BRITISH OPEN COUNTDOWN INTERVIEW WITH PADRAIG HARRINGTON: Philip Reidhears from the holder of the Claret Jug about trying to recreate the conditions and feelings that accompanied his win at Carnoustie

THE CLARET Jug has probably never endured such a year. The day after Pádraig Harrington laid claim to it, on a now-famous Sunday just short of a year ago, it was removed from a plastic bag - its temporary wrapping - and placed atop a table in a pizza joint in south Dublin while the champion golfer of 2007, seemingly oblivious to the stares around him, soothed his hunger pangs.

Within a few days, it was being showcased on the footsteps of Leinster House and, at a time when the Celtic Tiger was beginning to flag, Harrington's endeavours - just as those of Stephen Roche in 1987 and the Irish soccer team at Italia 90 had done - put a pep in everyone's step.

By Christmas, the Jug, one that had even housed ladybirds on four-year-old Paddy Harrington's insistence during its time at home, had a more suitable place of storage than a plastic bag as the British Open champion brought the old trophy to the people. Wherever he went, the trophy travelled with him in a metal security box.

The weirdest memory?

"There's been a few," confesses Harrington, although one incident in San Francisco would, as they say, beat Banagher. Harrington and a group of friends - and the Jug - had spent the night in Johnny Foley's Irish House, a popular bar on O'Farrell Street in the Union Square district, and afterwards hailed a taxi to return to the hotel.

What intrigued Harrington when he sat into the cab was that the driver was wearing a golf glove. "I'm sitting in the back (of the taxi) and I'm looking at the glove so I just threw out there, 'I suppose you're into The Inner Game of Golf' . . . and he says, 'No, no, I'm more into Golf in the Kingdom' (a classic golf meditation book)."

All the time, with banter flying, the taxi driver's eyes kept going to the container. "He was trying to figure out what was in this big steel box. I was in a different hotel and, when I got out, the lads told him afterwards it was the Open trophy . . . and the saddest thing is I didn't show it to him because I think that's something someone like him, a golfer, would have remembered for the rest of his life and a story he could tell (his customers).

"I was on a San Francisco radio station recently and I related the story. So that one man driving around with a golf glove on, very strange, knows he did really have the Claret Jug in his taxi."

It's a week short of a year since Harrington out-duelled Sergio Garcia in a four-hole play-off at Carnoustie to claim the Claret Jug, the first Irishman since Fred Daly in 1947 to win the oldest major championship of them all.

It's a period of 11 months and three weeks that has seen the Dubliner go without another win, even if he has had his moments - among them a fifth-place finish at the Masters in April - and juggle the responsibilities of a major champion while at the same time ensuring his career moves on.

The winner of the British Open is a wanted man, and his scheduling - at times questioned - has brought him to such places as Morocco and Korea and, ahem, Wales, in part because of the lure of appearance money.

"Scheduling is the hardest part, and I really tried my hardest not to go down the road of overplay. When anybody wins a major, I think that's the one thing (to be careful) . . . a lot of players will look back and say, well, they did too much.

"I may have done too much at times during the winter and different commitments here and there, but in terms of playing and the commercial side of things, I definitely kept it to an absolute minimum. I kept it to what was reasonable and kept the tournaments down.

"I'm not even sure how many I've played this year but I feel like I could have played more, which is a good thing at this time of the year. I feel that I'm in shape and I'm looking forward to every tournament I play."

So, how come it was his time? The night before the final round at Carnoustie, he had half-joked to those in the rented house that the next day would be his day. It was an uncharacteristically bold assertion.

He recalls: "I was tempting fate. Over the years, I've always downplayed my chances in anything . . . I've never had the ability to walk into any tournament, whether a match or strokeplay and sort of say, 'Oh, yeah, this is easy, I'm going to win this and I'm going to breeze this.' I just haven't had that confidence or arrogance. But, at the Open, just for the fun of it, I ran with it and said, 'Yeah, I'm going to win tomorrow.' It wasn't that I was expecting to win. I was just trying to get myself comfortable with the thought that when I got the chance of winning, I was already content that I was going to win.

"You know, sometimes you've got to tell yourself these things, and you may be lying to yourself. In some ways you're trying to convince yourself and trick yourself into believing it. But if you do, whether it happens, when you get in that situation, you do have a familiarity and a comfort in it, and definitely that was the case.

"I threw it out there (in the house) a few times and some of it was a bit tongue-in-cheek because I wanted to see other people's reactions, more people around me, because they know I'm not like that . . . but it certainly made it more comfortable for me and it definitely helped. It worked."

Yet, as he reflects on how it was his time, Harrington puts it down to experience. The experience of losing in the past as much as winning: "It took hard work for me to get to where I am in the game. The reason I won the Open is through a lot of experience about my own game and who I am. And, when I got my chance, I took it. There's no doubt over the years a number of wins and of close seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths made me the player I was that I was able to see what was happening the last day of the Open.

"My game has improved as a player, but I think I've improved in terms of experience and knowing how to interpret a situation as you go along in a tournament. You can only do that through experience, to know when to push it and when not to.

"I'm not saying in any shape or form you're going to get it right every time in the future, but I made a lot of really good decisions during the Open and throughout the week. I made good decisions, not just in the last round, and I was tremendously patient. I remember I double-bogeyed the 36th hole and it didn't bother me because, at the end of the day in a major, it really does come down to the last nine holes of the event."

So it is Harrington - who heads for Royal Birkdale next week as the defending champion, seeking to emulate Tiger Woods, who won back-to-back titles in 2005 (St Andrews) and 2006 (Hoylake) - will seek to recreate some of the conditions of Carnoustie a year ago. For one, Dr Bob Rotella, his sports psychologist, is staying in the same house with him again.

"If I knew which sock I wore during the week, I'd probably wear the same ones again . . . but circumstances do change. In terms of recreating what I did, I try and create it every week, to have that same discipline.

But it's not going to be a situation, say, of eating my dinner at 6.30 and having spaghetti Bolognese because that's what I did at the Open. It's more about getting yourself prepared and making sure you're not panicking about getting everything covered, that you're comfortable with yourself and play your game.

"You wait and be patient and be confident. That's the hardest thing to do."