Sergio Garcia wishing for kind bounces in his 17th Masters

Sergio Garcia’s nice run in the Masters Tournament came to a halt last year.

The Spaniard, who had a stormy relationship with Augusta National Golf Club in his early years, had improved upon his finishes for three consecutive years.

His missed cut in 2014 ended an overall streak of five consecutive years of making the weekend, including 2013 when he was the first-round co-leader and finished tied for eighth.

In 2014, Garcia shot 74-75 and missed the cut by one shot.

“I don’t know, it was tough,” said Garcia, noting it was breezy and the wind was swirling in the second round. “For some reason I can’t seem to find the comfort. There’s just too many shots that I can’t really see the shot I want to hit.”

He also felt he was a bit unlucky last year.

“If you have one of those bounces that are just a little bit off and everything is catching the wrong slopes and the wrong side of the greens, it becomes a little bit more of a struggle,” he said. “It is what it is.”

That is called frustration.

“When you hit a good shot and you think it’s going to be 8 to 10 feet and it starts rolling away and then all of a sudden it’s 40 feet, it is frustrating,” he said.

Garcia said there isn’t another course quite like Augusta National in regard to the bounces a player can experience.

“It’s difficult to compare it to any other course,” he said. “Augusta National is just very special because of all those things. St. Andrews, I guess, can be a little bit like that. It’s a links course and you have to fly it short of the green sometimes and you know it can bounce a little bit weird sometimes. But no, I guess it’s (Augusta National) quite unique in that aspect.”

Garcia’s comfort level often determines how he plays in the Masters.

“At the end of the day, it’s just a matter of how you feel that week,” he said. “If you feel well, you don’t feel intimidated. If you don’t feel great then you see a lot of other things. I think it’s a feel thing.”

Even playing practice rounds at Augusta National with fellow Spaniard and two-time Masters champion Jose Maria Olazabal over the years hasn’t helped Garcia that much, he said.

“He did comment and tell me some things,” Garcia said. “At the end of the day, there are some things at that course you have to do. When the differences are so little between a good shot that goes 4 feet and a good shot that goes 35 feet, you just have to hit the right shot and get a little bit lucky to catch the right slope. If you are able to do that, then you can have a good week there.”

Major championships such as the Masters might be frustrating at times, but Garcia likes the fact that “they test you to the limit.

“You know your margin for error is smaller in a major. That’s why the majors are tough to win,” he said.

Garcia wasn’t feeling it with his game at the Northern Trust Open at Riviera Country Club near Los Angeles earlier this season, but was still able to stay in contention. Bogeys on his final two holes in the closing round left him one shot out of a playoff.

“I managed to do quite well at L.A. without feeling great with my game,” he said. “I had a chance of winning, which I thought was an achievement.”

The next week, at the Honda Classic, he tied for 31st.

“It’s golf,” he said. “Golf is so much depending how you feel that week and mentally a little bit. I’m not going to lie. The beginning of the year hasn’t been, game-wise, what I expected. I want to start playing a little bit more like I played last year.”

In 2014, Garcia won the Qatar Masters and had three runner-up finishes on the European Tour. On the PGA Tour, he had three runner-up finishes.

He said it’s not a pleasant feeling when a possible win starts getting away from him, like it did at Riviera.

“It’s tough because you can feel it kind of sliding away from your hands,” he said. “There’s not many things you can do to prevent that. You try to stay positive and do the best you can. You try to go to your go-to shot.

“Sometimes it’s tougher than others. It all depends on how you’re feeling at that time. When your game is not totally on, like what happened to me at Riviera, and you start seeing signs of bogeys here and there, it’s tougher to keep under control.”