At PGA Championship, Major Attitude

CHASKA, Minn .

A player seeking a major championship can adopt one of two attitudes, each of them extreme. He can think about it all the time, and talk about it all the time, and heap pressure on himself. Or he can refuse to talk about it, and try not to think about it.

The different approaches will be on display in the PGA Championship at Hazeltine this week, with 98 of the top 100 players in the world teeing off on a course that looks like a huge farm, where they will scramble for a chance to hold the only trophy left that matters in 2009. Phil Mickelson is prone to announcing his large ambitions: He wants "to be the last major champion until Augusta comes around in April," an enduring win that he can savor until the cycle starts all over again next spring with the Masters. Stewart Cink is the opposite; he's a self-described "small-picture" player who habitually deflects pressure in favor of process, which helped him win the British Open in a playoff last month.

"I have never really been the kind of guy that thought of myself as a must-win major guy," Cink said. "Like a lot of people have asked me: Now that the monkey's off your back, how does it feel? I never thought there was a monkey."

Sergio García is searching for the right mind-set. It scarcely seems possible, but this week marks the 10th anniversary of García's debut as a major contender, without a victory. A decade ago in the 1999 PGA, a 19-year-old García joyfully scissor-kicked his way up the fairways at Medinah to finish runner-up by a stroke to Tiger Woods. Back then, it seemed inevitable that García would win multiple majors and provide Woods, then just 23 and a lot less accomplished himself, with a needed rival.

Instead, while Woods has amassed 14 major titles, García has yet to win his first. He's been second three times, and third twice. He's also finished fourth twice, and fifth twice more. With each failure, the mental burden grows, and his game gets a little less carefree.

"I think that the beauty of it when I came out is, you know, when you are a youngster, I don't know, you don't care about anything," he told a media gathering on Wednesday, still looking like a boy, though that could have been due to the Jello-green color of his golf shirt. "You just play and hit it and find it and you don't worry about missing a fairway here or missing a green there. You just go along like nothing happened. So that's the beauty of it. That's what we all try to get back.

"I didn't come home and [say], 'Oh, because of what I did in the PGA, I should win eight majors, you know, in the next six or seven years.' No, you try to play your best and give yourself chances and win as many as you can. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. I had my chances. Unfortunately, I haven't taken them, but you know, it's just a matter of keep going, keep going at it, and believe you can do it."

García undoubtedly understands that the PGA has a history of ratifying good players seeking their first major, such as Steve Elkington (1995), Mark Brooks (1996), Davis Love III (1997) and David Toms (2001). It has also produced some relative flukes, from Wayne Grady (1990) to Rich Beem (2002) to Shaun Micheel (2003). By August the more dominant players can be a little worn out or sated, and the courses are hot and dry, and it's hard to get much separation in such a crowded field.

But in this year's PGA, any aspiring first-time winner will have to deal with the fact that the already established major champions are coming in especially ambitious. Both Mickelson and Woods are edgy, winless in majors this season and with grim game faces on. Then there is defending champion Padraig Harrington, seething from a triple-bogey collapse and second-place finish to Woods last week in the Bridgestone Invitational.

These players have something in common, and it's something from which García can perhaps learn. The great champions, the ones who truly believe in themselves and their ability, who have the intestinal fortitude to hold up while others are collapsing, don't just chatter hopefully about winning one major. They talk about winning lots of them. Even when Mickelson spent a fruitless decade chasing his first, with 17 finishes in the top 10 of majors without lifting a trophy, he promised that he would someday be a multiple winner. He never shied from that pressure or backed down from the promise.

Harrington observed Mickelson carefully while he was experiencing some similar frustrations in his own career, including 29 runner-up finishes worldwide. But once Harrington broke into the major champion category, he ran off three titles in six tries, with his pair of British Opens in 2007 and 2008 and last year's PGA.

"I watched other players who had won majors, and I learned from them," Harrington said. "I will always give the best credit probably to Phil Mickelson; anytime he was asked about winning a major, he always put it in plural. He said, 'I'm going to win majors.' So I copied that rhetoric. And I would always put it into 'majors,' to make sure that if you succeed, make sure it's not the end of the road and that there's more afterwards."

There is something useful for all of us in this attitude. Champions, especially the kind who repeat, don't sit around waiting for a one-time stroke of good luck. In a sport that can be maddeningly fickle, they take charge of themselves and their own destiny.