For five days Padraig Harrington has been telling the story of what he did
last Sunday, but there are so many windows into that day at Carnoustie and
he has just pulled back another little curtain. It was 10.30 on Sunday
morning when he arrived downstairs in the house where he was staying, five
minutes from the course. His caddy, Ronan Flood, had gone ahead to check the
pin positions but sitting on the kitchen table were half-a-dozen golf balls.
His grandmother’s husband-to-be Johnny Smith was staying with them for the
weekend and Harrington asked him how come the balls were sitting there.
Johnny was a little flustered, not wishing to fib, not licensed to tell the
whole truth. “Ronan has put them out for the playoff, hasn’t he?” said
Harrington. Flood had phoned from the course: the usual dozen balls were
packed in the golf bag but Johnny was to carry the extra six, just in case.
This was Sunday morning; Harrington was six shots behind.
Hindsight always promotes special details and inflates them with significance.
If Sergio Garcia had holed his putt on the 72nd hole of The Open, we would
have been peering through different windows this week and Smith would have
carried six extra golf balls for nothing. But all Harrington could do was
create the conditions in which he might win and Flood’s thinking was in
harmony with the mood in the house all week. Winning was on their minds.
“The fact that Faldo came from six behind [on the last day of the 1996
Masters] and Paul Lawrie came from 10 behind [in the 1999 Open at
Carnoustie] registered with me,” said Harrington. “You can’t come from that
far behind if there are 10 players between you and the leader but when
there’s one guy out there on his own in a Major situation it’s very easy for
him to go out there and shoot 73 or 74 without doing a huge amount wrong. I
didn’t think six shots was insurmountable.”
On Saturday night, after the third round, they decided not to go to the
practice range. Over the years Harrington had been a practice junkie and, if
he had a chance to win, it would have been inconceivable for him not to hit
balls before he left the course. But there were times when he harmed himself
with excess practice and when Flood took over as his caddy a couple of years
ago they reached an accommodation on this issue: if he’s playing well enough
to win, they skip the range. After the third round of The Open, Harrington
felt that good.
Later that evening in the house, Harrington told them all he was going to win.
He says, at first, that it was a casual remark, designed to ignite a
reaction, but he was familiar with the mental process of positive
reenforcement and he was nodding in that direction too: “If you asked me to
get my logical brain out and get the left side of my brain working I would
have said, ‘No, I’m not going to win, I’m six shots behind’. But throwing it
out there was me very much trying to get [the message] into the right side
of my brain: ‘I’m going to win – this is it’.”
The sports psychologist Bob Rotella had shared the house with Harrington all
week and was part of the conversation on Saturday night. Harrington read one
of Rotella’s books in 1997, during his second year on tour, and their
working relationship began the following winter. Over the next 10 years
Harrington committed himself to a programme of mental landscaping at
Rotella’s hands but the gains he made often came with small and critical
deductions. He trusted all of what Rotella taught him without practising all
of it when he needed to. For years Harrington felt his swing wasn’t good
enough and, while that work continued with his coach Bob Torrance, he didn’t
believe his mind could carry him home in a Major.
Over the past couple of years, though, that changed. A bogey at the last
ultimately cost him a playoff place in The Open at Muirfield five years ago,
but he says now that he didn’t believe he could win back then. Others did
but he found it difficult to import that feeling. Fifteen months ago,
though, he finished 27th at the Masters and told Rotella that he was there:
his game, his mind was where they needed to be.
In Carnoustie, Harrington knew the value of having Rotella about the place:
“One of the biggest change-arounds I ever had in golf was the week before
the Ryder Cup in Oakland Hills [2004] when I won the German Masters. On the
Wednesday evening I rang Bob [Rotella] at 11 o’clock and didn’t get off the
phone until half one. I probably played the best golf of my life that week
and played very well the next week and kept playing well for a period afterwards. He was hugely instrumental in that. There was an 18-month period
when I started working with Bob when if he turned up for a tournament I
didn’t finish outside the top 10.
“Having him there [in Carnoustie] all week meant that every night we’d sit
down and have our chat and go through what I was thinking. The nice part was
that he kept coming back and saying, ‘Look, you’re in the right place’. We
didn’t actually try to change anything during the week. He said to me
afterwards that he had never seen me as comfortable as I was all week.”
On Sunday, he still had to do it. With his caddy they decided on a policy of
isolation. No lead-erboard updates, no progress bulletins. The only major
strategic decisions on club selection would come on the 14th and 18th tees.
If they were chasing birdies the club on 14 would be a driver; they were
still two behind but Flood handed him a five wood. “That was a red flag to
me that said, ‘We’re doing well’,” said Harrington. “That was his decision
and it was a perfect one. We played the hole for a four and ended up making
three but if we’d tried for a three, I could have ended up making five.”
On the 17th fairway, though, Harrington felt he needed to know exactly where
they stood and for the first time he asked his caddy. There is a big bunker
short and right of the pin and with a four iron in his hand Harrington
didn’t want to take it on if there was no need to do so. Flood told him he
was tied: they could play to the left and take two putts from there.
The 18th, though, defined everything about Harrington: the strength, the
weakness, the transition. Here was the bridge he needed to cross from the
player he was to the player he might become. His mind was clear: driver was
the club. Cutting a three wood into a right-to-left wind was going to be
difficult and he didn’t want to be forced to play a five wood or hybrid for
his second shot.
“I just hit a bad shot. I was happy it was the right decision but it was just
a bad shot. The third shot was an incredibly tough shot, no doubt about it,
but I hit a really poor one. On a difficulty level it was an absolute 10 but
there’s no getting away from the fact that the shot I hit was a really poor
one.”
If there was a fault-line in his mentality this was the moment it should open
and pull him down. For the first part of the journey up the fairway he
walked with his disappointment but then, “50 or 60 yards” from his ball, he
felt the mental process kick in.
“I said to myself that nothing really spectacular had happened yet. I could
chip this in or at least get it up and down. The best thing about that hole
was where I got myself to in my head standing over the chip. Standing over
it my mind was as clear as if I’d hit my two very best shots to be sitting
there.”
He paced it out and the numbers were perfect: 49 yards to the pin which meant
carrying the ball 35 yards to the flat part of the green. Every day that he
practised in his back garden in Dublin he hit that shot “20 or 30” times.
With a lob wedge in your hand and your feet close together you must hit
“pretty much on the max” to fly it that far. He knew that and he trusted
that knowledge; he didn’t quit on it, he executed it with total freedom.
“The laughable thing about that shot is that when I hit it and it was in the
air it was like I wasa kid again. When I was a schoolboy I used to show off
to my friends by hitting a pitch really hard and making them think I’d made
a mess of it but making it stop dead then beside the hole. It was completely
the shot I’d hit if I wanted to show off.
“So, when the ball was in the air last Sunday you could hear the crowd gasp
because they’d thought I’d made a mess of it. I knew as soon as it left the
club that it was going exactly where I wanted it to go and, actually, when I
heard the crowd gasp I laughed to myself because it reminded me of those
days.”
That was the shot of a champion. He holed the putt and half-an-hour later
Garcia missed his for par; the playoff unfolded as it did with Garcia
half-broken and Harrington in serene control but everything came back to
that moment. He couldn’t win it with that chip, all he could do was create
the conditions in which he might win.
That’s what they talked about. That’s what he did.
