Harrington Belongs To A Special Club
People are saying Padraig Harrington is one of the elite of professional golf and he is starting to believe they are right
Harrington's comfort as one of the best should make Nick Faldo sleep easy.
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The intersection of greatness and great things shook hands Wednesday under a tent in the North Carolina foothills and, as it turned out, the tent was big enough to hold them both. Padraig Harrington and Arnold Palmer met for the first time while each was making a site visit, independent of one another, at a new development near Tryon called White Oak.
Palmer flew in to have a glance at the course that his firm is designing and Harrington dropped in to choose a site on which to build a house that will serve as his U.S. base. While there might have been a time in which Harrington would have shied away from sharing the spotlight with a legend, clearly he now feels as if he belongs at least at the same lunch table.
"I remember playing in Greensboro when the entire purse was $10,000," said the 78-year-old Palmer of last week's Wyndham Championship, making a play with the longevity card.
Harrington trumped. "Nobody's thinking, 'Poor Arnold, he didn't do too well,'" he said.
The King teed it up for another shot. "One year, I made $58,000 in official money and was the leading money winner."
Harrington would have none of that, either. "I like the way he said, 'official.' I wonder what he won on the side?"
Winning three of the last six majors -- two British Opens and last week's PGA Championship -- has put Harrington squarely into the best-player-other-than-Tiger conversation and even he is beginning to accept that the talk is justified.
"I'm more comfortable at this position than I was when I got into the top 10 [on the Official World Golf Ranking] six or seven years ago," said the 32-year-old Harrington. "It takes a while to believe it, but I'm comfortable more at No. 3. It's something I have to come to terms with. Other than Tiger, there is no one playing at the present time who has won more than three majors. People I would have put on a pedestal -- Phil [Mickelson], Ernie [Els], Vijay [Singh] -- they all have only won three and I'm the youngest of that group."
But winning the British Open or even the PGA this year didn't immediately flip a switch for Harrington. Feeling a part of elite company in the game is coming over time and with success.
"This is an area that I have been talking to [sport psychologist Bob] Rotella and the friends and family that I discuss golf with," he said. "The common theme is that the bottom line is to believe in myself more. I have to believe in myself as much as [other people] believe in me. There's no question that if I want to go to the next level, I have to play with more confidence.
"I can make any tournament a struggle. If I am behind, I can chase and if I am ahead, I can throw shots away. It seems I always want the drama and excitement. But I have to be more assertive. I have to puff up my chest a bit more. I need to play with free-flowing confidence and not make every tournament more of a battle."
Harrington carried on a variation of a theme by winning the year's final two majors on the verge of not being able to compete because of illness and injury. At the British Open, he wondered on Wednesday of championship week whether he'd be able to start the tournament because of a wrist injury. He had laser treatment, physical therapy, threw anti-inflammatories at the wrist and iced it every day. The combination obviously worked because he played at Royal Birkdale practically pain-free.
At Oakland Hills, Harrington played the final holes in Friday's second round in a daze.
