Garcia’s Solution? Fire the Caddie

Sergio Garcia hasn’t spent much time sprinting up the fairway this season, craning to see a dramatic recovery shot that could keep him in the hunt for a big-time championship. Mostly, he has been trying to cash a check.

Garcia, low amateur in the 1999 Masters, has made slightly more than $100,000 this season, 112th on the PGA Tour money list, and has missed the cut in two of five events. In his four stroke-play tournaments, he has missed the cut twice and finished 35th and 42nd. Hardly the kind of performance expected of “the next rival of Tiger Woods.”

He fired new caddie Fanny Sunesson after missing the cut in the Players Championship. He shot an 82 in the first round, couldn’t recover and sent Sunesson, Nick Faldo’s caddie for 10 years, packing after a three-month relationship.

“I haven’t played well. . . . Everything didn’t work because, you know, my relationship with Fanny didn’t work as good as I would have liked,” he said Wednesday.

“You always try to get the best caddie you think is for you. And, you know, some things work and some don’t. She wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t happy.”

Garcia, who said he and Sunesson differed on club selection and personality, said he wasn’t willing to spend several months to make the relationship work, so now he has Glen Murray on his bag. Whether that makes a difference is another matter, but he says he thinks his game is coming around.

“I’ve been driving the ball pretty well,” he said. “At Bay Hill, I missed two fairways. Now I’m hitting the ball much better. . . . I feel much more comfortable, and hopefully we’ll play well in this tournament and see what we can do.”

Garcia, 19, finished tied for 38th in his Masters debut last year, turned professional and made the cut in seven of the nine tour events he played.

The highlight was his second-place finish in the PGA Championship, featuring the six-iron blasted from behind a tree on the 16th hole Sunday as he tried to catch eventual winner Woods. He chased the extraordinary shot up the fairway to see it wind up on the green. But this year he has been chasing Woods and most of the rest of the tour and hasn’t caught up.

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William W. “Hootie” Johnson, president of Augusta National, said there is a reason the fairways were brought in for the Masters.

It’s because of better players and better equipment.

“These young men are hitting the ball a long way,” Johnson said. “They’re in better condition, the equipment is much better. We felt that we could no longer really kind of let them swing from the heels and we had to require more accuracy off the tee.”

Johnson also said there are no plans to alter the eligibility rules and once again permit winners of PGA Tour events automatic entry into the tournament.

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Jack Nicklaus says that the addition of rough makes Augusta National a far different course than it used to be. It was grown for the first time last year, and modified to make fairways tighter this year.

“It’s become more like a U.S. Open course than a Masters golf course,” he said, referring to the severe setups at Open venues with deep rough and extremely narrow fairways.

The rough at Augusta isn’t deep, but it will make spinning the ball after errant tee shots into the hard, fast greens more difficult.

“You’ll have to invent a lot of shots, and I like that,” he said. “I do not believe you’ll see many records broken this weekend.”

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Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player will tee off today at 1:23 p.m. local time, a nostalgic spectators’ dream. Nicklaus won the Masters six times, Palmer four times and Player three. How special is that threesome?

“We’ve played with each other a thousand times,” Nicklaus said. “All of us are getting tired of seeing each other. . . . Every time we go to a tournament, they put us together as a special pairing.”

Nicklaus never has been accused of being a sentimentalist.

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Nicklaus, who will play in the four major tournaments on the regular tour and four on the senior tour this year, says he’ll keep playing as long as it’s enjoyable, which means as long as he feels competitive. He said that probably means playing primarily senior events next season, but because his game varies from day to day, he is keeping his options open.

“I just came from the range and I liked the way I was hitting the ball, hitting it very nicely. I don’t know who’s going to wake up tomorrow, though.”

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On Tiger Woods: “I think the last six-eight months, he’s played better than I ever played,” Nicklaus said, adding quickly that a great career is measured over many years, not six or eight months.

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The last playoff in the Masters was 10 years ago, when Faldo defeated Raymond Floyd on the 11th hole with a par. Faldo also had won the year before in a playoff, beating Scott Hoch with a birdie on No. 11. If there is a tie after 72 holes, sudden death starts on the 10th hole. . . . Chris Perry won the par-three contest with a birdie on the first playoff hole. Perry was tied at four under with Jay Haas, Jerry Pate and Hunter Haas before the playoff. No winner of the contest has gone on to win the Masters that year. . . . For the first time, the honorary starters ceremony will be shown live (5 a.m. PDT today) on www.masters.org, the Masters Web site.

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Staff writer Thomas Bonk contributed to this story.