Garcia thrilled to be back on Ryder Cup team

MEDINAH, Ill. (AP) — Ser­gio Gar­cia has never been so happy to lose a title.

Two years after a slump rel­e­gated him to the admin­is­tra­tive role of vice cap­tain at the Ryder Cup, Gar­cia is back where he belongs. His win at last month’s Wyn­d­ham Cham­pi­onship earned him a spot on his sixth Euro­pean team

“It was def­i­nitely a lit­tle bit of an inspi­ra­tion to see your team­mates play­ing and you not really being able to do much,” Gar­cia said Wednes­day. “So it def­i­nitely helped. I hope that it was one of the rea­sons why I’m here now.”

What­ever the rea­sons, the Euro­peans are thrilled to have Gar­cia back out on the course.

Gar­cia may be a flop when it comes to the majors — he pretty much owns that dreaded “Best Player Never to Win” title — but he is per­haps the finest Ryder Cup player of his gen­er­a­tion. With 16 points in his pre­vi­ous five appear­ances, the 32-year-old is already ninth on Europe’s all-time list. He needs only nine more points to catch leader Nick Faldo, which looks fea­si­ble con­sid­er­ing he won at least three matches in each of his first four appearances.

He has Europe’s third-best point per­cent­age, and has played twice as many matches (14–6-4) as the two guys in front of him. (Ian Poul­ter is 9–2-0 and Luke Don­ald is 8–2-1.) He has never lost in foursomes.

“He’s very pas­sion­ate about the Ryder Cup,” said Lee West­wood, the only Euro­pean with more expe­ri­ence. “He gets stuck in.”

Two years ago, how­ever, Gar­cia was sim­ply stuck.

Dev­as­tated by a breakup with Greg Norman’s daugh­ter, his game unrav­eled. After win­ning The Play­ers Cham­pi­onship in Novem-ber 2008, he went 2½ years with­out a top-three fin­ish. It would be almost three years before he’d win again, on either the PGA or Euro­pean tours. His rank­ing, a career-best No. 2 in 2009, plunged as low as 85.

He didn’t come close to qual­i­fy­ing for the 2010 Ryder Cup, and he knew Colin Mont­gomerie couldn’t afford to waste one of his captain’s picks on some­one whose game was in total sham­bles. So he asked Mont­gomerie if he could be part of his staff — a job nor­mally reserved for golfers on the back side of their careers, not one who had just cel­e­brated his 30th birthday.

“I think that made him real­ize how impor­tant it is to be a player in the team,” cur­rent Euro­pean cap­tain Jose Maria Olaz­a­bal said. “I remem­ber his words when we were hav­ing a lit­tle chat a cou­ple years ago, he said, ‘If I knew this, I wouldn’t have come’ — in the sense that he wanted to be playing.”

Not that Gar­cia ever showed it. Gar­cia has the same pas­sion for the Ryder Cup as Olaz­a­bal and Seve Balles­teros, and the event is one of the few occa­sions when he’ll let down his guard and give a glimpse of the almost whim­si­cal exu­ber­ance that made him so appeal­ing as a teenager. He made the Ener­gizer Bunny look like a slacker as he bounded around Celtic Manor, cheer­ing on all of Euro­pean teams, offer­ing advice to the rook­ies and relay­ing mes­sages to Mont­gomerie and the other assistants.

When Graeme Mc-Dowell made a 15-foot birdie on the 16th hole to beat Hunter Mahan and give Europe the Ryder Cup for the fourth time in five meet­ings, Gar­cia was as elated as if he’d deliv­ered the win­ning point.

“We achieved what we wanted to achieve that week, so it was very pos­i­tive,” he said. “But at the same time, I’d rather be on this side than on the other one.”

Posted by Jon Kleinknecht on Sep 27 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.