Golf: Tom Humphries meets Padraig Harrington and gets an insight into what makes the Dubliner a frighteningly good golfer

'I walked straight onto the tee, pegged up my ball and drove it onto the front of the first green . . . marching off the tee I felt a powerful surge of adrenalin, maybe the greatest I've ever experienced," Arnold Palmer, from A Golfer's Life, describing the start of the final round of the 1960 US Open.

The business between the tortoise and the hare is never really done. Too many angles. Too many ways of looking at that long-odds upset.

Imagine the hare. Unbackable. A lifetime of just skimming the earth, hovering over the grass as he moves. His shocking speed, his hind-leg hydraulics, his ears back, turbo-dynamics. State of the art, baby. That's what makes his post-race quotes so poignant. His reflections are generous enough but as he heads to the drawing board for the first time, well, this is the beginning of the end.

And the tortoise. He has an actuary's heart. It's about the fear and how he came to love it. How he thinks through every step, weighs every risk. How he moves in straight, inexorable lines. Consistent rather than pacey says the form guide.

Knows where he's going because if he doesn't he's going to spend a long time being lost.

Christmas. If you were to make guesses where David Duval, the former British Open champion spent the festive season you'd probably say he was golfing. And you'd probably be wrong. These days Duval snowboards. He has a deal with gravity. He hangs in the thin mountain air with his wraparound shades reflecting the white peaks all around and, meanwhile, he plummets through the world rankings. Top 10 and going down. Top 50 and going down. Top 100 and going down. Top 200 and . . .

And Padraig Harrington. Precise and indefatigable, the hard shell of accumulated knowledge on his back. Always moving. Never sleeping. He began his current nine-week sabbatical with two weeks of weights work. It will take him until week six of this break to become completely de-stressed, to wipe the anxieties of a season away. He'll clean the disc, however, because it's part of getting ready for next year. Every thought is about the next step. One foot forward.

Steady.

Sometimes he thinks about David Duval. What it must have been like to be a great natural talent. What flameout must feel like. He's just looking in from the outside but puzzles hold a fascination for him and David Duval is a puzzle. He has a take on Duval. Every pro has.

It started when Duval seemed to strike a chiming blow against the Tiger regime. He revolted. Went and won the British Open. Consummated all his lovely Floridian promise then and there.

"Imagine," says Harrington. "This was one of the great goals. And he woke up the next day and he said, what next?"

And Harrington knows only too well, what next. Duval would want to win want a Masters. He'd hanker for a green jacket. He'd remember that he'd nearly won the thing so often in the previous few years. It had to be.

"And a voice inside probably said, 'it would be great if I could draw the ball around those trees at Augusta'."

Or maybe somebody whispered that to him. Whatever. It was a golfing death warrant. Duval was always a natural fader of the ball. He drew the club through the ball in such a beautifully unorthodox manner that his genius lay in his pure difference from other players.

Suddenly though he's under the hood. He's trying to draw the ball and he's strangling himself. He's no longer a natural. He's a mechanic. He's a tinkerer. He has oily hands.

"He's like me suddenly," says Padraig Harrington, "but he's never experienced that. He's opened a can or worms and he can't get the lid back on. I've been changing things for the last 12 years. It's what I do. But look at any of the players who have gone from being superstars to dropping out, they've all tried to be mechanics.

"The toughest thing for them should be rhythm or ball position. They shouldn't be doing massive swing changes. Ask (Nick) Faldo to swing it around his toes, in a month's time he'll do it, because he's a mechanic. David Duval is a natural. Now he's wondering where his elbow should be."

The tortoise sees it all. He wishes he didn't. Jesus, look at Lee Westwood. In 1999 he had the greatest swing in the world. Not the longest but slap, bang in the centre of the club head every time. Swoosh! Ball doing exactly what Westwood needed it to do every day. Consistent to the point of being boring.

Or to the point of perfection as Padraig Harrington would see it. And then somebody told Westwood he had a kink in his swing. It's taken him three years to recover from his time of tinkering.

"Lee is quite determined. Very few people ever come back. You can't suppress those thoughts. Where is the club, where's my elbow. I'm delighted he's been able to do it. It shows how strong a player he is."

