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E-mailPadraig's Day
Padraig Harrington became the first European to win the Open Championship since 1991 and the first Irishman to win the Claret Jug in 60 years
If you drive across the mountain road that borders south Dublin, chances are you will see Padraig Harrington at work in the garden that serves as his office.
Out the back of a modest but large dwelling he has installed a kidney-shaped green built to U.S. PGA specifications, two artificial putting greens, six small target greens, three bunkers filled with different sorts of sand, and teeing areas where he can hit a golf ball with everything from a three-iron to a sand wedge in the direction of Wicklow. The harder he practices the luckier he gets, as Gary Player used to say.
Happily married to Caroline and with a brother or sister on the way, for young son Paddy, Harrington is the finest Irish golfer of his generation, the first Irish winner of the British Open in 60 years, and the man who brought a country to a standstill to watch his play-off victory over Spanish sensation Sergio Garcia at Carnoustie, Scotland in July.
Yet he still works hard at his game because he believes he has to.
“Talent will only get you so far – the successful ones are the ones who work harder,” he says.
Harrington was born in Dublin in August 1971, and born to golf. By the age of four, Padraig was playing golf and chasing rabbits in Stackstown, the course his father and fellow members of the Garda Siochana (the Irish police force), built on the side of the mountains that straddle Dublin’s border with Wicklow.
Golf was big in the Rathfarnham home he shared with brothers Tadhg, Fergal, Colm and Fintan, as were football and hurling. His father Paddy, a Cork man, played Gaelic football in the 1957 and 1958 All-Ireland football finals.
“Whenever I go to Cork I am still regarded as Paddy’s son, not as a sportsman in my own right,” he laughs.
Padraig, too, played football and hurling, but when he was picked for the Irish Boys Golf Team when he was 15, he gave up football and life as a goalkeeper.
He had much success as an amateur golfer. Victories in the 1995 Irish Amateur Open and the Irish Close Championship, and three Walker Cup appearances against the United States saw him ranked number one in Ireland. But instead of turning pro, Padraig went to college to study accountancy. His intention was to work as a golf club manager, or maybe on the player management side of things.
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