By Jim Moriarty
Photo By J.D. Cuban
August 15, 2008
On a cold, rainy day better suited to Dublin than Detroit, playing a game that gives a person ample opportunity to tell himself anything he wishes but, in the end, reveals only what he truly believes, Padraig Harrington showed again he was a true believer in himself and, in the process, more than just the Champion Golfer of the Year but the best player in the world -- currently active division.
A year and a month ago during the British Open at Carnoustie, Sergio Garcia and Padraig Harrington passed each other going in opposite directions, both physically and metaphorically, on a bridge across the Barry Burn. It would be easy to say Harrington's back-to-back 66s and his two-shot victory over Garcia and Ben Curtis in the PGA Championship at Oakland Hills CC was just another step toward the personal destinies of Europe's two best players. But this was neither the same Sergio nor the same Padraig. Both are better versions of the players they were that day. Like rivals of old.
Harrington, the 36-year-old Irishman who has climbed golf's rope ladder hand over fist, added the PGA Championship to his back-to-back British Opens, giving him three of the last six major titles and one half of the career slam. Turns out the one-time junior accountant had a head for numbers but a heart for silver. Harrington is the only Irishman to win the PGA Championship, the only European golfer to win back-to-back major championships, and the fourth player to win the British Open and the PGA Championship in the same year, the first being Walter Hagen who undoubtedly would have enjoyed watching all this with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other from the room he once occupied upstairs in the Oakland Hills clubhouse. And it happened in the city where Padraig's last name is the punch line to a joke, thanks to his distant quarterback cousin, Joey.
The PGA of America likes to talk about glory's last shot, but actually this was Goober and Gomer's last shot before He Who is Without Peer comes back with a new left knee to put the lid back on his personal cookie jar of major championships. Turns out when the big cat was away, only Harrington came out to play.
At Royal Birkdale where the Irishman outlasted the aged newlywed, Greg Norman, Padraig turned a wrist injury and 40-mile-per-hour winds to his advantage, claiming those factors combined to take the pressure off his championship defense. At Oakland Hills it was mental fatigue and dehydration, or both, or neither.
Harrington's sport psychologist, Dr. Bob Rotella, finds the mind games Padraig practiced at the crucial par-5 12th more to the point. Harrington went into Sunday afternoon three shots behind Curtis and though it was a trio of magnificent bunker shots on the sixth, seventh and ninth holes that kept him close, it was No. 12 that put him in a position to win. He drove it into the trees on the right and knew he needed to make something happen. "The tree was actually blocking where I was aiming so I literally had to hit like I was hitting through the tree for my second shot," said Harrington, "but I knew I needed to take on the shot at this stage, and there was no backing off. You get chances in a major tournament on the back nine, and you've got to take them. I'm a great believer in making it your responsibility whether you win or you don't win. I realized it was the same 5-wood that I hit to the 17th at Birkdale. And so, yeah, it was one of those shots that you like to have that responsibility in the final round. Some days, it won't go for you, and you have to be prepared to handle that. But you [also have to be] prepared to take those shots on and take that responsibility and the consequences that go with it. You're not going to win any other way."
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