Inspiring Golf

TURNBERRY, Scotland — Legend holds that eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, a kid at the time, was fascinated with a luxury car in the garage of his parents' estate in Houston and dismantled it just to see how it worked.

Padraig Harrington cites the story, knows it well and can relate.

No golfing machine — not even one named Tiger Woods— was running at a higher performance level than Harrington a year ago. The Irishman won $4.3 million last season, rose to No. 3 in the world and was the PGA Tour Player of the Year. He became the first European in more than a century to win back-to-back British Opens and the only European to win consecutive majors in a season when he followed his Open triumph at Royal Birkdale in England with his PGA Championship victory at Oakland Hills in Michigan.

So Harrington shocked the golf world and took apart his swing despite winning three of the last six majors.

He's still trying to put it back together.


The rebuilt Harrington has been sputtering all year, fueling criticism of his decision. On the eve of the Open Championship on the Ailsa Course at Turnberry, where he'll try to enter the record books again by becoming the second player since 1882 to win three consecutive Opens, his chances look bleak.

"You get to a certain point, and you like to tear it apart and see how it works and put it back better," says Harrington, 37, who concedes that his fixation with building a perfect swing makes him a wee bit like Hughes. "But it's taken longer than I thought.

"I would say my chances this week are very sketchy. We'll go with whatever we have Thursday afternoon."

Five consecutive missed cuts

Harrington hasn't had much to go with all year. He has missed eight of 16 cuts on the PGA and European tours, including his last five. He hasn't recorded a top-10 since his season-opening tie for fifth in the Abu Dhabi Championship. He became the first player to win two out of the last four majors and not be in the top 10 in the world ranking.

And despite winning last week by seven shots in the Irish PGA Championship, a tournament that is little more than a club pro's event, is not sanctioned by any of the major tours in the world and came with a $6,500 winner's check, Harrington will be hard-pressed to become the first since Peter Thomson in 1954-56 to win three consecutive Opens.

"It would be very special to win the Open a third time in a row. But I am realistic about these things," says Harrington, currently No. 12 in the world. "I want to compete in many majors. The idea that it has to be the next one is not how I go about things."

Harrington, forever a tinkerer, has been down this road before. He says that since he took up the game at 11, he's found something to work on every year. Even when the driving range workaholic finished runner-up 15 times earlier in his career on the European Tour, including five times in 1999 and six times in 2001, he worked toward the future instead of the final round.

"Many a Saturday evening when I was leading the tournament, I was trying to improve my swing to play well the following week, not the following day," says Harrington, who has 16 wins on the European and PGA tours. "I lost many a tournament because I was actually trying to get better for the next week."

His fans want him to start thinking about the present. As his play deteriorated, he started receiving advice from all walks of life, including his postman. Letters with swing tips started arriving; suggestions that he put away his analytical side started appearing in newspapers and golf magazines.

His play got so bad that six weeks ago Harrington was the center of attention during what he jokingly called an intervention with his wife, Carolina, sports psychologist Bob Rotella, swing coach Bob Torrance and caddie Ronan Flood.

"That was the first step in getting him back in the right direction," Rotella says. "He needed to start thinking about results again. Anytime you are a bit of a late bloomer, you constantly try to get better. But one of the hardest things to do in this game is to have a little of that perfectionist tendency to develop your skills, but once you get them, to say to yourself, 'That's good enough.'

"He's so open, so honest, that, unlike so many other players who won't talk at length about making changes, he does. That leads to more questions. But I think he's back on track and in a good place."

The place Harrington has been searching for is an improved impact position to give him more consistency with his bad shots. Essentially, instead of missing a shot and hitting the ball into trees on the right, he will miss the shot and end up in the right rough. Part of trying to reach this position has forced him to tinker with new shafts, the weight of shafts and the lies of his irons.

"Through it all, what happened is that I've been strengthening my weaknesses but weakening my strengths," he says. "That's obviously not a great idea when you're looking for performance in the short term.

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I did have good intentions. I'm comfortable with it. I'm going to be patient."

Tiger understands the logic

Some of his colleagues understand the approach. As sports reporters became perplexed with Harrington's decision, Woods started receiving queries into this type of methodology.

"You're asking the wrong guy," Woods says. "After I won The Masters by 12 (shots in 1997), I changed my swing. People thought I was crazy for that. I said, 'Just wait. Just be patient with it. It will come around.' "

Woods was winless in 10 consecutive majors after his Masters masterpiece. Then his overhauled swing started purring and he won seven of 11 majors, including four consecutively. After another swing change in 2004, he won 21 PGA Tour events from 2005 to 2007, including five majors.

"We're all trying to get better," Woods says. "The game is fluid. It's always evolving; you're trying to make adjustments here and there to try to get yourself to the next level.

"The hard part for Paddy is he's doing it in front of everyone. I've been through it. Sometimes it can be a little difficult, because you get questioned quite a bit. But you have to understand the big picture for yourself."

Harrington, according to 2006 U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy, won't lose sight of that fact.

"I would imagine that most guys, if they won two majors and then started to struggle, would get deeply depressed," Ogilvy says. "I don't see that with him. He sees this as his project, and he's not getting frustrated."

At least not yet.

"Golf is always a juggling act of keeping all the balls in the air and keeping everything working together," Harrington says. "And I've obviously concentrated on one ball a lot and a few of the other ones have fallen. Now it's a question of picking them up and getting them all together again."

By Steve DiMeglio, USA TODAY