Garcia moves to the top

    Writing from Cherry Hills Village, Colorado
    Friday, September 5, 2014

    There was a time when the slightest disturbance could get Sergio Garcia off his game. He was the walking realization of P.G. Wodehouse’s character flummoxed by the flapping of butterfly wings in the adjacent meadow.
    Garcia is that person no longer. Because he is not, he’s in the lead after two rounds of the BMW Championship – ye olde Western Open, if you will – at Cherry Hills Country Club.
    The proof of Garcia’s shedding of the rabbit ears came on the 18th green. Garcia had scrambled to save par on the par-5 17th after dunking his second, and, after a solid drive and approach, stood on the edge of the 18th green with an opportunity to wrest the lead from Ryan Palmer. He was over the ball, giving the line on his 22-foot putt a first look, when someone on the balcony of the BMW luxury suite behind the green dropped a glass.
    Garcia backed off and looked up. Once upon a time, he would also have imitated a volcano.
    Instead, with Mount Sergio dormant, he got back to business, lined up again, and rolled the birdie putt home for a 6-under-par 64 and a two-day aggregate of 8-under-par 132, a stroke ahead of Palmer, who posted a 64 a few minutes earlier.
    Need more evidence? How about an eardrum popping when he was on the sixth green, elevation 5,360 feet?
    “It obviously helped, because I made a 2 on the next (the par-4 seventh),” Garcia kidded. “It was uncomfortable for five or six holes. First I heard a popping sound. It’s happened before, but it didn’t feel quite the same as before and still doesn’t. I was uncomfortable for five or six hole.”
    One ear banging away, Garcia holed a full lob wedge from 128 yards for his deuce eagle on the seventh, and after a bogey on the eighth, birdied the 12th and 13th to move to 6-under. Birds at the 16th and 18th, the latter after the balcony clatter, set his final score.
    But a 132, a stroke higher than the halfway-point total for the last three Western / BMWs, doesn’t satisfy Garcia, a tough judge.
    “I need to feel like I played better,” Garcia said. “I didn’t play bad, don’t get me wrong. But I played better at the British Open and at Bridgestone.”
    Not because he doesn’t stand a chance to win the tournament, or win the playoff pot o’gold next week at East Lake. But because the Big One in his eyes, the Ryder Cup, is less than a month distant.
    “The $10 million (for winning the FedEx Cup), that’s obviously a bonus,” Garcia said. “At the PGA and the Barclays, I hit some great shots. I want to build momentum and be where I need to be for the Ryder Cup. That’s the most important thing to me.”
    The cast in pursuit of Garcia, who has two top nines in this affair, is a blue-riband group. Palmer, his 64 highlighted by a second eagle in as many days, is the aforementioned stroke back. Rory McIlroy is two back at 6-under 134 after a second straight 67, highlighted by three birdies in the last four holes. Billy Horschel, the Cinderella runner-up last week in Boston, joins him there.
    And look who’s in a tie for fifth: That old belter himself, Bubba Watson, whose 4-under 66 puts him at 4-under 136 at the halfway point. Jordan Spieth, Rickie Fowler and Henrik Stenson are in a gaggle at 3-under 137.
    Palmer hit only three fairways – Garcia only hit five – en route to his 64. That’s where the softer conditions paid off.
    “You could play from the rough a lot,” Palmer said. “I had a lot of wedges out of the rough. Balls were even stopping and spinning back out of the rough. I drew a lot of good lies.”
    Palmer’s eagle at No. 7, a 396-yard test, came via a 30-yard pitch. He holed birdie putts of 13 and 7 feet on the last two holes to finish with a flourish.
    Thanks to the tightly bunched field after the first round – 49 players were within five strokes – the top of the scoreboard featured more changes than a Broadway star’s wardrobe. That Garcia is the man standing at the top when the dinner bell rang is impressive. Now, he has to break his bad run of surrendering 36-hole leads. He’s 1-for-9 converting that into victory, with only the 2001 Buick Classic a success.
    “You could be a little more aggressive today,” Garcia said, noting the softer greens courtesy of the half-inch overnight rain made the putting surfaces more receptive. “It played longer and the breeze made it more challenging.”
    The cool temperatures – it never got higher than 64 degrees – negated the distance advantage heat gives a well-struck shot, but the altitude edge was still there. That made for some educated guesses on approaches, not all of them good.
    “You don’t really look at the yardage ... (you) take off 10 percent,” Watson said. “It’s roughly 7,000 yards if you do that. If you look at it that way, it’s a lot shorter than a normal course we play.”
    Watson said he was trying to hit different shots off the tees, then backtracked and said he was hitting drivers “as hard as I can so it gets way down there.”
    Some things never change.
    – Tim Cronin