Going South: Slump has Garcia searching for answers

Sergio Garcia trudges down the left side of the 17th hole, lazily swinging an iron at the wispy rough from which he just slapped an approach into the front bunker.

Swishing that club through the thick August air, with neither a spectator nor pro-am partner nearby, Garcia looks like any detached teen whiling away the last summer hours. His shoulders slump and his head sinks, leaving the loose impression of aimlessness bordering on melancholy.

He is withdrawn, searching for something lost, but Garcia no longer passes for a boy. He first walked these Sedgefield fairways as an 18-year-old amateur mounting an impressive, though futile, charge against Duke grad Joe Ogilvie in the PGA's minor-league tour. They called him El Nino, which made him a boy wonder even an ocean removed from his Spanish home.

The next summer, after Garcia slashed a 6-iron off a tree root, he sprinted and skipped up an Illinois hill, chasing Tiger Woods and the PGA trophy with the whole wired world watching. He came up short, but enraptured romantics crowned him a boy king, certain to win countless major championships in the years ahead.

Ten years later, this is the running count: 45 majors, no victories. He missed the cut last weekend at the PGA, his final major before turning 30.

Garcia shows up for the Wyndham Championship pursuing something entirely different: a guaranteed spot in the PGA Tour's FedEx Cup, a month-long playoff series that's harder to explain than health-care bills and, relatively speaking, costs almost as much.

He wears an orange shirt, a two-tone orange cap and roughly two days of dark stubble on his tanned face. He vaguely remembers his American debut on the Nike Tour and how well Greensboro folks treated him before, but those are peripheral pleasantries.

"You know," he said, "I wanted to take this week off. I couldn't."

Garcia started the season ranked No. 2 in the world, and today he starts this tournament ranked No. 110 in PGA money ($607,000) and No. 115 in FedEx points, 10 spots better than the cut line but situated in the vicinity of Chris Stroud, Roland Thatcher and Troy Matteson. How does he feel about that?

"I don't feel about it," Garcia said after shooting a 65 in the pro-am. "I come here to try to improve on that, but if I don't, no worry."

He presumably wants to save face -- shaved or otherwise -- by making the field for the Barclays playoff opener outside New York City. By doing so, Garcia would complete his 15-tournament PGA requirement for next season before heading overseas for six commitments on the European Tour and in China.

Garcia retains higher standing in Europe, where he won a rich November event that counted as the first leg on the Road to Dubai, that tour's playoff bonanza. He ranks 11th in money there and seventh in the world rankings, which cover a two-year period, but the summer swoon has produced just one notable finish, a 10th-place tie in the U.S. Open.

Mediocrity weighs down Garcia's spirit. He wears emotions outwardly, as always. He invited criticism by failing to lock up the 2007 British Open on the 18th green at Carnoustie. After barely losing the PGA last year, Garcia contrasted his self-described bad breaks with the good luck of Padraig Harrington, his vanquisher again. He rattled the establishment cage in April, blaming his 38th-place Masters finish on botched course changes.

Now, instead of lashing out, he settles for curt assessments. He doesn't sound happy.

"I'm not," Garcia said.

Putting problems cost him down the stretch in several majors, but the reasons behind the freefall vary.

"Usually bad shots," he said. The reason for that? "Bad swings." The reason for that? "More bad swings."

He dismisses the details the same way he dismissed Woods and Harrington just as they ripped major titles out of his hands.

"Well," he said, "that's what I'm trying to figure out. If I knew, I would be playing well. So, I'm trying to work on it and see if I can figure it out."

He openly concedes his frustration. Garcia described similar symptoms in May while weakly defending his biggest American title, the Players Championship. He acknowledged that his parents and friends worried about his unhappiness shortly after his breakup with Greg Norman's 26-year-old daughter, Morgan-Leigh Norman.

Three months later, golf has him down and ready for a vacation. At the PGA, reporters sought a personal review of his exasperating misses in the majors. Garcia insisted that the 1999 magic never made him believe he should win eight majors in seven years.

"What's missing?" he said. "I don't know. I think if I were to aim a putt an inch farther right, nothing would have been missing in one of those."

The 2007 British stings worse than the rest, perhaps, because it made Garcia realize that losses can sting forever.

"When you're a youngster, you don't care about anything," he said. "You just play and hit it and find it, and you don't worry about missing a fairway here or a green there. You just go along like nothing happened. That's the beauty of it. That's what we all try to get back."

He lacked the youthful spark yesterday but still signed caps and paused for photos as he walked from the 17th green to the 18th tee. A course worker drove up in a golf cart with a golden dog in the passenger seat. The frisky dog jumped out, engaging Garcia in a playful game of grab-the-towel.

The dog won the towel and made Garcia smile, no small feat in the dog days of the ex-golden boy's longest summer.

■ Lenox Rawlings can be reached at lrawlings@wsjournal.com.