Pádraig Harrington, one of Bob Rotella’s great students knows better than most that golf is not a game of perfect.
There are no pictures on the scorecard, just eighteen figures scribbled into as many squares.
The 53-year-old is always good for a natter and a piece of wisdom when asked for “a quick word.” The quick word being a rhetorical phrase but you’ll always get something.
This week Harrington has been fascinated by the modern player’s obsession with performance over result, stating that he feels players would rather hit the ball well and shoot 71 than scrap it around in 70.
The three-time major winner almost fell into that trap himself during his second round at the Senior PGA Championship. After starting well with two birdies in his first seven holes, he dropped shots on the 18th and 1st before rallying with three birdies in his last five to keep his hopes alive at four-under and two off the pace.
For a while he admits he was focused on analysing too much during his round but managed to knuckle down and “get the job done” as he put it.
“I’m always working on a few things. But I have been working on something. I was striking the ball well and liking what I was doing. I think one of the worst things you can do on the golf course is judge and analyse, and after, let’s say, 26 holes, I knew I’d missed two greens this week and hit a couple of par-5s.
“That was horrible information to have in your head. You shouldn’t be aware of how many fairways or how many greens because we don’t play fairways and greens, we play score.
“I was too concerned about — again, you can ask yourself the question, would you rather be 15 feet away from the hole on the fringe or 20 feet away from the hole on the green. 15 feet on the fringe, but you’ve missed the green. You see what I’m saying? You get caught up — when you’re playing well like that, you get caught up in hitting fairways and hitting greens, which isn’t always what you want to do on a windy day.
“Sometimes missing on the short side in the rough on a tee shot to leave yourself — like I hit a bad tee shot on 5-up the right-hand side, but I had only 150 yards left out of the rough, whereas if you missed on the left-hand side you probably had 190 yards. No. 4, that’s the one I’m thinking of.
“Sometimes a good miss is better than even a shot — like if I hit it down the fairway, I might have had 180 yards, but I kind of cut across the dogleg. Even though it wasn’t a good drive, it was in the rough, it was the sensible miss in the conditions.
“Yeah, sometimes you’ve just got to get the job done, and over the last eight holes I was definitely into getting it done. You know, it was pretty tough, and I felt I was slipping out of the tournament at 1-under par. Yeah, but I’m happy to have played my way in quite nicely.”
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