Padraig Harrington's success is 'a reproach to the Floridaisation of the professional game'. Alamy Stock Photo
column
Pádraig Harrington is the greatest Irish sportsperson of all. This is why
Harrington won again on the PGA Tour champions last weekend – no Irish sportsperson can match his success within one sport and influence on countless others.
Another ‘greatest sportsperson’ column? Don’t they keep them for the slow news weeks?
And yes, these columns are usually framed by glass to be broken in case of emergency, or else are dusted off in the aftermath of a crowning triumph.
The Simmons Bank Championship on the PGA Tour Champions is nobody’s idea of a crowning triumph and, yet, to to watch Pádraig Harrington awkwardly hoist another of those golf-patented cumbersome trophies on Sunday night was to experience a great moment of clarity.
Harrington’s the best we have ever had, isn’t he?
Let’s begin with the basic sporting case. At 53, he is still out there and competing on the senior circuit: Sunday was his ninth win in 48 starts on the Epilogue Tour. Harrington is now fourth on the overall points list and will contend next month for the order of merit title.
His competitive spirit has not been quarantined on the champions tour, either. He finished in a tie for 22nd place in brutal conditions at this year’s Open Championship, and made the cut in all three of his major appearances last year. His form was such that he changed his schedule in an ultimately forlorn bid to play his way onto the European Ryder Cup team.
Any claimant to be our greatest-ever sportsperson must have won the biggest prizes against a global field of talent. This rules out GAA and rugby players, but draws in footballers, tennis players, golfers, boxers, swimmers and track and field athletes.
There are few sporting competitions on earth as difficult to win as golf majors, and Harrington is one of 46 men in history to win three of them.
Add to Harrington’s major titles another three wins on the PGA Tour and 11 European Tour victories and a world ranking as high as number three, a status further edified by the fact numbers one and two were Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.
So if you want to make this a lay-your-medals-on-the-table contest, then Harrington at least meets the quota for the conversation.
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He has deeper sporting achievements, however. A country demands its greatest sportsperson exhibit some ideal element of us all, and Harrington’s victories were all built on a trait we like to be believe quintessential in Irish sport: grit.
Harrington’s success is a reproach to the Floridaisation of the professional game, where the game is dominated by long-hitting Republican voters chasing low scores in still conditions and stultified atmospheres.
“If you were brought up in Phoenix where it’s beautiful sunshine, pretty calm, you’re going to have a perfect golf swing”, Harrington told the PGA Tour website last year. “If you’re brought up in Ireland on Stackstown Golf Club up the side of a mountain, and you become a good player, it will be because you’ve learned how to play the game, how to get the job done.”
There’s also a difficulty tariff added to these tasks for those who did not have a compatriot to light the path before them: it’s always more difficult to be the first to achieve something.
Harrington became the first man from the 26 counties ever to win the Open Championship, and the first man from the island to win the PGA Championship. Hell, he was the first European to win the latter in 78 years, and the first European to successfully defend the Claret Jug in more than a century.
This has left a legacy to be assumed by others.
“Pádraig was the one who made us all believe that we could do it that we could follow in his footsteps and win major championships”, said Rory McIlroy earlier this year.
And it’s in the casting of his imperceptible influence that Harrington distinguishes himself as our greatest. Prior to Harrington, the North Star for Irish sporting greats was Roy Keane, from whom they drew an implacable demand for high standards from others and a zealous refusal to indulge their own doubts, luxuries, and vulnerabilities.
For all the success the supposed Keane doctrine provoked in others, it sounded a pretty miserable life. Read the autobiographies of O’Gara, O’Connell or many of the great GAA players of the noughties: you weren’t doing your sport correctly if you weren’t utterly consumed by nerves and finding your professional life as something to be endured, rather than enjoyed.
Harrington’s philosophy is antithetical. He is more forgiving of errors and mistakes, because, quite frankly, it’s impossible to play a round of golf without making any. It’s no coincidence he worked closely with sports psychologist Bob Rotella, author of Golf is not a Game of Perfect.
Asked for his strengths as a golfer earlier this year, Harrington replied, “I’m a real good optimist. I really do look forward. I’m not somebody who looks at the past.”
