For all those questions his win in The Players Championship answered, two big ones remain.
No. 1: Where was THAT Sergio Garcia the last half-dozen years?
No. 2: How soon can we expect him to show up at a major?
Garcia hinted at the answer to the first question the moment after he wrapped his hands around the large crystal trophy.
``First of all,'' Garcia said, ``I want to thank Tiger for not being here. That always makes things a little bit easier.''
How much easier, as well as a definitive answer to the second question, won't be known until Woods is done rehabbing a surgically repaired knee and returns to the hunt, almost certainly in time for the U.S. Open in June.
And to be fair, every golfer could claim his growth has been stunted by Tiger's emergence, though it's likely even more true of those who have hung around the top 10 in the world rankings for most of that time. In Garcia's case, he was humbled by Woods in what was essentially a head-to-head duel in the final round of the 1999 PGA Championship, which may have kick-started the very crisis of confidence that the Spanish prodigy, now 28, appeared to finally put behind him by playing near-flawless golf down the stretch at Sawgrass.
The Players Championship is the most pressure-packed event of the season outside of the four majors, and the knock on Garcia was that he's never been reliable in that rarified atmosphere - outside of Ryder Cup matches - and even shakier on the greens.
The lingering image of Garcia on the greens that most of us carried into Sunday was him narrowly missing putts three times in the last four holes of regulation, and three times in the playoff against Padraig Harrington last summer before losing the British Open. What changed soon after is that Garcia ditched the belly putter he'd been using and hired short-game guru Stan Utley to help him rediscover the more instinctive stroke that marked Garcia as a player to be watched while still in his teens. It bailed him out a half-dozen times in the final round, the final time on No. 18 in regulation, when he rolled in a 7-footer that subsequently forced Paul Goydos into a playoff.
The other image that stuck from the British Open was Garcia complaining afterward that he never caught a break.
``You only watch the guys that make the putts and get the good breaks and things like that,'' he said at the time, which was spot on. The truth is we watch the guys who make their own breaks, those who expend little time and energy cursing their luck, focusing instead on the things they can control. For once, Garcia was that guy.
After a terrific approach shot from the left rough at No. 16, and an even-better chip shot that left just five feet, Garcia's par-saving putt didn't even touch the hole. He led the field in both driving accuracy and greens hit for the tournament - ball-striking has never been Garcia's problem - so it wouldn't have been the first time he was undone by the short stick. Instead of sulking, though, this time Garcia responded with two tough pars.
His reward came on the first and only hole of the playoff. It might have been the biggest break of Garcia's career. Goydos hit first as the duo replayed the par-3 17th and his wedge shot caught one of those 30-mph gusts that bedeviled the players all day and splashed into the pond just short of the green.
``It didn't knock it down, just ballooned it,'' Garcia recalled.
``I was just praying that I didn't get any weird gusts or wind or anything like that, and I knew the shot I wanted to hit ... a good, solid sand wedge,'' he said a few moments later. ``I was thinking, if I manage to make 3, I'm probably going to - I should win this thing. So that's what I did.''
For what it's worth, five golfers who won The Players Championship went on to win their first major afterward, David Duval being the last one and Hal Sutton the only one to win his in the same year. As Garcia acknowledged afterward, and knows only too well from experience, Woods isn't likely to crack the door for him the way Goydos did.
But after all those stops and starts that cluttered his past, Garcia finally sounded ready in an interview with The Golf Channel to do that for himself.
``I don't want to be cocky or anything, but when I'm feeling good, I don't think anybody else can hit the ball much better than me, not even Tiger Woods, who's an unbelievable player. I feel on that part of the game, I can still manage to beat him at that.
``Unfortunately, his short game is still better than mine and that's what I have to keep working on. If I keep doing that and believing in myself,'' he added, ``I can at least make it difficult for him.''
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org