He sees everything. He knows players who bound onto the tee box, take a glance down the fairway, pick a spot and launch the ball into the blue yonder. Bada boom! Bada bing! They make him wonder. Himself, he gets onto a tee box and he sees seven varieties of disaster out there. That's just when he looks to the left and the right.

The season just past brought a couple of tournament wins and a securing of his top-10 world ranking and he's happy to dismiss it as average. Very happy. For the year to have been average means there's still more he can squeeze out of himself. It makes it worth his while moving on. It's the carrot that prompts his relentless hunger. An average year means his fears haven't been realised. It's not a fluke. He's not playing above himself.

He's not some cartoon figure who having run over a cliff fails to appreciate his predicament until he looks down and sees that he has been running on air. That's what hares do.

When the tortoise crosses the road do you think he whistles a happy tune? Nope. He's thinking of juggernauts and grim reapers. Native traits. If Padraig Harrington could have one quality for himself it would be a little blitheness, an ability to just take some confidence and build on it. To have a few days when he didn't worry about a thing.

"I play with fear. Fear isn't a good thing to play with but it's successful. It's not as enjoyable as it is to play with confidence. I've never had much success with confidence though. I struggle. I play the wrong shots. When I have fear I know what I can and can't do. I play with fear and that means it's important and I focus better. I'm never afraid to hit a safe shot. Feeling good I get whimsical. I get cocky within myself."

A story. Last year at the European Open, coming up the final fairway, he was dabbling with confidence and he drew a six iron from his quiver and hit the ball straight into the water. All that he didn't want to do was to hit a safe shot six yards short of the flag. He was too confident. He could have put it 10 yards right and two putted but he went for the pin. No fear, no limits.

" Days like that I think this is what I should be doing when I play great and feel good."

He remembers also the first time he played Sun City. He torched the place in the pro-am and in his first round. Two 62s. And in the second round he's six or seven under after eight holes. He feels like he could play with a blindfold on.

On the ninth he's digressed into some semi-rough and thought, sure what harm. He's a god of golf today. He's leaned down and noticed too that he's got mud on the ball. Oh well. Stand back everyone and watch this. He reaches for a wood, looks up at the island green meaningfully and wham! Found the water.

Now out of semi-rough he was always going to get a flat shot. He was hitting into an island green, over water. Even if he carried the water the ball could fly through the green. If per chance it got properly airborne it was going to be, well, a flyer. Could be big or could be short. And that mud. Mud meant it could go right or left. But he thought of all these things afterwards. One of those character-defining moments.

His brother Tadgh is very keen on golf stats. He's been quietly drawing Padraig's attention to the fact he's been making bad decisions at crucial times. To coin a phrase it's the Phil Mickelson syndrome. The crucial times are when he's pleased with himself.

"I'd love to get into the situation where if I played well one week I could take the confidence into the next week and play better. It's a bad trait of mine. I can't build on confidence. I build on fear."

Fear. Fear. Fear. When he takes a break he fears his game will be gone when he comes back. When he plays a good round he fears he won't be so good tomorrow. When he plays a bad round he fears it's terminal and his metabolism slows till he is grinding out and analysing every stroke. Fear drives him, makes him obsessive. Fear is the wind beneath his wings.

He can't rest, can't stop moving, can't cease his slow incremental progress towards excellence.

Take the Irish Open last year. He shot 69 on the first day out and doing the maths realised that 69 was comfortably good enough to give him a shot at winning. It was always going to be a 12-under kind of week. He was feeling good.

So he had a 69 and a little something to eat and then went down to the practice range in the rain. Four hours leaning into the rain and the wind, just practising. Hitting the ball majestically. Working with Bob Torrance. He was in heaven. He loved it. He was afraid to stop. Every ball went about its business like a dutiful employee. He emptied the tank completely. The little console in his head was flashing red. A voice was saying "c'mon you know better than this", but another voice, that of fear was saying, "look it's going better, the swing is lovely, don't stop".

He's always been the same. No balance. Clay Deavers, an individualist whom he admires, told him a story last year. He said the first time he saw Harrington was in the Malaysian Open in 1998.

