Video: watch Harrington tackle the 'Extreme 19th' at Legends

Padraig Harrington is ready for the Open, boosted by his victory on Saturday in the Irish PGA Championship. From now on he won’t be watching any reruns of Saving Private Ryan, nor Blackadder Goes Forth, nor reading any of the self-help books he likes so much. He has even put aside his copy of The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin, a book subtitled An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance.

He will eat red meat at night because he knows that will make him dream, and he loves dreams. The more vividly he dreams the better. He even hopes he has nightmares and that in them he falls, because he says he loves dreaming about falling. “You can control your dreams,” he says. “Nightmares are great, too. If you are aware that you are dreaming it is not a nightmare any more.”

Harrington’s form has been the stuff of nightmares recently as he has slumped from No 3 in the world to twelfth last week and lasted four rounds in only one of his past seven tournaments. But from now until Thursday, when he tees off at Turnberry, he is doing all he can to win a third Open in a row and the fourth of the past nine major championships.

Control is a key word for Harrington. He tries to control his life, his golf swing, and that is why he has played so poorly for most of this year — he has been too busy trying to improve parts of his swing that he felt needed to be improved. He even tries to control his fears. He knows he will be fearful of what might happen at Turnberry this week because he always is fearful.

He had fear as he drove from the 18th tee of the US PGA Championship in the last round at Oakland Hills, in Michigan, last year. He had fear one day in May when he had scarcely warmed up and had to drive off the 1st tee at Turnberry in front of 50 people. He had fear when he teed off as an amateur at Portmarnock in his first Walker Cup in 1991 and people were standing six deep around the tee.

Yet the Irishman remains philosophical. “Fear is not the problem,” he said. “Reaction to fear is the problem.”

In South Africa this year, he was taken to the top of a 400-metre high mountain and asked to hit a ball to a green far below, a ball that would take 30 seconds to reach its target. Harrington suffers from mild vertigo, so he had to convince himself that it was going to be all right.

Thus it was that on that day in Limpopo Province, he took on his opponent and worked out a way of dealing with it, eliminating the problem.

“I said to myself, ‘Look, there’s been hundreds of people up here before and nobody’s fallen off. I am not going to fall off,’ ” he said. And with that, he walked as near to the edge of the tee as he possibly could, teed his ball up, drove and reached the green.

“Mind over matter,” he said. “That’s how I do it. I don’t like it, but I work my way through it.”

Think for a moment of Harrington. Think of the way he sticks his tongue in the corner of his mouth, of the way he grimaces after he has hit a shot, of how he rolls from side to side when he walks down a fairway. Think of him in interviews before and after a round, of him at a function on behalf of Wilson Staff, one of his sponsors, that you have attended as well. And think: have you ever seen him angry? You haven’t, have you?