Risk and reward

So, Harrington is behind the tree at the Dunlop Phoenix tournament in Japan last Sunday, sizing up his second shot on the par five, expecting that Tiger will make birdie and at an emergency board meeting in his mind one of the directors has thumped the table and shouted: Chance it. Ronan Flood, his caddie, may have seen the commotion behind Harrington’s eyes but he was obliged to deliver his site engineer’s report in the usual way.

“My caddie,” says Harrington, “was at pains to point out a number of options — outside of going through the tree. He wanted to make sure that I was clear in my mind that there were alternative ways of making four.”

Harrington, though, was seduced by the risk. Chopping out sideways was spiced with a little danger from overhanging branches, fractionally compromising its status as a safe passage. Coolly, he chose to be hot-blooded. “I often say to people if you’re in a good frame of mind you always see the opportunity. If you’re in a bad frame of mind you always see the downside. I felt it was an opportunity to be bold.”

The ball made some contact with the tree on its way through and he still wouldn’t have beaten Tiger without playing the most exquisite sand wedge from the rough, spinning the ball to rest a couple of feet from the pin. But the tree shot was the signature shot. That was the moment he dared to win.

The “frame of mind” that empowered him to go for it is an ongoing conflict in his working life. He said recently that golf is “95%” about the mental battles and for long stretches of this season he was fighting on his back. Granted, his season looks a pretty picture now: a pair of tournament victories, four second-placed finishes, his best performance at a major in four years, winner of the European Order of Merit. But in the first half of the year he slipped outside the top 30 in the world rankings and he didn’t figure in the top 10 at any stroke play event until Wentworth in May. And that wasn’t the end of it.

“If there was a turning point,” he says, “it was the US PGA (in August). I had two weeks off going into it, I had done very nice practice at home, I was swinging the golf club really well and I couldn’t have been hitting the golf ball any better — and I missed the cut. I hit an awful lot of golf shots on the range that Saturday and Sunday and then I walked away from it. It was starting to eat me up a bit. It was very evident, when I walked away from it, that there wasn’t really anything wrong with how I was playing so the reasons the results weren’t coming must have been somewhere else and that was with my approach to it, my attitude.

“I was trying too hard. Simple as that. It’s a hard one to say to people and it’s a hard concept (to accept) because all sports people are taught, ‘The harder you work the better your results.’ It’s very difficult for me because I’m the one who likes to hit a lot of balls on the range. But then you get to a point where you have to work better. You have to give up a little bit to get more. If I hit a bad shot on the golf course now or have a couple of bad holes I don’t necessarily feel that my golf swing is falling apart and I have to spend three or four hours practising. I’m a bit more accepting of the good and the bad.”

It’s a mindset he received from the sports psychologist Bob Rotella, though the transaction didn’t take place just today or yesterday. Harrington read one of Rotella’s books during his second season on tour in 1997 and their working relationship began the following winter. The golfer surrendered himself to a programme of mental landscaping and the process continued, year on year. But all the time Harrington was holding something back. He didn’t trust his swing enough to believe his mind could carry him the rest of the way and without making that leap of faith there was a limit to where he could go.

“I have been an absolute disciple of Bob’s methods since I first met him. The only thing is, carrying it through all the time is something you don’t do — even though you believe in it. You get sidetracked. I could see that it worked and it was there but I was putting it on the long finger because I wanted to work on my golf swing. I know it makes a huge difference [the mental side] but somewhere deep down inside me I needed the confidence of having a golf swing that I felt I could believe in and trust and that’s really why it’s taken me so long to move on. Now I’m more comfortable with my swing and it’s only small incremental improvements in that end of things.

“I realise I have to put the mental side on top. I’ve always been very good at the mental side but I have to put more focus on it because that’s going to push me over the edge. It brought my game to a new level at Muirfield [2002 British Open] and it brought my game to a new level at the US Open [this year]. Those are probably the two tournaments that stand out where I got everything right mentally and those are two tournaments where I played way above what I’ve ever played before.”

With three holes to play in the final round of the US Open Harrington was tied for the lead, the only player in the field without a bogey on his Sunday card. Without looking at the leaderboard he knew he was in contention and he creamed another drive down the middle. “I felt great walking down the 16th. I felt I had played 15 and a half holes of the easiest golf I had ever played. I felt as comfortable as I could be and then I was thrown out by a lie that was just hanging a little bit.

My ball had just gone over a little ridge on the fairway. As I came into it (to make the strike) I was thinking, ‘I don’t want this to cut off a hanging lie’ and I hit it dead straight up the left-hand side.”

