Garcia is a formidable talent, but he's already been through a mild form of the putting disease known as the yips (last week he used a belly putter) and another golfing mental disorder, the regrips (in which you can't begin the backswing). He's not a gifted putter. Of the four majors, the British suits him best because the greens are flatter and slower than at the other majors. Harrington, really, is in another league. He has the game, and the head, to win any of them.
They came to the money game differently. Garcia, after a vaunted amateur career, turned pro at 18, and within a few months he had won the Irish Open and nearly won the PGA Championship.
Harrington turned pro at 24, after earning his accounting degree.
"My goal was to be a journeyman," he said on Sunday night. "I thought I could make a living at the game."
He has succeeded, and then some.
Sergio began the playoff bewildered that his 10-footer to win on the 72nd had slid by the hole and irritated by longish waits as he played his final holes. Harrington began the playoff relieved to be in it. He had butchered the 72nd hole, hitting two balls in the water en route to a double bogey, but he was still breathing.
Both golfers had cornermen. Miguel Angel Jimenez, the Spanish Ryder Cupper, crouched in the wings in support of Garcia.
Thirty feet away stood Paul McGinley, the Irish Ryder Cupper and Harrington's close friend. Aware that no European had won a major since Paul Lawrie won the British in '99, Jimenez said of the last two men standing, "The good thing is, no matter what, a European will win the Open."
He meant it, but only to a point. In the week in which Seve Ballesteros, the brilliant Spanish performance artist, announced his retirement from golf, the fitting thing might have been for one of Seve's golfing progeny to win the Open championship. As Seve did in the '70s and '80s, Sergio plays golf fueled by emotion. But on his 72nd hole, needing par to win, he ditched emotion and tried to win playing, he said, "the right way" — by taking an iron off the tee.
The lesson of Van de Velde, in some way, had to be deep in his head. Van de Velde was true to his golfing self and lost. (He hit driver.) Sergio was not, but he lost too, clubbing his approach into a bunker and making 5.
The hole's too damn hard. How great. Carnoustie's 6th has a strip of land called Hogan's Alley. In his only British Open, Wee Ben won at Carnoustie, in 1953. There's a plaque on the 6th tee honoring Hogan and a quote from him: "I don't like the glamour — I just like the game."
Harrington is cut from the same cloth: Analyze and execute, again and again. If you screw up, just play the next shot. Easy to say, hard to do. Sergio knows that, now more than ever.
Regarding the winner: If Hogan were around, he'd appreciate the guy.
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