Exactly two years ago next week, Pádraig Harrington sat in the press tent at Bethpage Black just outside New York and went through it all one more time. No, he wasn’t playing particularly well. Yes, he had expected a bit of a fall-off after winning three out of six majors. But no, he didn’t think the slump was terminal. And being in the meat of the season as he was, there was nothing for it but to go with what he had and to stop trying to fiddle with his swing.
“When the lightning storm has started, it’s too late to get up and thatch the roof,” he said. This latest Harringtonism split the press tent down the middle. On one side were the British and Irish journalists who had long been used to him pulling a kooky aphorism out of nowhere to explain away a wonky round. On the other were the Americans who just plum didn’t know what the verb ‘to thatch’ meant. And so the next day’s US papers spoke quizzically of Harrington looking to patch houses.
This small vignette is relayed only to give a flavour of the level of coverage Harrington used to get. The smallest half-thought of his was relayed for a time as though chiselled from stone. Those were heady days, when we all got tremendously excited and thought we had one of the great legends of world sport living in the Dublin hills. He dyed his hair one winter and made the front page of the papers. Imagine.
And now? Now he could streak through an exam hall of Leaving Cert students and it might make the bottom of page seven. Last Monday, Harrington fell out of the top 50 in the world rankings for the first time since March 2000 and there was barely a squeak about it. There were a few lines in a few of the papers carrying a couple of quotes from his website and that was that. It was like he was just another golfer.
“I’ve had a strange year,” he said. “I’ve had a few weeks written off. I’ve had a few good, decent performances, where things were looking good, and a couple of missed cuts out of nowhere. But I’m excited about my game and I'm keen to get out and play.”
And that was that. A few paragraphs, a nothing quote and we move on to the next thing. It’s like golf reporters are tired of writing about him, weary of trying to work him out. Out of the top 50, Pádraig? Ah well. Sure, come back to us when you’re any good again.
Is it really only 18 months since we were anointing this man the greatest sportsman Ireland has ever produced? Were we wrong? For what it’s worth, I don’t think we were. Irish golfers went 60 years without winning a major and we may go 60 more before the next one. For Harrington to have won three inside 14 months amounts to nothing short of the most extraordinary feat ever achieved by an Irish sportsman. If someone wants to argue that a Brian O’Driscoll or a Christy Ring should be ahead of him, fair enough. But the sheer global reach of golf gets Harrington my vote and I’m not sure anyone could argue him out of the top three.
So taking that as a given – and leaving a debate over the rights and wrongs of the world ranking system for another day – should it not be a bigger deal that he isn’t even among the best 50 players in the world now? This is roughly equivalent to O’Driscoll not being good enough to make a Lions squad anymore and you can be damn sure that if that were the case, there’d be pages of dudgeon, all of it high. But Harrington gets a shrug and nothing more.
Truth is, we’re just ground down by it all now. He fell in increments, inch by bloody inch, bogey by double bogey. One brutal week borrowed another, one missed cut found solace in the next one. He won a nothing tournament in Indonesia last year and we clung onto it as evidence that he was back, back, back. In reality, there were about as many world ranking points on offer as there are when you play hungover on a Sunday morning. Slowly, mundanely, he stopped mattering.
When the majors swung around, the general public looked for Rory McIlroy’s score first, then Graeme McDowell’s. If you asked how Harrington was doing, you got a roll of the eyes and a shake of the head. How do you think he’s doing?
Sliding out of the top 50 means nothing and it means everything. On a tangible level, it will eventually mean that he stops qualifying for majors, although his British Open and USPGA wins will cushion him for a while on that score. But on a more abstract level, maybe it means that we’ll soon hit the point where he won’t come back. People waited for former world number one David Duval to bounce back for years and then one day they realised he just plain wasn’t going to.
We’re not there yet with Harrington but we’ll get there someday. This week felt like a milestone. Or at least it felt like more people should have thought it was.