El Nino dealing with the growing pains

Sergio Garcia? Remember him? Next year's big thing two years back? Of course. Yesterday he crept on to the US Open leaderboard playing golf that was both good and wise. And the world wondered where he'd been. Growing up is the answer.

US Opens are different. They stand as landmarks in golf history. Something funny happened to Sergio Garcia at last year's tournament. Something wild. Something funny. Something funnypeculiar, something a little funny ha-ha.

Here's how it went down. He arrived on the fourth tee. Ahead of him was most of humanity, chasing the divinity who would win the tournament. To the right of him was the Pacific Ocean. To the left a small curious gallery. It was morning time and Sergio filled his lungs with good air.

Sergio sets himself. Wiggles. Takes one last look at that flag and then locks on the ball. Backswing. Swing. Swoosh!

Hands shade eyes as heads turn to follow the flight of the ball. Who da man? Heads turn, scan the skies, and turn back again. But lo! Thump! Sergio's ball hits a seagull whose last thought must be that an egg has attacked it. The seagull drops down dead on one side of the out-of-bounds fence, Sergio's ball drops like a bomb, hits the top of a fence post, bounces high but in a mean arc and lands inbounds. You da man!

Not to diminish his mourning for the seagull, but Sergio can't grieve forever. He doubles over with laughter. So do his playing companions. The gallery gasps excitedly. D'ya see that? Damnedest thing! . . . Sergio . . . ball . . . seagull . . . fence . . . post . . . in-bounds! Whoa!

This should be the story of the day, the capper on every news report, the what happened next sequence on a decade of sports quizzes, but something is missing. TV. No TV camera was there to record the moment when the seagull became an exseagull. And if a seagull should pass away in such a manner without a TV camera being present, well who knows if it died at all. So, by the time Sergio finished his round, the incident with the seagull was nothing but a yarn for the locker room.

Funny? Not if your name is Mrs Gull and you are so freakishly widowed. Funny peculiar? Yeah. A year previously it would have been unthinkable if not downright illegal for Sergio Garcia to have privately slain a seagull at Pebble Beach or anywhere else without the cameras catching the moment for posterity. Oh. birdies, albatrosses, seagulls, the fun that might have been had. Twelve months on and the guy is on his way to 46th place. Who cares?

One year previously, Sergio had gone Hollywood. He had become the new boxoffice, boy wonder of golf, charming the hard-bitten Chicagoans on Sunday at Medinah when he chased after that crazy six-iron shot he made on the 16th with his eyes shut, lightening the graceless mood at Brookline as himself and Jesper Parnevik hugged and mugged their way through a successful Ryder Cup tour of duty, teasing Tiger Woods with his kiddish lack of fear, meeting Michael Jordan, turning a dose of teenage acne into an authentication label of his prodigiousness.

He was the nemesis needed to make Tiger exciting and not just phenomenal. It would be Arnie and Fat Jack all over again and a new golden era!

Cut to 2001. Sergio Garcia is the guy who was in a few good films way back but crops up in nothing but duds ever since. He is the Mickey Rourke of the fairways, a curiosity, except he's putting together a quiet body of work again and perhaps this time, with less fuss and no ticker-tape, he could do something substantial.

On Thursday, he arrives late at the first tee in Southern Hills looking tired and pale. Sets off slightly a fluster and bogeys the first. He then goes two over at the seventh. But he pulls his round together like a kid with more wisdom than he has a right to. He birdies nine, which nobody has a right to, does the same on 13, drops one on 15, but birdies 18 again which nobody has a right to. He leaves with the impression of his magnificent approach shot burned into the memory.

He comes off and talks with more pleasure than anyone has seen him express in maybe two years.

"It was a tough day, but I'm pleased with how I handled myself. I felt I hit some good shots, the six I hit to 18 was the best, that was a good way to finish."

And somebody comments that more people seemed to be watching him at the end than had been at the beginning and he acknowledges that his gallery has snowballed in the sun.

"People are coming back," he says, "but a lot of people have stuck by me in the past year when everyone else was saying that I was finished, that it was gone, that it was over for me. That's one of the reasons I've worked so hard and I'm so happy today. It helped that people stayed with me."

