In the rough

Earlier this summer, the same Ciaran went missing after running into some long grass, and when his father asked where he had gone, a passer-by replied, “He’s in the rough like his dad”.

Two family snapshots; two very different glimpses into the world of the back-to-back Open champion.

Golf is an unforgiving game at the best of times, but for Harrington, an amiable, softly-spoken Irishman, the 11 months since he followed last year’s Open triumph with a third Major win at the USPGA have been anything but the best of experiences.

In fact, they have been the stuff of nightmares, culminating in five missed cuts in a row prior to something of a return to form in last week’s Irish PGA Championship, a tournament that pitted the reigning European Tour Player of the Year against a field of Irish club professionals.

Harrington won it, but he would have been hard pushed not to and will still tee off at Turnberry today as the only player ever to have won two of the last four Majors and yet still not feature in the world’s top ten.

Rarely has someone fallen so far, so quickly, yet the reasons for his sudden fall from grace opens a window onto the unique mental demands that golf makes of its champions.

In most sports, greatness appears to come naturally. It doesn’t of course, it demands hours of practice and refinement, but picture a Usain Bolt or a Roger Federer and you tend to think of the effortless ease of their actions rather than the technical practicalities of their performance. At their best, both Bolt and Federer give the impression they are performing without having to really think about what they are doing.

Golfers are different. No golfer competing at this week’s Open will possess a swing that can be truly be described as ‘natural’. It will have been honed and remodelled during endless hours on the practice range, or in front of video cameras and screens that highlight the smallest flaw in an otherwise fluid action.

Those flaws might be relatively inconsequential, but swing by swing, they nevertheless seep into the mind.

And as anyone who has ever swung a golf club can vouch, the mind has more sway over where the ball ends up than the club that is actually making contact.

Perfection is a valid yet unattainable goal so, like greats such as Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus before him, Harrington’s response to last year’s two Major titles was not to rest on his laurels. It was to instigate a radical overhaul of his swing that, to the layman at least, appears to have done much more harm than good.

“I don’t think I’d enjoy winning if I didn’t know why I was winning,” explained Harrington. “Understanding how I got there is the ultimate satisfaction.

“If somebody was the best at something in the world and they couldn’t tell me why they were there I wouldn’t be interested.

That’s my make-up.

“When Howard Hughes was a kid, he bought a Model T Ford or a Mercedes and pulled it apart to see how it all worked. That’s me with my golf game.”

Golf seems to breed introspection and Harrington always appeared a perfect candidate for the kind of soul-searching that has turned countless champions into nervous wrecks.

The very best bounce back, as Woods did after he deliberately remodelled his swing in the wake of his record-breaking triumph at the 1997 US Masters. It took him almost two-and-a-half years to win another major, but when he did it signalled the start of a run of seven in three years.

Others, however, fall by the wayside, and the fear must be that Harrington’s tinkering has proved so destructive that he is incapable of rediscovering the form that carried him to his memorable wins at Carnoustie and Royal Birkdale.

“The last thing I want to do is feel like what I’ve achieved in the game is the pinnacle,” he said earlier this week. “Yeah, when I finish up I’ll look back and say, ‘I won three Majors, who else did that?’ And, of course, there’ll be my standing in the history of Irish sport to analyse.

“But that’s for sitting back in the rocking chair with the grandchildren and telling them the great stories of what you did. It’s not for now. I’ve seen the harm on many a good player’s career in dwelling on their success.”

Over the course of the next four days, Harrington will set out to prove that golf’s mental gremlins have not got the better of him. If we are telling tales of ladybirds on Sunday night, perhaps that will mean he has emerged unscathed.