Deavers had finished his round and was sitting in the hotel and he could see Harrington out on the range. And he could see Harrington out on the range. And he could see Harrington out on the range. And he came to think of Harrington as a landmark and started calling other players up and telling them to look out the window because there was this madman, this Irish lunatic. He's been on the range for four hours. It was 90 degrees out there and the humidity count was 98 and mad dogs and Englishmen were taking siestas.

He has two Bobs in his life. The ying and yang of coaching. Bob Torrance is craggy and Scottish and he knows the fear and he shares the obsession. Bob Torrance always says if you are hitting the ball well on the range, well how can that be harmful.

That's the long-term view and Harrington is a long-term kind of creature. He was brought up on that philosophy. Years ago with his dad, he'd go down to the west of Ireland and it would be blowing a hooley and the Harringtons would see guys who hadn't played for months and they'd be beating balls in the worst of conditions before they would go to the next day. Doing themselves harm.

Harrington would smile. He would have prepared by beating balls like that for weeks. Now he would just be chipping and putting.

"In the last six years though I've become much more obsessed about my swing. I spend more time on the range. I know that has to change for me to produce the goods.

"I've been prepared to wait to change it. It's a long-term project. I have to work on the swing, but not too much. Not like I do."

Bob Torrance's soul carries a similar curse. He's a morning, noon and night merchant. One reason he works with Harrington is that he has had a lifelong dream to find a guy who would stand on the range for as long as he would stand there.

Once they were up , somewhere north of Glasgow, out in horrific weather. The wind was making rain come in sideways. And the cold was making the rain icy. Harrington was hitting drivers into the teeth of it. Freezing. He looked at Bob Torrance and like a man enjoying the mortification of his penance noted there wouldn't be too many professional golfers out practising in weather like this. And Torrance nodded and said quietly: "Aye, and not too many coaches with them." That's Bob Torrance. He knows the fear. Feels the obsession.

"If I said to Bob that I'm going down to hell to hit a few in the heat, Bob would say okay, hold on I'll come too."

And then there's Bob Rotella. Bob hates grinders. Hates obsessives. Bob tells him what he knows deep down. The sort of success that comes with grinding is hit and miss.

"He says basically that I have to prepare more consistently, prepare without doing myself harm. At end of the year just past I wouldn't allow myself hit more than 50 balls after a round. That's Bob Rotella's philosophy. When you practice during a tournament play every practise ball like a real shot. Imagine a shot and try to execute it. Feel it. Visualise it. They both have their merits. The closer to competition the more you want to be in the Rotella mode."

Simple things. He's talked with Bob Rotella about the idea of going to a tournament specifically to win that event. Often he goes just trying to win the event that's on the next week. He punishes himself this week hoping reward will come next week.

I know I have to peak at big events. I love practising. It's hard not to do. I'm at my happiest out there. When I mess up I feel so bad. When I walk back on the golf course or the range it's gone. I'm working. I'm repairing it. I'm thinking in the future again."

In the future nothing can touch him.

For now life has changed. He and Caroline had a baby boy, Patrick, late last summer. Brought him home to a new house overlooking the city. Meanwhile, Paddy Harrington, revered father of the clan, was recovering from a bout of cancer.

It would be glib at this point for Harrington to note that all perspective had changed. It hasn't. He likes to think no matter what went on in his outside life, golf would remain the same and separate.

For sure Patrick has meant it's slightly harder to leave home, much easier to come home and his father's recovery has been a happy blessing, but the world has kept spinning.

The Room is a big change in his life. The room, the golf room, was an idea he incorporated into the house. It took the architect a while to grasp the idea but now he has a Sistine Chapel to play golf in. For a man who fears that his game might go at any stage, The Room is a sinful pleasure.

The walls and high concave ceiling are a perfect mural of the view down the 18th at St Andrews. The floor is dotted with holes. The back of the room has a clubs rack. A shoes rack and a bag from the Ryder Cup with all his team-mates' names signed on it in silver scrawls. In the middle of the room is a tee-box. And some very expensive equipment, most essential of which is the launch monitor.

