old Garcia returning to the fold after the rise of the young guns in Rome in 2023. Yet those who play alongside him on the LIV Golf circuit insist he is just as good as he ever was.

“For people that see him any given day, Sergio Garcia can a can hit it tee-to-green better than anybody on the planet,” Jon Rahm declared after his compatriot’s resurgent 2024.

With a victory at his favourite course, Valderrama, Garcia’s LIV season was bettered only by two-time major winner Rahm and the prolific Chilean Joaquin Niemann. He trails the same two players in this season’s early standings after a win in Singapore.

“Any Ryder Cup – it doesn’t matter where it’s played – it’s special and different,” Garcia says. “I’ve played well there and it’s a course that I like so that would be a plus.

“Hopefully I play so well in the majors and in the European Tour events that I don’t need a pick. That’s my goal.”

Indeed, Garcia is so desperate to make a Ryder Cup comeback that he has settled fines worth up to £1.5million to renew his DP World Tour membership and remain eligible to play.

His appearances on his former domain will be sporadic owning to his LIV commitments, but recovering his card means he is now up for selection for Luke Donald’s side.

For that outside possibility to become a reality, Garcia must impress the European captain on the biggest stages. And with the chances of earning Ryder Cup points while on the LIV league limited, a special invitation into the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow will certainly help that cause.

But for Garcia, Augusta in April always felt like the perfect place to start.

Ben Parsons is the Senior Writer at bunkered and is the man to come to for all of the latest news, across both the professional and amateur games. Formerly of The Mirror and Press Association, he is a member at Halifax Golf Club and is a long-suffering fan of both Manchester United and the Wales rugby team.