Arnold Palmer was one of those golfing greats who like to throw out quotes. “The road to success is always under construction,” was one noted by The King.
And few have lived out that mantra quite as well as Pádraig Harrington, who will be inducted into Golf’s Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Pinehurst North Carolina on Monday evening.
For the kid from Rathfarnham in South Dublin, a product of the hilly Stackstown Club in the foothills of the mountains, this accolade provides validation for a golfing career that saw Harrington achieve three Major championships, national opens, Ryder Cup glory and World Cup success. He ticked all the boxes, and – to this day, now 52 years of age – continues to ply his trade on the Champions Tour and also on the main circuits.
Perhaps, as a child, a different white ball held sway in the Harrington sporting household. His father Paddy Harrington was an All-Ireland Gaelic football finalist with Cork – twice, in 1956 and ‘57 – and it was only natural his son, too, would have some ambition in that particular sporting pursuit.
But a schools final in Croke Park brought reality. Young Pádraig was marking a young blond-haired kid from the northside and ended up being skinned more than once, and on his backside more than once. The opponent? Dessie Farrell.
From then, golf was the sport that consumed him and which would bring him to a global audience and to be held in esteem by his peers.
Even Harrington himself is still processing the honour being bestowed on him.
“Hall of Fames really aren’t on the radar in Ireland, aren’t they? It’s not something we would have naturally grown up with. So yeah, it only becomes a thing as you go out on Tour, then as you start to play better it becomes a much bigger thing, you start to realise ‘that’s a Hall of Fame player’, ‘he’s a Hall of Fame player’, people talk like that.
“I suppose it’s a way of measuring success so once you do start playing well it does become on your radar and it’s something you want to become part of, for sure.
“It’s certainly nothing I would have dreamt about when I started off as a pro but as I gradually got into my career, and I suppose once you win your first Major, I suppose 2007 for me would have been very relevant to push on.
“I think in my own personal playing career I was very conscious that a one-Major winner can become quite a burden on the player, always trying to live up to it, every round of golf after you’ve won a Major is trying to justify that one Major.
“So you know if you can get to that next level you really are heading to the Hall of Fame and that’s something that is very important for me, even more so now that I’m on the Champions Tour because I’m hanging out with Hall of Fame guys, so you’re kind of looking at these guys and you want to be one of them, you want to be part of it, and many of the guys on the Champions Tour, they’re a little bit older than me, their careers were a little bit ahead of me so they were actually guys I would have looked up to when I was turning pro. They’re guys I would have watched on TV at pro events, so it’s nice to be part of that crowd that I would have looked up to back in the day.”
Harrington is very much one of a kind, his own man, in words and in deeds. Yet, he is also the first to share the appreciation of how he managed to scale the heights and earn this particular accolade.
“Everybody had an influence, they were all role models whether that was my family, Howard Bennett, Bob Torrance [his coaches], [sports scientist] Liam Hennessy for sure still does to this day. Bob used to say this to me every day and this is more relevant now than in my career heading to the first tee from the range: ‘These are the happiest days of your life.’
“I realise as you get older what that really means. There’s no point in playing for tomorrow or yesterday, it’s got to be today. As I get older I realise that. Bob was particularly good when it came to the psychology of life, he was a nice, entertaining person to be around. By choice, I have picked some great role models, Bob Rotella [sports psychologist] and Liam Hennessy. I have picked some great people to be around.
“The one thing about my golf career which is ironic is I have always been stereotyped as somebody who changes, and yet I never change. I’ve had the same manager 30 years, same caddie 20-something years, club manufacturer 26 years, accountant 30 years – I have the same everything. Everything I stick with a long time but sometimes they say ‘you changed everything after 2007, 2008′ which I didn’t. I played better in 2009 and 2010, I just didn’t have the wins.”
For all that he has achieved, it remains true – not just to Harrington, but to all players who aspire to greatness – that the Majors define careers.
As he put it: “Deep down I wanted to win Majors. I definitely didn’t want to win one Major. I was really scared of that one. And I’ve looked at players who’ve won one, it becomes a burden in their career and it’s only when they get to retire, they get to enjoy it. It can never be taken away from them.
“I always wanted that second one. I got the third one pretty quickly. In my head, there was that factor, two was brilliant. Maybe the third one was a bonus. I can’t say I could have sat back in 2000 and said I should win five or six Majors. When you look at the modern era of golf, I’m tied 30th all time in Major wins. They just don’t come around as quickly as you think. I’m happy to have got my three. No doubt, they’ve got me in the Hall of Fame.”