" I swing and it takes four snapshots and can tell me what speed the ball is going at, what the angle is, the spin rate. Where the ball is going. Basically. Launch angle. Spin rate and speed. The ball just hits that heavy curtain but the machine can determine where the ball would have finished."

Tiger Woods swings a driver 10 m.p.h quicker than Padraig Harrington. That's a disadvantage. Not a huge one, but . . . "I hit the ball flat out to keep up. They hit within themselves to get to the same place. I'm at my limit to do that. There's not another 25 or 30 yards in there. The room is for that."

He looks at each shot on the computer to make sure it's doing what he thinks it's doing.

He keeps the room heated to 24 degrees and on sunny days with the long windows the temperature gets to 28 or 29. He can come down and practice in the morning in his T-shirt and shorts. It's like practising in the sunshine.

And outside in the garden the obsession flowers further. It's 174 yards from his private tee-box to his practice green. An eight iron or nine iron generally. On a bad day a six iron. He can play right around the house, using the full two and a half acres.

" I have one main green that's as good as any championship green, one astroturf green and another astroturf green going in and five main target areas."

John Clerkin, an agronomist, comes in and looks after the practice green which on this January night is heavily acned with about 200 golf balls.

Four weeks of his break left. Signs are that Padraig Harrington is stepping it up again.

"Among all the fears, my greatest fear is whether it will be there, when I start up again. I finished 11th the first year on Tour and eighth the next year just to prove that the first year was no fluke. That's why I'll spend a whole day here practising, stretching, exercising. I'll play shots in The Room, shots outside, have lunch, hit more shots, go to the gym." (No great journey, it overlooks the golf room).

If the last year was average he has his customary high hopes for next year. He is at a stage of his career where it is arguable any year which goes past without him winning his first Major will be an average year.

He disagrees but the topic of Majors seduces him so easily it undermines his argument. He loves the majors. Yearns for them. Even for a man devoted to perfection in the mechanics of the game he concedes he would trade an otherwise mediocre year in which he became US Open champion for a splendid year outside the Majors. In the majors, fear is a special friend.

"In a Major you can smell the fear all the time. There's no confidence out there. With anyone. Just big-time fear. I like Majors for that reason. Everyone has that fear. We're all level. I focus sharper. I know the rules. You never go at it. No matter how well you are playing."

Surely not though. A Palmer? A Tiger? Fear? He grins. "It's a total fabrication, absolute and total, that Tiger Woods plays aggressive golf shots. He's the most conservative player of the lot. And yet everyone believes otherwise. His image has been built on the fact he really hits some great golf shots, he really does. Watch his major play, he hits it in the middle of the green all day and waits for other guys to make mistakes. It's the mystery and enigma of him. He's known for the great shots but he will play as many middle of the green safe shots as anyone. He's not an aggressive player .

"I'm not saying that if he's in the woods he won't go for it because that's the right shot to play. He plays the right shots within his capabilities. He has greater capabilities than the next guy - which is different.

"Yet everyone believes he's being aggressive. If you want to see somebody aggressive look at John Daly. He hits driver all day. Some guys never stop going at the pin. Tiger takes it in. Right shot at right time. It's a by-product of the media frenzy. He hits the best shot of the year each year. He hits it when he's put up to hit. He doesn't hit the best shot of the year from the middle of the fairway. When he plods, he plods better than anyone else."

Fearlessness when he sees it holds a horrible fascination for him. Last year at the Masters he played with Tom Watson and Watson went for everything, all day long. Harrington was fascinated. On a course which gives you 10 options to choose from Watson would judge the distance to the pin and fire straight at it.

"Most of them came off too. I would have loved to see it in his heyday. Some of the shots with woods and long irons, I kept wondering would he have played them when he was really competitive. Would he have made the same decisions."

And Arnie? Mr Grip and Rip himself.

"I didn't see enough of Arnie. Sure people say he gripped and ripped it. Whatever way you look at it he took a lot of risks. A lot of people praise him for that. A lot of people say it was madness. He won a US Open at Cherry Hill where he drove the first green on the last round, made his birdie and shot a 65 to win a US Open. He'd played two bogeys and a double bogey previous to that on that very hole. If he'd played a five iron off the tee for pars every day he'd have been one under for the week and only needed a 69. I suppose that would be my way of looking at it."

