PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — When Sergio Garcia tees it up these days and sees all the young stars around him — Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Jason Day and Rickie Fowler among them — it has to make him wistful.
It must make him feel like he’s looking in a mirror and seeming himself 18 years ago when he was the it young star poised to take over the game without a care in the world and everything in front of him.
Sometimes it seems like 15 minutes ago Garcia was sprinting down the Medinah fairway delivering that scissor kick as an exclamation point to his youthful exuberance after hitting that improbable shot from the base of a tree at the 1999 PGA Championship.
Garcia, 19 years old and in his first year as pro then, finished second to Tiger Woods in that PGA.
Eighteen years later, Garcia has eight career wins, none of which is a major championship. The last was the 2012 Wyndham Championship. Before that, he hadn’t won since the 2008 Players Championship, a victory considered to be the most significant of his career and one that might catapult him to greater things (a major championship).
With the lack of wins has come no shortage of scar tissue — the cumulative result from multiple major championship close-call disappointments.
This week’s Honda Classic is not a major, but it’s playing like one, and Garcia will wake up Friday morning tied for the lead with Michael Thompson after he posted a 5-under 65 at PGA National — a standout score considering the 15 to 25 mph winds that blew all day.
Making it an even more symbolic day was one of his playing partners, Fowler, with whom he is friends and someone he must envy because of his youth and rising stardom.
“It’s always nice when you’re young and the scar tissue is not that thick,’’ Garcia said Thursday. “You play and you love it and you don’t really care too much about everything that’s going on around.’’
Garcia was not referring directly to Fowler, but this current generation of young stars in the game. But he might as well have been referring to Fowler, because he is a little bit like Garcia in that he wears his emotions on his sleeve and doesn’t hold a lot back for the public to see.
“As you get older, I think you see more things and you start worrying,’’ Garcia said. “It’s nice to see those guys up there and kind of reminding me a little bit of when I came out and I was much younger.’’
Thompson, after his round, was not speaking specifically about Garcia when he talked about how expectations are something that “everyone struggles with,’’ but he might as well have been referring to him because Garcia is the definition of a golfer who became swallowed up by outside expectations.
“Expectations are kind of a demon for golfers,’’ Thompson said. “When we have them, it’s hard to live up to them, because inside we want to be perfect.’’
Garcia has been doing this for the better part of his 18 years as a pro, trying to manage expectations — both his own and those coming from the outside. He has done so to varying degrees of success and struggle.
There have been triumphs that accentuate his resilience (see the 2008 Players Championship win). And there have been low points (see his 2009 rant about his disdain for Augusta National, his petulance in blaming the 2007 British Open loss to never being the beneficiary of any good luck and his unfortunate scrap with Woods at the Players Championship in 2013).
Through it all, though, Garcia has been true to himself in this way: He’s been himself, not a phony. He often has bled before us and there is something admirable about that.
In Thursday’s Honda Classic opening round, which came a week after his missed the cut at the Northern Trust Open at Riviera, where he said he had “a terrible week where I felt like I didn’t do anything well,’’ Garcia was the best player on the course.
“I didn’t come in with a lot of confidence,’’ Garcia conceded.
Garcia then made a tacit effort to tamp down expectations sure to balloon off his opening-round performance.
“We have only started here,’’ he said. “Still a lot of rounds to go.’’