Bitter Pill

By Jaime Diaz
Photos By Dom Furore August 15, 2008

The nickname El Nino has been ironic for awhile now, so it was difficult watching Sergio Garcia bravely pretend that losing the PGA Championship at Oakland Hills -- in a way no golfer would wish on another -- wasn't going to hurt.

"Why are you trying to make this a disappointment?" he asked a questioner just behind the 18th green, where Padraig Harrington had just hit Garcia with the golf equivalent of a perfect left hook to the liver. "Obviously I was trying to win, but that's it. It's not disappointing."

To his credit, this wasn't the Garcia of the 2007 British Open at Carnoustie, visibly shaken and finally petulant. He knows better that pain can be essential to growth. But his nearly all-black outfit and unshaven whiskers foreshadowed a serious darkening to come.

This PGA was a major championship loss that will be painful on many levels. It was unavoidably personal because Garcia was beaten head-to-head by the now-nemesis who had faced him down at Carnoustie. At neither championship did Harrington play as high a quality of tee-to-green golf as the younger Spaniard. At Oakland Hills even Harrington's 66-66 finish was more a testament to a gritty ability to minimize mistakes and intensify focus at crunch time than the kind of full-flighted physical talent Garcia consistently exhibited in closing with 69-68.

Harrington one-putted eight of the last 11 holes, finishing that run with a trio of mid-rangers as clutch as any ever seen to close out a major championship. Garcia was beaten even though the crowd was with him, a young man who has paid his dues and whose talent and charisma they long to see unburdened. He was beaten with the coast clear of Tiger Woods, beaten in a year in which his destiny seemed foretold by the Spanish winners at Wimbledon, soccer's European Cup and the Tour de France. Beaten when he did everything a professional golfer has to do while near the lead in the final round of a major better than he ever has.

"It looked like his day," said Harrington of Garcia, admitting he was feeling close to beaten himself when he fell behind by three at the turn. "He's holing putts, and this is obviously an area that maybe he struggled with in the past, and it's really looking like it's going to happen for him."

Reading those words will increase the sting, and Garcia seemed to be inoculating himself when he called his final-nine 44 at Royal Birkdale at last month's British Open, which came when he had fallen to the outer fringes of contention, more difficult to take. "When you give your best ... it's hard, but you feel good," he said. "It was worse when I finished the Open Championship [because] I kind of lost control a little bit."

Garcia's 5-wood on the 72nd hole found a greenside bunker and left the door ajar for Harrington.

He didn't at the PGA, but while there's no question Harrington won more than Garcia lost, after his final-round front-nine 31 Garcia made five mistakes on the back nine that were enough to give Harrington and his newly intensified instinct for the jugular the openings he needed.

The first came when Garcia chunked a simple uphill pitch from 30 yards at the par-5 12th, costing him what should have been a birdie for a two-stroke lead. The second was badly pulling a birdie putt from 10 feet on the par-4 15th after a near-perfect 6-iron approach jumped into the hole before unluckily bouncing out.

The third mistake was the big one, the 6-iron approach to the par-4 16th from 178 yards that Garcia -- whose iron play to that point in the round had been stellar -- pushed wide of the green and into the infamous water hazard. Garcia "did the no" (to quote the anathema of competitor extraordinaire Raymond Floyd,) and although he followed it with a superlative 55-yard pitch from the drop area and a good putt to salvage bogey, the momentum had switched.