A second-hole meltdown left his driver in tatters, and left 2017 Masters champion Garcia on the receiving end of \u200ca code of conduct warning.<\/p>\n
Garcia allowed that it was frustration bubbling over from his season — in which his Fireballs have struggled to find success, ranking eighth of 13 in the LIV Golf standings — not the event itself.<\/p>\n
“Just obviously not super proud of it, but sometimes it happens,” Garcia said.<\/p>\n
Having already absorbed a bogey on his first hole — the first of five on the day — Garcia lined up for \u200chis tee shot \u200con No. \u20602, found the shot not to his liking as it made a \u200bbeeline for the fairway bunker and promptly took two heavy swings at the turf in frustration.<\/p>\n
Apparently not content until his driver had lost its head completely, Garcia swung the blunted instrument into a cooling stand a few moments later, then snapped the dangling head of the damaged driver off himself shortly after that.<\/p>\n
Funnily \u2060enough, the par-5 second ended up being the only \u200chole \u200bof Garcia’s first four in which he managed par, settling again for bogeys on the third and fourth.<\/p>\n
On \u200bthat fourth, Garcia was approached by Augusta National competition committee chairman Geoff Yang, who issued him a code-of-conduct warning.<\/p>\n
Asked about what Yang had said, Garcia responded, “I’m not going to tell you.”<\/p>\n
Garcia ultimately finished with the third-highest score among players to make the cut, as his 3-over-par \u200b75 \u200bleft him at 8 over for \u200bthe tournament.<\/p>\n
“Well, if you don’t hit good shots, you’re not going to score well here,” Garcia said. “It’s very simple.”<\/p>\n
As frustrating as it might have been to Garcia, a former Masters champion, his finish was still in keeping with his recent performances at Augusta.<\/p>\n
Garcia has \u200bmissed the cut in six of the eight Masters he has participated in since he \u200bdonned the green jacket, and his best finish in that span was a tie \u200bfor 23rd in 2022.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A second-hole meltdown left his driver in tatters, and left 2017 Masters champion Garcia on the receiving end…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603043,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-603042","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-golf","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}