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On Monday, Luke Donald announced the six captain’s picks who will be joining the six players who’d already qualified for Europe’s Ryder Cup team to officially firm up the roster for the upcoming competition. No one really expected to see Sergio Garcia’s name among those dozen golfers, but he was apparently caught off guard to the point where he decided to withdraw from a tournament he was preparing to play in.
It’s impossible to deny Sergio Garcia is a Ryder Cup legend. The Spaniard earned the right to represent Europe for the first time in 1999 when he was just 19 years old, and he’s still the youngest golfer to compete for either team.
That’s not the only record he can claim, as Sergio broke the all-time points mark that was previously set by Nick Faldo by racking up 28.5 of them over the course of 10 Ryder Cup appearances where he posted a 25-13-7 record in the individual matches he competed in while helping Europe earn six victories.
2010 marked the only time Sergio didn’t compete for Team Europe between the year of his debut and his most recent appearance in 2021, as he took a hiatus from golf prior to the competition due to his struggles on the course. However, he was still a vice captain, and the showdown at Marco Simone in 2023 marked the first time he’d been entirely absent in nearly 25 years.
His decision to join forces with LIV Golf undoubtedly contributed to that development, but Europe proved they were more than fine without him while coasting to a 16.5-11.5 victory over the United States in Italy.
There was no real reason to believe Luke Donald had any interest in tapping the 45-year-old who was the ninth-best golfer LIV Golf had to offer during its most recent season to compete in the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, but Garcia apparently deluded himself into thinking that was the case after he officially ended up on the outside looking in.
Sergio Garcia says he decided to withdraw from the Irish Open because he didn’t make Europe’s Ryder Cup team
The Irish Open will kick off at The K Club in Northern Ireland on Thursday, and Garcia was one of the more than 150 golfers who were slated to compete in the tournament that’s overseen by the DP World Tour. However, that will not end up being the case.
On Tuesday, he decided to withdraw from the event before speaking with GolfMagic to explain why he’d decided to skip it while pointing the finger at the Ryder Cup news, saying:
“I felt like I was so looking forward to being a part of that team, and so I felt like mentally, you know, mentally it was kind of tough.
I didn’t want to go there and not be fully engaged in the tournament and stuff, so I just decided to take a little bit of time off and spend it with the family and do a couple of things, you know, some things outside of golf and just kind of reboot a little bit, recharge the batteries.”
Donald selected Ludvig Aberg, Matt Fitzpatrick, Viktor Hovland, Shane Lowry, Jon Rahm, and Sepp Straka to round out the sextet of automatic qualifiers that consisted of Tommy Fleetwood, Tyrrell Hatton, Rasmus Højgaard, Robert MacIntyre, Rory McIlroy, and Justin Rose.
I’m not really sure how anyone could seriously argue Garcia deserved a spot over any of those guys, but he apparently does not feel the same way.