Sports

Sergio stumbles in crunch time

Sergio Garcia “wasn’t feeling comfortable” yesterday. He wasn’t quite himself. The calm, fluid player who carried a two-shot lead into yesterday’s final round of The Barclays Championship at Bethpage Black became “a little bit jumpy,” he said. “I could feel that I wasn’t quite there.”

The result was the Spaniard stumbling to a 4-over 75 yesterday to finish tied for third. His 6-under par total was four strokes behind winner and playing partner Nick Watney.

“It was nice to see him do as well as he did,” Garcia said of Watney, who started the day at 8-under. “I would have loved to give him a better fight than I did. But you know at the end of the day, I can’t really be disappointed.”

Garcia was trying to post back-to-back victories, having won the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro last week. But his chances of victory yesterday were hurt by two-shot swings at the par-3 8th and the par-4 10th. Watney made birdie on both those holes while Garcia took bogeys.

Garcia struggled with his accuracy much of the day. He reached 12 of 18 greens in regulation and needed 33 putts to complete his round.

“I obviously struggled with the speed of the greens,” he said. “They were much slower. Even though they still looked brown, they put a bit of water on them to not lose them. You could tell the difference. I just struggled to get the speed of the greens early on when I had three or four good chances for birdies.”

He couldn’t explain why he was not as relaxed as he’d been throughout the week.

“I just didn’t feel as good as I did the last three days or the last week,” he said. “I didn’t feel quite as comfortable. [Saturday] I felt really, really at ease. I felt really, really calm. I didn’t feel nervous at all. [Sunday] I was a little bit jumpy.”

Garcia earned $464,000 for his third-place tie with defending champion Dustin Johnson. It gives Garcia close to $2 million in earnings over the last two weeks. Though he stands in 10th place in the FedEx Cup points standings, Garcia plans to skip the Deutsche Bank Championship this week in Boston.

“It’s been two very good weeks,” he said. “Obviously, I would have loved to finish in a different way. But to me, to be able to win last week and put myself in contention here again this week was good.’’I had a good shot at winning this tournament on this golf course which is really, really tough and is testing you all the time. I would have loved to do a little bit bitter. But there’s always things that you can improve on and that’s what I want to try to do.”