The latest to pay homage to Harrington’s view of sport is Jonathan Sexton, who was in the room when Harrington spoke to the Irish rugby team at Carton House in 2009.
Harrington spoke of how he had bottled the 72nd hole of the Open at Carnoustie, putting his third shot into the water in front of the green. Harrington had visions of his father’s disappointment and imagined the disappointed reaction across Ireland, but his caddy Ronan Flood machine-gunned him with positive thoughts, telling him he could get up and down and get into a play-off. Harrington did exactly that and beat Sergio Garcia in overtime.
“You assume these superstars are bulletproof mentally, but this made me realise they aren’t”, writes Sexton in his autobiography. “They are human. I’d had those doubts on the pitch, especially as a place-kicker. It felt he was speaking directly to me.”
Sexton did a pretty good job of conquering those doubts.
Harrington’s influence has trickled far beneath the rarified plane of elite sport, and he has faithfully fulfilled the pretty unfair demand we place on our great sportspeople to speak in interesting ways about life separate to their sport. For evidence of that, see his casually profound three-minute treatise on fatherhood to the Golf Channel last year:
"If your kid gets good at the game that doesn’t necessarily make them love the game. But if the kid loves the game, it’s likely they’ll become good at it. It’s the love that should be first."
This column brings its own personal biases to this argument, of course. I was in the crowd when Harrington delivered an address during my first year at university, during which he managed to utterly flip my attitude to nerves in a single sentence.
Nerves, he said, don’t feel great, but they are proof you are fully invested in whatever is stirring those nerves, which is a far better means of living than wandering through life with nothing to truly care about.
Harrington truly cares about golf, and there is something pure about his love of the sport. Sure, he has made a fortune, but the professional game has been fractured and irredeemably damaged by the greed of a cohort of elite players who put their share of Saudi wealth above the best interests of their sport.
And a final point to add to the argument: Harrington has remained a fundamentally decent man through all of this.
Harrington is still as obsessed by his sport and addicted to competition as he ever was, all the while remaining utterly himself away from the golf course: generous, inquisitive and maddeningly stubborn.
We should celebrate his many brilliant consistencies.
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Pádraig Harrington is the greatest Irish sportsperson of all. This is why
OKAY, I KNOW what you’re thinking.
Another ‘greatest sportsperson’ column? Don’t they keep them for the slow news weeks?
And yes, these columns are usually framed by glass to be broken in case of emergency, or else are dusted off in the aftermath of a crowning triumph.
The Simmons Bank Championship on the PGA Tour Champions is nobody’s idea of a crowning triumph and, yet, to to watch Pádraig Harrington awkwardly hoist another of those golf-patented cumbersome trophies on Sunday night was to experience a great moment of clarity.
Harrington’s the best we have ever had, isn’t he?
Let’s begin with the basic sporting case. At 53, he is still out there and competing on the senior circuit: Sunday was his ninth win in 48 starts on the Epilogue Tour. Harrington is now fourth on the overall points list and will contend next month for the order of merit title.
His competitive spirit has not been quarantined on the champions tour, either. He finished in a tie for 22nd place in brutal conditions at this year’s Open Championship, and made the cut in all three of his major appearances last year. His form was such that he changed his schedule in an ultimately forlorn bid to play his way onto the European Ryder Cup team.
Any claimant to be our greatest-ever sportsperson must have won the biggest prizes against a global field of talent. This rules out GAA and rugby players, but draws in footballers, tennis players, golfers, boxers, swimmers and track and field athletes.
There are few sporting competitions on earth as difficult to win as golf majors, and Harrington is one of 46 men in history to win three of them.
Add to Harrington’s major titles another three wins on the PGA Tour and 11 European Tour victories and a world ranking as high as number three, a status further edified by the fact numbers one and two were Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.
So if you want to make this a lay-your-medals-on-the-table contest, then Harrington at least meets the quota for the conversation.
He has deeper sporting achievements, however. A country demands its greatest sportsperson exhibit some ideal element of us all, and Harrington’s victories were all built on a trait we like to be believe quintessential in Irish sport: grit.
