Garcia longs for carefree days
Sergio Garcia reflected on 10 years in the professional game since his dramatic US PGA Championship debut and admitted he was trying to recapture those carefree days of his youth.
Garcia was 19 when he took America by storm at Medinah, near Chicago, in 1999 and made Tiger Woods work hard for his first PGA Championship victory.
The Spanish teenager, known as ’El Nino’, missed out by a shot but won hearts with a cavalier approach typified by a daring shot from right of the fairway at Medinah’s 16th, flashing his club with eyes shut and lifting his ball out from the exposed roots of a tree before chasing after it to see if it had reached the green.
A decade later, world number six Garcia was still waiting for his first major as he got his 2009 US PGA campaign under way at Hazeltine National in Minnesota and yearning for the days when a missed fairway did not matter to him.
“I feel like probably my overall game is better now than it was in ’99,” the Spaniard said last night.
“I think that the beauty of when I came out is you know, when you are a youngster, you don’t care about anything. So that’s the beauty of it. That’s what we all try to get back.”
