Sergio Garcia is going to the Players' Championship with his confidence shattered. Sawgrass is the not best course to win it back!
He is going to be under a lot of a pressure as a defending champion at the Players’ Championship at Sawgrass. There will be a lot of media interest, and he may get a little ratty with them all asking the same questions.
What he will want most of all to do is to get out onto the golf course, and feel confident again on a venue he has done well on in the past.
But it is obvious that he is lacking confidence. He hits the ball so well, the rest of his game looks impressive. Every time there is a big tournament, we talk of him as one of the contenders.
But the fact that he is using a belly putter shows you the extent of the lack of confidence he has in his short game.
If you lose confidence with a flat stick, it goes right through your game. If you can’t hole putts after good shots, you can’t up and down it to save a score, all of a sudden 70’s are being turned into 74’s.
You then find yourself missing cuts, not making it through the weekend, and it is a downward spiral from there.
Putting is a big part of the game, but I feel, equally as importantly, it is a great confidence builder for the rest of the game.
And yet, he will not be helped at all by the course. There are holes that can really hurt an-out-of form player, none more than the most famous par three 17th in golf, the Island Green.
I have sat in the commentary booth above the par three 17th at Sawgrass, and the players are shaking in their boots as they play the hole.
The 17th is a fabulous place to have a hole like that. If you stuck it in at the sixth or at the eighth, it would not have the same effect. I look at course being built today, and they all try to follow the example of a 17th hole over water.
The first day of the Players’ Championship two years ago, they had the pin on the front of the tee, a shot of 118 yards.
Yet 50 out of 156 players hit their balls into the water with a half wedge. It is a hole that does not get any easier, and certainly not on the Sunday if the player is in with a chance of winning the Players’ Championship!
Ronan Rafferty was speaking as part of Setanta Golf's coverage.
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