And with that view he heads off again in a few weeks. He'll put his golf head on and run away with the circus. Literally his golf head. At the moment his hair is dyed a soft cappuccino colour. He shaved his head last year. Let it grow long and spikey and added a beard another year. At the end of a golfing year the alteration to his appearance just says to him he's not playing golf. Golf is a formal game. On the golf course he wears the standard golfing attire.

"I conform very much. In everything to do with the game. When time off comes I just change my appearance. It helps."

He'll carry the fear, which he has learned to know, recognise and love and he'll carry the aggregated experiences of a decade on Tour. Tiger does as Tiger is. It's the same for Padraig Harrington.

Last year, late on at the Seve Tournament he got into a memorable spat with Jose Marie Olazabal. The pair were on the third green when a dispute over pitch marks broke out and coloured the rest of their match. It won't mean a lot to Olazabal but perhaps the root cause lay on the GAA fields of Dublin.

"Logically the best thing would have been to go on. Let it pass. I'm not like that. I'd never let somebody take a wrong drop. I would never do that. I have to stick up for myself. I always feel I'm too soft. It comes back to the old days playing football for Ballyboden St Enda's. We used always get beaten by the tough teams. Too soft. We were just too soft. We had all the talent in the world and couldn't get it out on the tough days. I'm always conscious of that. You have to stand up."

It made, he says for an interesting day. He spoke about the incident in lighter terms with Olazabal the next week in Hong Kong and quietly noted too an incident a short while later at the World Cup in the States

"They replayed the Ryder Cup of 1991 and Jose and Seve were playing against Paul Azinger and his partner. Paul Azinger played a different type of ball on a different hole. In other words he played a softer ball going downwind and a harder ball into the wind. They'd just changed the rule on that. I was interested because it happened on the sixth and Jose and Seve pointed it out on the 10th. They just said, look you can't do that. They told him. It was remarkably similar.

"The shoe was on the other foot. If he'd thought the same as I did during our match he would do the same thing. Or maybe I'm putting words in his mouth."

On he goes. He's been moving for so long, moving past all the snoozing hares and towards perfection that he scarcely realises the distance he has put behind himself.

This year, these coming seasons when he is a man at his peak these are the times by which we will judge him. The crux will be whether he wins a Major or not.

"Maybe I will. Maybe I won't. I regret Muirfield certainly. I don't look at things as individually as one tournament though. Is there more in me? Yes. Am I getting there? Yes. The curve generally is up. I'm a better player now than when I finished fifth in the US Open in 2000."

Relentless. He tells a tale about his last year as an amateur. He has no animosity over it, just curiosity really. The story tells him a lot about himself.

It was 1994 and he'd not lost a strokeplay event over 36 holes or more for 18 months or more in Ireland. He finished on top every time. Better. He never lost a match in European Championships or Home Internationals.

One week he beat a guy called Stephen Gallacher 4 and 3 in Ashburnham in Wales. Comfortable. The next week a team from Britain and Ireland was picked to play in the Eisenhower Trophy. Gallacher was in. Harrington was first sub.

"Each of the guys on the team (Steven Gallacher, Lee James, Warren Bennett, Gordon Sherry), they were each great players but I also deserved to be on it. I didn't catch the eye, though. I wasn't glamourous. I didn't have a showy game and I never looked like much. That's stayed with me. Until now when I realised that I had an average year last year and still maintained eighth place, well until now I've been wondering if I'm not over-achieving."

On he goes. The fear always with him. Tomorrow he heads off to Barbados for six days holiday. His soulmate, Bob Torrance, has given him a fear to pack.

"Bob has a pathological fear of sharks. He watches the Discovery Channel to feed his fear. He will not step into salt water anywhere in the world for fear of sharks. I had to thank him. Everytime I go swimming on holiday now I have this fear of a great white sneaking up behind me."

But he'll swim. And he'll play on with the fear on his shoulder with the great white shark of failure dogging him.

"I've been brought up that way. If you capitulate life is easy. It's harder to do the other. Harder to just keep going."

Slowly. Steadily. Inevitably.