So, Sergio — for it is first-name terms for a young man enduring a pain like yours — how does it feel today? For three days you kidded us that you could putt. By the swagger in your step, it is a fair guess that you had kidded yourself, too.

Walking from the 18th yesterday, though — the first time you walked from it, that is — the look on your face seemed to tell of a horrible, sinking enlightenment. You had the putt of your life on that 18th green. In fact, you could call it the opportunity of your life. And you could not take it.

Indeed, it is not pushing it to say that that putt alone seemed to encapsulate the past few years of García’s brilliant yet unfulfilled career. A world of gongs, glory and greatness just ten tantalising feet away. It was the kind of putt that has undermined his golfing life, the kind of putt that in recent years he has spent trying and failing to make bend to his will — and here it was, another ten-footer smiling at him and asking if he could make it when it really counted.

So you were close, Sergio. Very close, but not quite there.

It will not help García’s cause that he will know all this. He will know what people are saying and thinking. How can he recover from that? How does he find a way back from that? He will not need to read today’s newspapers for that. He may well be asking those questions, too.

The same was asked of Thomas Björn after he tossed away the Open at Royal St George’s four years ago.

Björn became a question mark with a career in doubt. And, unlike García, the Dane did not have eight top-five finishes in major tournaments to his name and a first-place still eluding him.

“It’s not news in my life,” García said last night, utterly unconvincingly, as if to pre-empt the inquisition. “I’ve just got to move on. I’m fine.” But does he really fancy it? Has he really got it? “If I’d lost,” Padraig Harrington said, “I don’t know what I’d think about playing golf again.” García probably does not know either right now.

“You must be bitterly disappointed,” the first questioner asked in the press room afterwards.

“No, I’m thrilled,” he replied, deadpan, before railing against fate, delays on his 72nd hole and an unlucky bounce off the pin on the 16th during the play-off.

Bitter, beaten and, now, overnight, our latest study in what pressure can do to a man. Does García lack bravery? No. No man who took on the green as he did on the 10th, straight at the pin and over a bunker, daring the sand to swallow his ball whole, could be accused of a lack of courage.

Yet, then again, what does it say about courage and the professional golfer when he is chasing the play-off, the way García was yesterday, and he leaves his birdie putt short? And what does it say about the winning mentality if you are so uncomfortable when in a winning position? He made it look as though he could handle it, he was unflappable through the first four holes and even when he had a bogey at the 5th, he gave the impression of a man in control.

But then came the pain, the 6th, 7th and 8th, a run of holes where he conceded his lead, when certainty was swept away and an awkward hush fell upon the galleries around him, the spectators grimacing and whispering to each other. Yes, here was the champion-elect in freefall and struggling desperately to get a foothold.

Yet he clung on. Some golfers might have sunk without trace.

Steve Stricker, his playing partner, for instance — he never even came up for air. García showed character, he got that foothold and he rallied. But what does it say about an athlete who delivers of his best only when chasing the leader, rather than leading themselves?

Only García can provide the answers. The rest of us, anyone interested in golf and psychology and what it is that keeps a man from his ambition when they are only ten feet apart — we can watch. The greatest man never to win a major; that cliché is his to treasure. It was pointed out yesterday that García’s putts on six of the last eight holes stayed out by inches. Is that a man lacking courage, a man who cannot putt, or simply desperately unlucky? That is Garcia’s ten-foot conundrum.

Faced with winning the Open Championship? Faced with requiring a single par on a single hole? Faced with personal fulfilment? Faced with a ten-foot putt. No, that he could not do.

Major problems

They call him El Niño but the wind was taken right out of Sergio GarcÍa’s sails at Carnoustie as his familiar final-round nerves returned. GarcÍa’s career has been a mixture of high promise and bitter disappointment as, tormented by problems with his putting, he has gone from top-five finish in one major to missed cut in the next. This should have been his moment – and it is hard to see how he can recover.