PGA Tour Archives - Marco Garcia Photography

Turn on a dime.

So after my two weeks golf week hell, I had a week off to recover, pay the bills, and storm the football field for the NFL’s Pro Bowl. We don’t get to cover sports much in Hawaii on the national level. Hawaii doesn’t have any professional teams nor is there much national interest in college or high school sports unless they win big. Yet with two major PGA Tour golf tournaments and the Pro Bowl…all within the span of three weeks in January…I’m sported out!

Sport photography is a tough business. Your career is based on capturing that winning moment. Photographer (and mentor if you ask me) Nathaniel Welch once told me about sports photographers. “Your livelihood depends on whether or not the athlete or team you are following makes the big play and wins,” or something like that. If that team or athlete fails, you fail. If you have to depend on someone else to make a living, it isn’t a good career.

I once wanted to be a sports photographer back in the day of film and manual focus cameras. It was in college and the University of Texas had top notch athletic programs and athletes. I spent much of my college days at football fields, basketball courts, and swimming pools.

UT vs Houston BB — UT vs Houston men’s basketball 1991-1992

Luckily I avoided that career path but do wish I had dabbled in the professional sports photo world a bit in my younger days. I would have been special times to have gone to a Super Bowl, a World Cup or an Olympics yet I don’t regret the path I have taken. Although I heard Nathaniel’s words much later in life, I clearly understood them years before.

But back to the Pro Bowl, the NFL event that brings the best of the best players who currently are not playing in the following week’s Super Bowl. Not too far back, the Pro Bowl used to be held after the Super Bowl but the Pro Bowl began to lose relevance and the NFL had to update and remake the event to keep people interested. For too many years, the Pro Bowl was a powder puff game where teams played hard the first quarter and cruised the rest of the time. I recall many times hearing boos and catcalls from fans as QB’s would take knees to run down the clock or tacklers would gently grab a runningback so as to avoid injuries. The last two years have changed quite a bit as players are actually out there to win. There’s still some powder puffiness going on but this last game proved to be a nail biter.

With minutes left in the game, Team Sanders scored only to have Team Rice quickly score soon after and take the lead with a two-point conversion. Team Sanders then drove midway down the field only to have Philadelphia Eagles QB Nick Foles sacked by Dallas Cowboys DT Jason Hatcher forcing TS into an impossible 67-yard field goal. With virtually no time left on the clock, the kick went wide but New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie caught the kick and ran towards the opposite end zone. The media and the side line had rushed the field as we thought the game had ended but clock had not completely zeroed out. Cromartie ran down field in hopes of making a touch down and headed straight towards me. I aimed my camera and fired thinking he’s stop but he kept coming. I didn’t have time to move and wondered if my cameras would break on impact.

Cromartie looked forward then back and rushed towards me only to turn on a dime to avoid running me over. He clipped the lens of my second camera on my shoulder which rocked back and forth after he shot by. Most of you who know me know I’m not a small guy but Cromartie would have knocking the hell out of me. It would have made a funny top ten plays of the day on Sports Center but it would have been an expensive trip to Canon repair…if not the doctor as well.

If you are not on the field and only watch it on television, its really hard to understand the athleticism of these men. I’ve seen 300 lb plus linemen move like ballet dancers and watched wide receivers make impossible catches…and this is only the powder puff Pro Bowl! My current and recent experience photographing football is the University of Hawaii and many of the players if not most will never see the professional side of the sport. There is no comparison. The Pro Bowl brings the best of the best to the field. I can only imagine if it had been a stumbling local college kid and what might have happened. Thanks Antonio for not breaking my back or bank.

*Note–The 2o14 Pro Bowl teams were drafted from both the NFC and AFC and teammates had the possibility of playing each other. The teams were headed by Hall of Famers Jerry Rice and Deion Sanders.

Live by the club, die by the iron.

2014 started with a bang, rather a swish of a golf club. Hawaii is golf central in January. Everyone from Barack to Vijay come to the Islands to hit our beautiful links. My first two weeks of the year are filled with the smell of grass, the pain of walking 18 holes plus an additional 18 holes, and the sound of…well…nothing as pro golfers are too sensitive to the sound of the camera shutter or the sound of anything else. An NBA player or Premiere League footballer can be screamed at during a free throw/kick…but a golfer? Well, silence is the only way to oppose this noble and elite sport.

My week spent at the Kapalua course for the Tour of Champions in Maui was hell. The hilly greens could easily be a ski resort and hiking is the only way to really describe covering the action on this course. The outstanding views of Molokai are touchable from many of the holes and all considering the current weather pattern on the mainland (Jan 2014) there is no better place to be…just don’t ask my knees, thighs or calves the next day. What a pain! Hoisting 400mm f2.8 up hill is no fun.

My next assignment is the relatively flat Waialae Country Club course for the Sony Open staring Wednesday. Its warmer, not as scenic but there are no hills. However, there are many more golfers to cover and be sensitive about ensuring an errant camera shutter disrupt their concentration.

