Sergio Garcia has revealed that he has pulled out of this weekend’s Irish Open due to the disappointment of not being selected for the upcoming Ryder Cup.
Garcia is the highest-scoring Ryder Cup player in history, having racked up 28.5 points as a Team Europe talisman in 10 straight appearances from 1999 to 2021, but wasn’t part of the team that won in Rome two years ago.
He harboured ambitions of a recall for the trip to Bethpage Black and started 2025 strongly, winning the LIV Golf Hong Kong tournament, finishing third in Miami and notching a T6 in Riyadh, but faded as the year went on.
He finished no higher than 10th in any of the final nine LIV events of the season, showed nothing in the majors to continue a streak that has seen him fail to register a major top-ten since he won the Masters way back in the spring of 2017 and missed the cut in his lone DP World Tour event of the campaign – the BMW International Open in July.
It meant that by the time European captain Luke Donald chose his six wildcards earlier this week, the 45-year-old Spaniard wasn’t in with a realistic shot of selection.
Donald still called him to let him know he had missed out and Garcia says he was so affected by not getting picked that he felt it best to withdraw from the Irish Open at the K Club in Kildare, which begins on Thursday and will see Ryder Cup selections such as Rory McIlroy, Shane Lowry and Tyrrell Hatton tee it up.
“The call with Luke was fine but not the call I wanted, obviously, but the conversation was fine,” Garcia told Andy Roberts of GolfMagic.
“Now, the only thing I can do is support the team from home. It's as simple as that. I'll be watching and cheering on the European team.
“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.”
Garcia’s plans instead of the Irish Open appear to include playing golf with fellow Spaniard and tennis superstar Carlos Alcaraz in New York, where Alcaraz has reached the semi-finals of the US Open and will play Novak Djokovic.
Alcaraz revealed the plan after his straightforward quarter-final triumph over Jiri Lehecka on Tuesday evening, where Garcia was in the crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium to watch his countryman.
Having swung his tennis racket like a golf club in celebration following the Lehecka win, Alcaraz said in his on-court interview: “Sergio Garcia is there – it’ll be a really difficult one but I will play [golf with him] for sure.
“We will discuss tomorrow but he has to give me at least between 10 and 15 shots. I think it’s going to be great. I’m not that good, Sergio, come on!”
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