The ball hit a tree and fell short of the green. He ended up with a 15ft putt for par and missed. Standing on the 17th tee he was five over for the tournament and decided he would need at least one birdie to have any chance of winning. On the par three he was too aggressive with a six iron and flew his tee shot over the green, chipped back and missed from 4ft. On the last he three-putted for bogey. An hour later Geoff Ogilvy was crowned champion with a score of five over par.

“The sad thing for me was that I needed three pars on the last three holes (to win) and I hit three good tee shots. That for most people would have taken a huge amount of the variability out of it. At the US Open this year I played golf that would have won the US Open. And I know how I did it.”

His play that day was a contradiction of the player we always knew. Throughout his career his short game was his calling card: his putting, his scrambling. When he first joined the Tour, and for many years afterwards, he wasn’t a long hitter and, tee to green, he felt an “inadequacy”. For years that was his big project on the practice range and suddenly it wasn’t an issue any more.

Some of his long-game stats at the Masters in Augusta this year were deeply impressive: 2nd in driving accuracy, 9th in driving distance. But of the 47 players who made the cut only 11 had poorer putting figures. His putting hadn’t been good enough in the final round of the US Open and at the Masters it had condemned him to a 27th-place finish.

He sifted the wreckage for answers: the par fives had killed him. Over four days you’re looking at 16 par 5s; Harrington’s aggregate score on those holes was three over, including three double bogeys. He reckons he hit 15 perfect drives on those 16 holes and still ended up bleeding shots. The winner, Phil Mickelson, played them in 13 under. Harrington’s score didn’t tell you how well he’d played but when he located the black box in the wreckage the evidence was there.

He just needed to be patient and wait for his week. The wait was slow. In mid-summer he finished second twice in the same week on both sides of the Atlantic — at the rain-delayed Booz Allen Classic in Maryland and at the French Open five days later. Both second places were thanks to storming finishes on the final day but those nuances have a short life compared with the bare statistics, which seem to endure like a fossil.

His career stack of runner-up finishes has reached 30 now and over the years when people had a mind to question Harrington that record was cheap and convenient evidence for the prosecution. He says when the figure was about 20 he had worked out how many of them were “good” defeats, where second had been a triumph, and he had even formulated a little parable from his career to demonstrate the value of perseverance.

“I used to give a stat, which was when I was an amateur I had 24 top-four places in two and a half years — or three and a half years — but then I went 18 months without losing in singles golf. The point was that these things can turn around.”

Now he doesn’t bother. He blew a winning chance at the BMW International in Munich at the end of August — bogeying the last and losing a playoff — and carried on with gritted teeth until his first win of the season finally came in the Alfred Dunhill Links at St Andrews, two weeks after the Ryder Cup.

That was good, but nothing like Valderrama. That was much more. Four years ago Harrington had travelled to the final event on the European Tour trailing Retief Goosen by just over €23,000 in the Order of Merit and his game couldn’t shoulder the pressure. After the final round he frankly admitted the failure.

His best score in Valderrama that week was 73; this time that was his worst score. On the final day he started bogey-bogey and refused to blink. He needed to finish first or second to grasp the Order of Merit title and all afternoon his chances looked slim but his performance never betrayed a hint of hopelessness.

He scrambled for his life and needed just one putt on each of the closing eight greens; three of them were birdies. He waited and waited and right at the death a hot putting streak granted him deliverance. “I went 66 holes in Valderrama, very similar to the Ryder Cup, without holing a putt and then I had six holes where I holed everything.

“And that affirmed to me that what I’m doing is right. I have done the right thing so many times in the past and come up second and got knocked for finishing second. It’s difficult to turn around to everybody and say, ‘Look, I did everything right, but I finished second.’ It’s a lot easier to say, ‘Yeah, I did everything right — and look, I’ve won.’ Bob Rotella tells you to work on the process and not the result and that’s ultimately what I was doing in Valderrama. Concentrating on doing my thing.”

He finished second in Valderrama. But that wasn’t the point. It was the greatest triumph of his career.

LAST Tuesday, in the sumptuously antique Council Room of the RDS, Harrington was awarded an honorary fellowship jointly by Liverpool John Moores University and Dublin Business School, where he studied accountancy in the early 1990s. It was an evening course, populated by besuited students who had come to class from various offices around town. Harrington, though, would have been arriving from the golf course, distinguished from his peers by jeans, sweatshirt and rosy cheeks.

Once he returned from a tournament without his homework done and one of his lecturers told him to “get a grip on reality” and stick to his studies. In his acceptance speech on Tuesday he remarked what “an oddity” he must have seemed to all the other students. Better than us they must always have had a sense of what he would do when faced by a Y-shaped pine tree.

In passing, the university’s motto was brought to the attention of the gathering: Dream, Plan, Achieve. Here were the words made flesh.