Sergio García has nightmares. Yes, in the plural. Some are literal. The others, more complicated, more worrying, are figurative. Both have to do with his golf. Just yesterday he had one of the former. After the second round of the Masters and after making the cut, he played for a while with his children and with Angela, his wife, they went to bed and just before four in the morning he woke up almost in a cold sweat. It is not an exaggeration. “The bad shots I had hit came into my head, what was coming up and what I was going to be capable of doing,” he explained today after signing for a 74 (+5 overall) in the third round of the Masters.
The figurative nightmares are linked to his current situation in golf and his expectations. Sergio is not going to throw in the towel, but he is starting to think about his age, something he had never given much thought to. Suddenly, it is as if his 46 years had caught up with him. “Maybe my expectations remain where they were when I was 25, 30 or 35, when I was a much better player than I am now. Maybe those expectations need to come down. Maybe you finish today with two more and it’s not so bad. Obviously, when I finish like that, the feeling is bad, because you fight all day without feeling good and in the end you throw it all away on the last two or three holes. It’s a shame, but oh well,” he says.
Sergio has begun to have doubts at this Masters, although the bad feeling goes back a few months. He is not sure that his golf is already at the level of the world’s best. The golfer from Borriol has spent almost 30 years going to every tournament with the sole objective of winning it. Nothing else would do. From now on he is beginning to think that that time has passed. In fact, he has started speaking in the past tense, as if he were a player on the downhill slope of his career.
“I think that, unfortunately, all our careers go up and down. And then, when you start to get older, they start to go a little more downwards. I don’t know if that’s what’s happening to me or if it’s a fairly bad patch,” he notes. That is his figurative nightmare. Sergio does not want to go to tournaments just to make the cut, to celebrate a top 25 or to count a par round as a good one. That is his real nightmare. That is what he must overcome because the others stem from that.
This is not the first time Sergio has gone through a mental low of this kind. It has happened on other occasions, such as in 2011, when he plummeted in the world rankings, or a couple of years before winning the Masters, when he said that maybe he didn’t have the game to win at Augusta and that he should start accepting that he would never win a major. He came out of those black holes. For him the difference is that he was younger then and, again, he speaks in the past tense.
“When I won the Masters I was 37. It was a bit different. I was lucky that the week went my way and I managed to win my big one. But in the end it is a pity, because when I look at my career, not having won The Open really hurts me a lot, especially with the opportunities I’ve had. But unfortunately we don’t get everything we want in our lives. Fortunately, I think I have had many things go well for me, starting with my health. And well, you have to keep moving forward,” he emphasises.
The first thing Sergio needs is to stop speaking in the past tense. Yes, he is 46, but he is not a retired player. At that age Jack Nicklaus won his 18th major. Furthermore, he is in very good health, he has always looked after his physical condition and has not had any major physical problems. There is no reason to think he hasn’t got plenty left in the tank. The best example for Sergio, the closest in age and relationship, is Justin Rose. Maybe a chat with the Englishman would do him good.
Nightmares can be overcome. Sergio needs someone who can really get through to him to wake him up and help him see reality in a different way. In a more objective way.
