There was ample opportunity during the third round of the Masters tournament on Saturday for Sergio Garcia to be, well, Sergio Garcia.
Advertisement
Needing his best golf on just about every shot in the final hour at the Masters, Garcia overcame a two-shot deficit with six holes to play and beat Justin Rose in a sudden-death playoff Sunday for his first major after almost two decades of heartache.
With 2013 US Open champion Rose and two of the best players in golf not to have won a major yet in Garcia and Fowler, as well as Spieth, whose first three Masters finishes have been second, first, second, there is plenty of quality at the top of the leaderboard and bubbling under. “So I’m certainly going to go for broke tomorrow”.
“The first hole was the key – we had been talking about it, thinking it was probably going to be the toughest hole through the day”, he told Sky Sports.
Justin Rose wasn’t going to play second-fiddle to another great performance in 2017.
Garcia has been taking a methodical journey to what he hopes is his first-ever major championship. “Everyone has a story line”.
So far in this 81st Masters, the breaks have been nearly exclusively good for Garcia, who fired a third-round, 2-under 70 – nearly five shots better than his third-round average in 13 previous Saturdays at Augusta – to maintain his share of the lead. “It was a very solid round and then obviously finishing birdie-birdie just kind of put the cherry on top of what was a good day”.
“I know that anything can happen”, he said with a wry smile. “That’s all you want”.
This is the first Masters since Arnold Palmer’s death last fall, and his legacy of the gambling showman has been often discussed this week. The Spieth-Fowler pair will be one of the most closely watched twosomes on a Sunday at a major championship in recent times.
Garcia and Rose had tied at nine-under par 279 after final rounds of three-under 69, which left them three shots clear of third-place Charl Schwartzel of South Africa. “I’m playing good golf, and if I play my game tomorrow, I think I got a good chance”. On a scale of one to 10, how much fun is this?
He previewed that strategy a day earlier, birdieing two of the final three holes en route to a 69.
It ended with Garcia at 4-under par at the Masters and tied for the lead, and if you feel like you’ve read this all before, that’s understandable.
Rickie Fowler took another step toward his first major win by firing a 1-under 71 with four birdies and three bogeys in Round 3.
“It’s win or go home”, he said. “I guess the golf course was Tiger-proofed at one point”.
“So I take confidence that I’ve put four great rounds together here in the past, too, and I enjoyed that occasion and I enjoyed the occasion of playing in the final group yesterday as well”.
Garcia, who once complained the golf gods conspired against him when he lost a playoff in the 2012 British Open, had the gods on his side Saturday in Amen Corner. I was able to regroup and make a couple pars coming in, two birdie looks. Garcia bogeyed the first two holes on the back nine, but got back within one stroke with a birdie on the 14th. “You just have to roll with it and realize sometimes you’re going to get good breaks and sometimes you get not-so-good breaks”.
Advertisement
However, he has not only bounced back from that setback, but also overcome the small matter of another woeful quadruple-bogey on Thursday, which saw him shoot 75 and end the opening day 10 off the pace. But he’s three shots ahead of Rickie Fowler, four clear of Charley Hoffman and five up on Jordan Spieth, Adam Scott and Paul Casey. And when Hoffman made his only truly bad swing of the day – a 7-iron into the water at the par-3 16th that led to double bogey – Spieth moved further up.
