RTÉ.ie's Brendan Cole on how a swing built with the help of a Scottish Ben Hogan aficionado, a mind strengthened by a softly spoken golf psychologist, and a short game learned from his GAA star father helped Padraig Harrington beat the world’s best in The Open Championship at Carnoustie.
‘Like most professional golfers, I have a tendency to remember my poor shots a shade more vividly than the good ones – the one or two per round, seldom more, which come off exactly as I intend they should.’ (Ben Hogan, Five Lessons, The Modern Fundamentals of Golf)
22/07/07, 5.10pm: In his last two holes, Padraig Harrington has nailed an iron to four feet and holed the putt for birdie to join Sergio Garcia at seven under at the top of the leaderboard before just missing a birdie putt on the next that would have sent him one clear. Now, on the fairway of the par five fifteenth after an ideal drive, he is sizing up his second shot into a pin tight at the front of the green. The long iron shot is beautifully flighted, but still requires a fortunate bounce off a hillock to find the putting surface and eventually comes to rest ten feet from the hole. Harrington drains the putt for eagle and takes the lead.
It is remarkable how often Ben Hogan plays a part in golf stories,
both large and small. Tiger Woods admits that his near superhuman efforts to get better are driven as much by his desire to emulate ‘the Hawk’ and his ball-striking feats as they are by his desire to match Jack Nicklaus’ achievements as a scorer and tournament winner. US Masters Champion Zach Johnson’s dog is named after him (‘Hogan’. Not ‘Ben’).
And it is rare, as most golf watchers will know, for a tournament broadcast to pass without a pundit or expert invoking the Hogan legend. Famously during one US event, PGA Tour journeyman Craig Perry’s swing displeased player-turned-commentator Johnny Miller so much that he was moved to say it ‘would make Ben Hogan puke’. Needless to say, Perry went on to win the tournament, proving once again that there is a big difference between the game of golf and the related but separate mysterious otherworld of ‘golf swing’.
Other champions are revered for being the premier winners of their respective eras, but Hogan’s legend is based not only or even primarily on his superb tournament and major winning record (six Majors), but on the fact that he was the owner of the greatest golf swing ever. The quick-fire action was a motion of such purity, power and precision that over fifty years after it won three majors in one calendar year it is still cited by any authority worth mentioning as the unsurpassable model to which all golfers in search of greatness should aspire.
Padraig Harrington’s own Ben Hogan story begins with a trip to 
the town of Largs in Scotland, home of golf swing expert Bob Torrance, in 1998. Torrance followed Hogan for all four rounds of his legendary Open Championship victory 1953 and has based his entire swing philosophy on the majestic action he witnessed then ever since. That Hogan's sole Open victory (and sole appearance in it) occurred at Carnoustie makes the past week’s events even more fitting.
That said, when Torrance first saw Harrington’s method it is unlikely he had major championships in mind. The Dubliner’s swing was, to put it mildly, less than pleasing to the master teacher’s eye. Torrance told Gold Digest in 2004 that: ‘The first time I set eyes on Padraig's swing, it was obvious we had some work to do. He had no leverage. He hit the ball no distance. He was a poor striker. The flight on his shots had no penetration.’
Although Harrington had been good enough to win the 1996 Spanish Open, he himself was even more condemnatory, admitting in a 2006 interview that: ‘If you saw a clip of me (in 1996), you would not believe the way I swung the club. I also [weighed] 15 stone. I was fat, no question about it.’
The swing changes painstakingly engineered by Harrington and Torrance over the next five years are regarded as the most comprehensive remodelling job since David Leadbetter’s work with Nick Faldo in the early 1980s. They were, as Harrington’s improving performances in major championships showed, enough to get him supping at the top table of world golf with reasonable regularity.
After his Open victory, Harrington was quick to acknowledge Torrance’s role: ‘I can never properly repay Bob for all the time and effort he's put into my game. Hopefully, winning The Open at Carnoustie pays off the debt a little bit.’