Mr. Obama, above, started my year on the first at Mid Pacific Country Club. The club is one of the few Mr. Obama can play at where the public can actually catch a glimpse of him. Most of the courses he now plays in Hawaii are secluded and difficult to get to but Mid Pac’s 18th hole sits on a public street across from a popular hiking trail. Obama, hat askew, hit off the fairway onto the green and made a long putt that would make any golfer proud. All considering he’s played about 12 rounds of golf during his 15 day Hawaiian vacation, he should be able to make all his putts!

No Still Photography Allowed

If that were only the truth!

I just finished my nine day odyssey at the 2012 Sony Open in Hawaii. I’ve had my complete fill of sun, pollen, sunburn, Old Spice, pesticides, idiot volunteers, and sensitive golfers. Oh how we marched and humped the flat yet hot course out at the Waialae Country Club chasing Ryo-kun and any golfer who dared to stray into first place for those few 100 yards or so.

I’ve shot the Sony Open in Honolulu for the last several years and it never seems to get any easier with all the running around and struggles of the course and not to mention the hours of being out in the sun. Every year at the end of the tourney, I get what I call a sun cold…better yet, a golf cold. I have my face down in the grass for multiple days inhaling all the pollen and pesticides I could ever want in a long drawn out week. Come wednesday, I get sneezy, congested, and irritable. The irritability just might be my irascible personality run afoul by the incomprehensible logic of volunteer marshals, the errant golf balls from the Pro Amers, and a weighty 400mm F2.8 lens digging into my neck muscles.

Golf is one of those sports that just begs to ask why anyone would pursue such a unreasonable game where a putt depends on whether the grains of the grass are facing towards or away from you, or whether your ball will slice or hook on the based on how your hands grip the driver. How ironic that basketball players get booed and screamed at when doing free throws from the line but golfers can’t take even a bright shirt if its in their eye sight. A gentleman’s sport, indeed! Especially when you hear certain golfers swearing like sailors when a ball goes off course or a putt doesn’t fall just like they envisioned.

Regardless of my own prejudice of the game (note…I’ve been know to roam the cloudy cool hills of the Pali golf course so I’ve no real complaints) I truly enjoy shooting the sport. The anticipation, the surprises, the reactions are all so great. Its completely boring most of the time as so many of the players possess that calmness the sport demands which doesn’t allow them to showboat or hoot and holler when sinking an eagle. Sure you get the fist pump but you’ll never get the true “jube” shots you’ll find in other sports.

Whether its pure madness to follow the Japanese sensation Ryo Ishikawa, who I truly think looks like an real life anime character, I’ll never truly understand. I think its the pack mentality of rushing around with a dozen or so photographers from the US and Japan, all struggling to capture that unique image of the golfer in pure rapture or total disbelief in his ability to make a two inch ball land in just the right spot. Even though you can’t communicate with each other due to a language barrier or a sensitive golf caddie, we share the same sweat, pain, sunburns, and struggle. One big unified mass chasing a bunch of dopes chasing a little white ball.

I do have a favorite shot of the week and its of this guy David Hearn hitting out of the bunker on the ninth green. I just found his expression of fear, worry, hope, and more fear more appealing than most of the stuff I shot that day. He fizzled at the end of the tournament allowing moustached Johnson Wagner to win all the marbles. Do I dare say Mr. Wagner’s prowlness is due to his hairy lip? We’ll never know.

A wide view of the 18th

Every year I am hired to photograph the Sony Open. I’ve made a bit of a name for myself shooting golf as I’ve done it for a few years and I learned from some of the very best shooters. Stan showed me how to sit on the first tee and get great, clean tee shots, Chris showed me how to position myself for anticipation, Sammy showed me how to walk up and down the course, and Grayson showed me how to hustle. I mean hustle. So I know my golf or at least pretend to.

Do I like shooting golf? Eh… Its tough shooting round after round of golf for days on end and when we had more than one tournament here, it was super hard to get motivated to follow these super sensitive” golfers for hours on end. By the end of any tournament, the last thing I want to do is be out in the sun, see grass, or anything to do with little white dimpled golf balls. I usually stay sick for a few days after as all the sun, pollen, pesticides, and the weight of my cameras breaks me down.

Yet, I get a shot like this and it all feels worth it all. Its not the best but it sure makes me feel I can really see the world happening around me. Sure, its just a sports shot, and not a great one at that, but to know I walked up and down a course for four days in the rain, sun, and humidity carrying three cameras, a heavy 400mm lens while slathered in sunblock…and get a shot like this…makes me feel like I’ve come along way from time time I first walked into a club house. Thank you, you men of golf, who taught me how to see golf…and thank you Steve Grayson…not a golf tourney goes by here in Hawaii without your memory recalled in laughter, professionalism, and fear.

Did anyone ever hear the chimp story between him and Sammy? HA!

If many of you don’t or didn’t know Steve Grayson, he was a great GREAT man who knew his photography. He once said he was one of the only photographers who was able to walk through South Central LA during the OJ riots with camera and taking pictures. I mean, look at him! Would you mess with that man?!?

Grayson sent me this shot of him and the hotties of the golf world. I bet those women were more happy to be seen with him that him with them.

In January 2008, Grayson passed away. Its been three years now and we still talk about that man of men, a giant among us who crawl through the grass to get that shot. We will always remember your bad plaid shorts.