The decorated European Tour star is determined to put lessons learned last season to good use in 2020 and beyond

By Kent Gray
When Sergio Garcia turned 40 on Jan.9, golf fans everywhere were left feeling decidedly old. Many remember that precocious Spanish teen scissor-kicking his way to stardom at the 81st PGA Championship like it were yesterday, not mid-August in the final year of the last century.

There have been countless moments since that mirrored that exuberant mid-fairway leap (think ridiculous highs and heavy, reputational landings) when Garcia briefly held the third round lead at Medinah in 1999 before finishing a shot behind Tiger Woods, then only 23 himself and en-route to just his second major.

Garcia’s long-overdue major breakthrough at Augusta National in 2017 aside, a pair of Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) stats speak volumes of his longevity at the pointy end of world golf. He remains to this day the youngest player to crack the world’s top 10 (a week after his 20th birthday) and perhaps even more impressively continues to extend the second longest streak – 20.5 years – inside the top 100 behind Phil Mickelson. Indeed, Garcia has not dipped lower than 82nd during two decades gripping (and re-gripping, and re-gripping) fans around the world with his immense talent and often fiery passion for the game.

Ranked 41st at the time of press, the Ryder Cupper started 2020 in search of his 17th European Tour title (and an 11th on the PGA Tour). Garcia’s 16th victory at the KLM Open last September marked a career-best third successive year he’d recorded a European Tour victory but even that couldn’t completely erase the troughs of 2019, lowlighted by his DQ from the inaugural Saudi International last Feb. when five Royal Greens G&CC putting surfaces and a bunker bore the brunt of the Spaniard’s always simmering temper.

In an intriguing, no holds barred interview ahead of the 2nd Saudi International, Garcia candidly reflects on his infamous tantrum in King Abdullah Economic City and revealed his plans to continue winning on and off the course well into the new decade.

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I don’t know if it released pressure or not. Obviously it [winning a major] is something I wanted to do for a really long time, you know for my whole career, and it’s always nice to be able to have that under your sleeve. But it still doesn’t mean everything is over. We are competitors and you still want to keep getting better, you still want to be playing well and having chances at winning many other tournaments so hopefully, we will be able to do that for many years.

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My last season was decent. You know, a couple up and downs here and there, but overall it’s been fairly good. I started the year pretty well with a lot of good top 10s, obviously calmed down a little bit but then I got the win in Holland which was great to play there for the first time as a professional. To win was a dream come true. Hopefully, we can get going again this year.

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I think every year it is important to get off to a good start but now that the front end of the season, it’s a lot more heavy loaded, it’s even more important. From March till July, you have really big tournaments pretty much every month so it is important to have a really good start of the year that can carry you on throughout the whole year.

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I haven’t changed my routine much. You know the majors are moved forward a little bit and you just got to try to peak a little bit earlier than maybe before, but it doesn’t really change much, the way you practise or get ready for your season.

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My wife Angela, she’s a [former Golf Channel] journalist and obviously it’s nice to have her on our side and look for her opinion here and there but she’s got a much more important job than that which is being a mum and that’s the most important thing for me. Obviously, she is a very smart woman and an unbelievable person and very pretty, at least in my eyes. But the most important thing is she’s an unbelievable mum and that’s what I treasure the most.

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I feel terrible about what happened last year. Obviously there were some outside things that got me to that point.  I want to go there. I want to show my respect for them. You know, the easy thing would have been for me to hide and never come back there, but I love the people there, all the people we met and everyone that takes care of us during the tournament.

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At the end of the day, those things unfortunately happened. We are not robots, you know we are humans and sometimes we lose our temper here and there. I think at the end of the day the most important thing is to learn from those things and to make sure that all the good things that you do are more than the bad ones. It’s just a matter of looking back and trying to learn as much as possible. Unfortunately, it just shows that we are human.

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Yes, it would be nice to put on a good show at Royal Greens after what happened last year. I did enjoy the country itself and the people there so hopefully, we can go there, play nicely, have a good week and leave with our head held up high.

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I enjoy the travelling we do and it’s not a huge thing but obviously, yeah, I do like to invest here and there. I try to see some opportunities that might look pretty good and give us a good opportunity of achieving something nicely there. We have some good friends that are in the restaurant business that we partner with and obviously starting golf course design is something that will probably start in the near future so there are several things that are going on.

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Golf course design is something that I would love to do as my career goes along but we will see. You kind of go with whatever feels right at that moment. I don’t know where I will be in 10 or 12 years. I don’t know if I will be playing on the Champions Tour or maybe spending time with the family and looking for hobbies and other things to do, so it’s difficult to say.

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We are very proud with the work that we have done with The Sergio Garcia Foundation, you know with all three foundations we have in Spain, Switzerland and the US. We’ve done a whole bunch of different things throughout the last 17 years trying to help special needs golf. We’ve invested in research for cancer in children, in young people obviously. We invested in an X-ray room in a hospital in Madrid. So, we are always trying to help as many as we can.

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I think the young people now definitely have a better chance than when I started. I’m not saying that I didn’t have a good chance, obviously, I did with my dad being a professional golfer and me living next to a golf course so that obviously helped. But I think nowadays it’s a little bit easier to join different clubs, to be able to go and play and all of those things kind of help you to level up your game.