‘Hit the shot you know you can hit, not the one you think you should.’ (Dr Bob Rotella, 'Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect')
6.09pm: Harrington looks as though he has just handed the 
Open to Garcia. Standing on the tee at nine under he pushes his drive in the water before doing so again when attempting to cut a five iron into the green from over 200 yards. About 50 yards from the hole he knows an up-and-down will at least put Garcia under pressure. A perfectly judged pitch leaves him with a four-footer for a six which he duly sinks.
Even with one of the best swings in the game, Harrington seems to have realised it would require something extra to get him over the line in a major championship. Due to the dominance of Tiger Woods, chances in the big four tournaments are now rarer than ever and Harrington must have been aware that he might realistically only have about half of the opportunities to win as Europe’s ‘golden generation’ – Faldo, Seve Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle, Jose Maria Olazabal, Ian Woosnam and Bernhard Langer – did in the 1980s and early 90s.
Ben Hogan also said: ‘The most important shot in golf is the next one’, but it is likely that as Harrington’s round lurched from serenity into crisis on the ‘home’ hole, his thoughts turned to the words and philosophies of a rather different kind of golf guru, the sort of which the taciturn and practical Texan would most likely have strongly disapproved: Bob Rotella.
On the surface, there can be few more different personalities than Bob Torrance, a Scottish graduate of the school of hard knocks, and Rotella, a holder of a psychology Ph.D.
Occasionally the subject has caused a certain amount of eyebrow raising. Harrington’s mental capabilities have been the subject of speculation after a lengthy stretch of second-place finishes. Carnoustie looked like it might be added to that list.
Harrington’s above-average number of second-place finishes have often been cited as a sign of mental weakness and they certainly have that appearance when placed next to, for example, Woods’ exploits as a front-running tournament winner. Skip back to golf’s previous great champion though, and it’s a different story. Jack Nicklaus, owner of one of the strongest minds in the history of golf, finished second almost as often as he won major championships.
Harrington’s decision to pitch rather than chip his second last shot on the 72nd hole demonstrates his mental toughness.
As he said afterwards: ‘I think most players would have played the pitch-and-run. But I paced it off, it was 47 yards from the pin, but I needed to pitch it ten yards short. I have a 35-yard pitch in my garden that I play every day. When I got over the ball I said: “pitch-and-run is the simple shot, but I actually know the other shot”.’
Despite opening himself up to a world of second-guessing (‘Why not pitch and run, Padraig?’), Harrington chose the shot he knew he could execute. In that moment, the years of work with Rotella paid off.
‘Whether [Padraig] was playing Gaelic football, soccer or golf, he had a brilliant temperament. Nothing seemed to faze him. And the more knocks he got, the more determined he would be to bounce back and succeed the next time.’ (Paddy Harrington senior, as told to Dermot Gilleece in the Irish Independent)
6.44pm: Harrington drives first on the first play-off hole. Forced to back away from the ball the first time he addresses it, he re-composes himself and smacks a three wood down the middle. Garcia replies with a long iron onto the fairway but then dumps his nine iron approach into a short side bunker from where he will eventually make five. Harrington hits a magnificent seven iron to ten feet and makes the birdie putt to take the two-shot advantage that will eventually prove enough to win him the Open.
As with many excellent hurlers, Paddy Harrington senior excelled at golf. Good enough to play at centre-half back at football for Cork in the All-Ireland finals of 1956 and ’57 (losses to Galway and Louth), he also played a gentle but decisive role in his son’s formative years on the golf course.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio in the wake of The Open win, one former Stackstown member recalled that his abiding memory of five years at the club was of seeing Harrington and his father on the putting green every time he went up to the club.
Of all the anecdotes from the Stackstown years, the information that Harrington signed and submitted every scorecard no matter how poor is perhaps the most interesting. Certainly among the world’s best golfers there cannot be many who will have holed as many important putts to prevent a five from becoming a six or a six from becoming a seven as Harrington did in his youth.
‘Once you've won a few events, everything is about winning a major and the whole of your career is judged on that. Winning the first one is the hardest part and there's a lot of pressure, hype and stress about doing it. So to finally cross that threshold is such a relief, and hopefully I can now go on and win a few of them.’
(Padraig Harrington)
