Oakmont Diary: Nothing irks a player, someone who has contended in over a handful of majors, more than to leave the party early.
Sure, there wasn't too much fun to be found on the course at Oakmont - especially if you're rummaging in ditches for golf balls - but, still, when Padraig Harrington departed this part of Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania having missed a cut for the second successive week on tour, it was with a philosophical attitude.
"You're going to get times like these," attested Harrington, who has now missed the cut in six of his nine last majors. "I'm still happy that I prepared well and I was ready to play on Thursday morning, but the swing wasn't there (on the course) and sometimes that is going to happen. I'm good to go for next week (in the Travelers championship) in Connecticut."
In actual fact, Harrington should have some degree of expectation heading to the event in Hartford. On the last occasion that he missed the cut at a US Open - at Pinehurst in 2005 - he went on to win the following week's event on tour, in that case the Barclays Classic in Westchester.
It remains to be seen if the blows inflicted by Oakmont will have any lingering effect on Harrington, who - despite dropping nine shots in a run of four holes at one juncture of his second round, on the way to a career-high 80 in a major - remained upbeat about the coming weeks, which see him play in Hartford followed by a week off and then a run that takes in the Smurfit Kappa European Open, the Irish PGA and the British Open.
"Dropping nine shots in four holes? I don't think I've ever done that before. It's just the way it goes. I found trouble (initially putting his drive into a drain and failing to get the ball out with his first recovery shot) and kept compounding things. It is easy enough to take a number (at Oakmont) if you're struggling," he said, adding: "I felt terrible. I hit some awful shots and it was probably getting on my nerves too much. When things started to go wrong, I compounded the errors by trying too hard . . . I would have liked to make the cut, but I don't think I was playing well enough to push on from there. I can't take too much from this US Open."
As ever, though, for a professional golfer, once one door closes, another opens. So it was that Harrington, and his entourage, left Oakmont behind and headed on to Hartford in Connecticut. Another week, another tournament.
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