Irish pair continue a fine tradition

We're back the way it all started, with an honorary member of Royal Portrush and a Dublin-based colleague. Forty six years ago, Fred Daly and Harry Bradshaw became the first representatives of a united Irish golfing nation in the 1953 Ryder Cup: now, Darren Clarke and Padraig Harrington will follow in their footsteps at Brookline next month.

If Clarke and Harrington achieve the same unity of purpose as their celebrated predecessors, they are certain to be splendid assets to the European cause. And for players with so much in common, especially in the context of a productive amateur career, such expectations are entirely reasonable.

Harrington is the 16th Irish player to achieve Ryder Cup status and the eighth since the team became a European line-up in 1979. And this is only the second time during those 20 years that two Irishmen have actually played their way into action.

Des Smyth and Eamonn Darcy gained that distinction at Walton Heath in 1981. Christy O'Connor Jnr and Ronan Rafferty were, of course, in the 1989 team which tied with the Americans at The Belfry. But on that occasion, O'Connor was a wild-card choice. As it happened, the only other Irish wild-card choice was Smyth who, as the reigning European Matchplay champion, was called into the 1979 team with Peter Oosterhuis.

So, it was understandable of Harrington not to have been expecting any favours from James, particularly with such apparently strong and experienced candidates as Bernhard Langer and Costantino Rocca available. But what of the player who felt he had pushed himself into the reckoning with three senior victories so far this season?

"I thought they'd pick Junior," said Christy O'Connor Snr, whose record of 10 successive Ryder Cup appearances was surpassed by Nick Faldo at Valderrama two years ago. Then he quickly added with a chuckle: "No, no. It's magnificent to have Padraig in the team. I've known him since his amateur days and he showed himself to be a real fighter, the way he came back in Munich. I've no doubt he will do us proud."

Harrington will be contributing to a fine tradition spanning more than half a century since Daly, as the reigning British Open champion, became the first Irish Ryder Cup representative at Portland, Oregon in 1947. And it was due in no small measure to the efforts of Philip Walton at Oak Hill in 1995 that the Ryder Cup is currently in European possession.

Walton's victory over Jay Haas was the last in a sequence of highly significant singles wins by Irish players, starting at Muirfield Village in 1987. That was when Eamonn Darcy played his part in an historic triumph on American soil by beating Ben Crenshaw, the current US skipper, on the 18th.

After that, Ronan Rafferty and O'Connor Jnr won their singles at The Belfry in 1989. And two years later, David Feherty played the best golf of the 1991 Ryder Cup by beating the reigning US Open champion, Payne Stewart, 2 and 1 at Kiawah Island. Interestingly, Stewart will be in the same position at Brookline next month, having regained the US Open at Pinehurst in June.

If the Ryder Cup is essentially a team effort, Harrington is the quintessential team player. So it was that when his progress to professional ranks became inevitable, he found it a great wrench to leave the amateur game, largely because of the involvement it offered at team level.

I can recall former Irish international captain, Brendan Edwards, then a selector, marvelling at Harrington's ability to win matches. "He's every captain's dream player," said Edwards. "On writing his name into the singles order, you can tick it off as a certain point."

Against that background, it was interesting to note his reaction yesterday when asked if making the team was the highpoint of his career. "No," he replied. "The World Cup remains the highpoint at this stage, because we won (he and Paul McGinley at Kiawah Island in 1997). But if we were to win in Boston . . . " Meanwhile, the decision by James to overlook both Nick Faldo and Bernhard Langer as wild-card choices, has brought an emphatic end to the reign of the so-called "Fab Five". When they last played together at Muirfield Village in 1987, Seve Ballesteros (second), Langer (third), Sandy Lyle (fourth), Ian Woosnam (sixth) and Nick Faldo (14) were all ranked in the top-14 in the world.

Lyle asked not to be chosen in 1989 because of poor form; Ballesteros had his last appearance as a player in 1995 and Langer, Woosnam and Faldo are no longer considered to be competitive, though they played at Valderrama two years ago. They came together for the first time in the narrow defeat at Palm Beach Gardens in 1983, which has since been acknowledged as Europe's Ryder Cup renaissance.

"After we came so close, I remember Seve saying we must celebrate because it was a victory for us," recalled Faldo. "That really was the big turnaround."

Now they've all gone. And, sadly, Faldo's departure led to bitter words when James gave him the bad news in a Munich hotel on Saturday. "Mark told me `even if you win the tournament this weekend, you are unlikely to get a pick,"' said Faldo. "I hope he's got some more motivating lines for the actual team."

But Bernard Gallacher felt James had done the right thing. "The reality is that when things are not going well, Faldo brings nothing else to the team," said Gallacher. "At Kiawah Island in 1991, when Nick (under Gallacher's captaincy) was going through a difficult time, he offered nothing else, unlike Seve Ballesteros who would be an inspiration to the players no matter how badly be was playing."

Gallacher added: "Nick wanted to partner only Colin Montrgomerie and when I paired him with David Gilford, he was so annoyed with his poor play that he did not have it in him, as the senior partner, to offer support and advice to his team-mate."

Going back to the Irish position, this is arguably the country's finest achievement in terms of Ryder Cup representation. For McGinley was the only other Irish player who could have been viewed as a realistic candidate and two out of three is certainly impressive, especially with England having only Lee Westwood in the side.

Finally, for those who might question the debt due to the Golfing Union of Ireland, back down the line, it may be no harm to recall that Clarke and Harrington met in the final of the Irish Close Championship at Co Louth in 1990, when, as it happened, the Tyroneman was victorious.