Pádraig Harrington recently made his 500th DP World Tour appearance and the 54-year-old has no intention of taking things easy on himself as he potentially faces a run of 13 events in 14 weeks during which he would love to thrust himself into a position to have one more crack at winning a fourth major championship.
Harrington, who won the 2007 and 2008 Open Championships and the 08 PGA Championship hasn’t recorded a top-10 in a major since the 2021 PGA Championship at Kiawah Island – his first in nine years – but the belief still burns within him that he can get into the thick of things going down the stretch on Sunday.
The Dubliner often performed well against Tiger Woods and the pair had several battles during the 2000s and he would still fancy his chances against Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler this year. He feels the big challenge would be not beating himself rather than golf’s two heavyweights.
“I’d relish it, absolutely,” Harrington said in a media roundtable at the Aviva Stadium. “Peak Pádraig Harrington would be grand with nine holes to play. But I have never been in contention with Rory and obviously not with Scottie. If it was coming down the stretch, I’d have so many battles and demons with myself that it wouldn’t really matter who was on the opposite side. It would be much more to do with me. It was like when you were battling Tiger down the stretch: the key wasn’t to beat Tiger, the key was to try and not beat yourself.”
Harrington doubled down on his belief that he can win one more major on the Late Late Show. And it is perhaps why he is so revered nationwide and why the government turned to him to help launch their new sports diplomacy policy document earlier this week.
“I create my own reality and I believe it. It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks, what the bookmakers think or what the stats guy thinks, I’ve got to think like that because that’s what I enjoy. I get out there and practice because I have this belief,” he told Patrick Kielty.
Harrington considers himself 54 years YOUNG and you have to say he is looking very well for it. But his chase for perfection is what keeps him young even if his long serving caddie Ronan Flood reminds him that father time catches everyone, eventually.
“Ronan reminds me every year, ‘you do know you’re running out of time’ as I chase this perfection and then at other stages he will say ‘you do know you have earned the right to chase this perfection’ I get reminded both of those. I do feel like I can compete.”
As for his 2026 goals which will include five senior majors and three regular tour majors including a return to Royal Birkdale for the Open where he successfully defended the Claret Jug in 2008, Harrington has no long term targets but to be the very best version of himself even if it is approaching 20 years since he was in his pomp.
“I don’t write my goals down at the start of the year”, says Harrington. “I did, of course I did all those young things back in the day. I am aware of where I am playing and which ones are important to me. I played for four weeks and I’ve come home and in two-and-a-half weeks I have hit thousands of balls, trying to tear my swing apart. That is just who I am. There’s no long-term focus in me at all. It can be a bit of a killer: I am absolutely looking for the very best version of Pádraig Harrington, rather than an adequate version of Pádraig Harrington.”
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