Harrington’s success is a reproach to the Floridaisation of the professional game, where the game is dominated by long-hitting Republican voters chasing low scores in still conditions and stultified atmospheres.
“If you were brought up in Phoenix where it’s beautiful sunshine, pretty calm, you’re going to have a perfect golf swing”, Harrington told the PGA Tour website last year. “If you’re brought up in Ireland on Stackstown Golf Club up the side of a mountain, and you become a good player, it will be because you’ve learned how to play the game, how to get the job done.”
There’s also a difficulty tariff added to these tasks for those who did not have a compatriot to light the path before them: it’s always more difficult to be the first to achieve something.
Harrington became the first man from the 26 counties ever to win the Open Championship, and the first man from the island to win the PGA Championship. Hell, he was the first European to win the latter in 78 years, and the first European to successfully defend the Claret Jug in more than a century.
This has left a legacy to be assumed by others.
“Pádraig was the one who made us all believe that we could do it that we could follow in his footsteps and win major championships”, said Rory McIlroy earlier this year.
And it’s in the casting of his imperceptible influence that Harrington distinguishes himself as our greatest. Prior to Harrington, the North Star for Irish sporting greats was Roy Keane, from whom they drew an implacable demand for high standards from others and a zealous refusal to indulge their own doubts, luxuries, and vulnerabilities.
For all the success the supposed Keane doctrine provoked in others, it sounded a pretty miserable life. Read the autobiographies of O’Gara, O’Connell or many of the great GAA players of the noughties: you weren’t doing your sport correctly if you weren’t utterly consumed by nerves and finding your professional life as something to be endured, rather than enjoyed.
Harrington’s philosophy is antithetical. He is more forgiving of errors and mistakes, because, quite frankly, it’s impossible to play a round of golf without making any. It’s no coincidence he worked closely with sports psychologist Bob Rotella, author of Golf is not a Game of Perfect.
Asked for his strengths as a golfer earlier this year, Harrington replied, “I’m a real good optimist. I really do look forward. I’m not somebody who looks at the past.”
The latest to pay homage to Harrington’s view of sport is Jonathan Sexton, who was in the room when Harrington spoke to the Irish rugby team at Carton House in 2009.
Harrington spoke of how he had bottled the 72nd hole of the Open at Carnoustie, putting his third shot into the water in front of the green. Harrington had visions of his father’s disappointment and imagined the disappointed reaction across Ireland, but his caddy Ronan Flood machine-gunned him with positive thoughts, telling him he could get up and down and get into a play-off. Harrington did exactly that and beat Sergio Garcia in overtime.
“You assume these superstars are bulletproof mentally, but this made me realise they aren’t”, writes Sexton in his autobiography. “They are human. I’d had those doubts on the pitch, especially as a place-kicker. It felt he was speaking directly to me.”
Sexton did a pretty good job of conquering those doubts.
Harrington’s influence has trickled far beneath the rarified plane of elite sport, and he has faithfully fulfilled the pretty unfair demand we place on our great sportspeople to speak in interesting ways about life separate to their sport. For evidence of that, see his casually profound three-minute treatise on fatherhood to the Golf Channel last year:
This column brings its own personal biases to this argument, of course. I was in the crowd when Harrington delivered an address during my first year at university, during which he managed to utterly flip my attitude to nerves in a single sentence.
Nerves, he said, don’t feel great, but they are proof you are fully invested in whatever is stirring those nerves, which is a far better means of living than wandering through life with nothing to truly care about.
Harrington truly cares about golf, and there is something pure about his love of the sport. Sure, he has made a fortune, but the professional game has been fractured and irredeemably damaged by the greed of a cohort of elite players who put their share of Saudi wealth above the best interests of their sport.
And a final point to add to the argument: Harrington has remained a fundamentally decent man through all of this.
Harrington is still as obsessed by his sport and addicted to competition as he ever was, all the while remaining utterly himself away from the golf course: generous, inquisitive and maddeningly stubborn.
We should celebrate his many brilliant consistencies.
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column Golf Padraig Harrington