He scans through the detail of a level-par opening round, knowing that level par will be a good score. Twelve greens in regulation, no three-putt holes and seven single-putt completions. Driving big if not as straight as he would like. Sergio has his mojo working. El Nino is back.

That impression has been around all season long. He won the (Tiger-free) Colonial at Fort Worth, tied for second at the Memorial tournament, where his putting was shaggy, and tied for eighth at the Byron Nelson. For a player who'd dropped as low as 112th in earnings 12 months previously, it was a comeback that should have been accompanied by a rolling back of rock.

Earlier in the week, he put the improvement down to maturity. In his game and in himself. A year ago, at the Open in Pebble Beach, he would have found it hard to admit he was struggling. When the incident with the seagull happened, he went scampering ahead to the traffic-jammed fifth tee and began telling the story to the knot of golfers there. He earned some polite smiles and looks which said not just now sonny.

And in the third round he hit an 81 and dropped like a dead seagull through the field. Now, life has slapped him around a couple of times.

Maturity hasn't been bestowed lightly. During the fallow times last year Garcia cut an unsympathetic figure, gaining a reputation for being temperamental and difficult to deal with.

There was an unseemly incident with a businessman during a pro-am when Garcia left the course claiming that he had been threatened. There was the sacking of caddy Fanny Sunesson after a brief, three-month partnership. His reputation wasn't helped by the fact that the sacking came after a round of 82. Even as late as February this year, he spat the dummy when assessed for a two-stroke penalty at the Greg Norman Holden Invitational in Sydney.

Many felt that his decision to concentrate on America so early in his career was unwise and for a while it seemed as if a throng of advisers and hangers-on would drag him down. He was prima donna-ish and playing badly. The upside was a major five-year deal with Adidas, negotiated by his Miami-based manager Jose Marquina.

Marquina is on the record about the growing pains of his client and the failure of the golfing world to appreciate that El Nino was in fact just that.

"Once I remember him playing well in the Argentine Open and he was leading and he went back to the hotel room and watched cartoons for the afternoon."

This year, though, right up till yesterday, things have been getting better. He has won $1,470,007 so far and recovered nicely from an early-season blip where he missed cuts at the Masters and the World.Com classic. Since then he has been playing good golf every day and spectacular golf some days.

It would be nice to think that there was some great life lesson involved in turning Sergio Garcia's career around, that perhaps the spectre of John Daly or some other wasted talent appeared to him in a dream and shook him up. He says not. Just hard work and growing up.

"It has been work," he says, "and I am still working a lot, working hard and getting better bit by bit. The problem is we're all getting better out there. You just have to keep on working harder."

The question which hovers over his head is the same as that over any golfer's. How about Tiger? When progress brings you to a certain level, you have to consider Tiger. It's significant that Sergio is even being asked again.

He pays his respects, as they all must. He's lucky to be playing in the Tiger era, everyone is being brought to a different level, the prize money and the attention is better . . .

Yes. But?

"A little unlucky, too, because it's tougher to win a tournament, that's for sure, And that's what you want to do. If I had putted a little better at Memorial, I think I would have been right behind him."

And the mind flips right back to Medinah and the 66 which Garcia shot to lead on the opening day, how the galleries had willed him on and turned on Tiger. Did that really happen? Were those the same people? And if it had ended differently, where would they be today? If Garcia had won in that crucible, what would we be watching now?

"After Medinah, yes, I expected I would be challenging Tiger every week. I was able to do it at the time and I knew that I was going to get better. So I was expecting it, but now there's still a long way to go. I'm still working at it, working hard and I think I am getting a little better."

And you hope that he will make one of those quantum leaps which characterise his career and stay on that leaderboard tomorrow because he is a limelight player. His final day 63 at the Colonial (as Phil Mickelson collapsed) underlined that. And what golf needs more than ever now is another limelight player, someone who loves the last day and the pressure and the challenge.

Glancing back over his CV, perhaps we should have known that he was always too good just to disappear. This is a kid who played the British Open as long ago as 1996. This is a kid who was champion of his home club at 12, a scratch player at 13. This is a kid who tied for second in the second pro tournament he ever played, a kid who won 70 amateur tournaments.

Most of all, this is still a kid. He has earned his few free drops. This week he is playing with the men again. As an equal.