Tom Humphries LockerRoomTook the kids to see Hulk a little while ago. Fell asleep. It's not like the kids didn't warn me. They pointed out that Hulk was made by Ang Lee, whose mordant take on 1970s culture was perhaps better expressed in The Ice Storm.

"Don't be surprised, Da," they said, "if there isn't a lot of existentialist angst over the desolating loneliness of being a Hulk."

"Like Ginger Spice before she lost the weight?" I ask.

"Yeah. Sort of."

"Good job he didn't make Charlie's Angels then."

"Not so sure about that. We found it vacuous and shallow."

Anyway, Hulk. It takes maybe an hour before anything remotely Hulky happens in Hulk. So painstaking is the explanation of the Hulk's Hulkiness that you can see after a while how come he is no longer ranked as The Incredible Hulk. All those scientific mishaps and his bad upbringing. He is The All Too Inevitable Hulk.

I'd explain the science bit to you in more detail if it wasn't for the fact that the more dozy I got the more like Padraig Harrington Dr Hulk came to look. And by the time I fell asleep, just before the first real outbreak of green, foamy Hulkiness, I was fretting a little about what would happen to Padraig Harrington were he to be turned into a Hulk, like John Daly only bigger.

His putting touch would go, surely. His clothing contracts might be up for grabs. If he could compose himself his driving distance stats might take some beating. He might duke it out with Darren Clarke.

And since then, just like Dr Hulk with the lurking little genus Of Hulkiness inside him, I have been haunted by the thought that Padraig Harrington is going to blow up. The sight of him not making the cut at the Irish Open last week brought me out in a sweat. That's twice this year he has missed cuts and we're only half-way. Not since 2000 has he missed two cuts in a season. He's a guy who always works weekends.

The recent past has been full of portents. Seeing Padraig loitering down the field in a respectable but unfulfilling position at the British Open while some guy who still gets the bus to tournaments put the trophy in his bag was hard to take. Seeing him finish down the field - way down the field - at the European Open was a shock.

There's not a lot new to be said about Padraig Harrington. In the world of professional sport lots of people have personalities and manners which are borderline socially adequate. Lots of competitors get a little money, a nice house and half a dozen shiny Italian cars and take what they have for granted. Professional players settle for comfort far earlier than they let on.

Harrington is the exception, the sort of example in terms of personality, work ethic, sportsmanship, etc, that you'd like any kid to follow. He never stops working at his game, he practises longer and harder and more intensely than perhaps anyone else on the European Tour. He's not one of the gang, but the gang all respect him.

And yet where is it all going? He is 32 at the end of next month. No time left to be a prodigy in a sport increasingly full of them. Half a decade or so left before the full press of middle age starts. Maybe there'll be kids by then, other responsibilities and distractions. Maybe he'll have squeezed from himself everything that can be squeezed. He plays a game which he would happily concede is obscenely well rewarded, but sometimes the flip side of that coin is that you accumulate enough money quickly to banish your hunger. Your lifestyle doesn't diminish notably if you drop a few tournaments from your schedule and stay home and take the handy money from a few corporate days.

At 32, though, he is still at a crossroads. Still has time to decide. If I were Padraig Harrington I'd go to America for a few years. (In fact, if I were him I'd retire tomorrow and live like a hog for the rest of my days, but that's just me.) Thirty-two. He is a player with a realistic chance of winning a Major title. It would be a tragedy were he to let his best years go past without claiming one. Yet this year he has looked a little stale. His wins in Asia and Germany certainly alleviate any ennui he may feel about the European Tour, but at this stage there must be some feeling of same old, same old.

He has been a top-10 player in Europe for six of the last seven years. He has been ranked second on the Tour for each of the last two years and is well positioned to finish in second this season unless Thomas Bjorn maintains the pace of the past couple of weeks.

His stats are a little worrying, though. He is putting better than ever this year, in fact he leads the European Tour in that regard. He needs to. His driving accuracy has slipped below 60 per cent for the first time in his pro career and his percentage of greens made in regulation is the lowest since 1998.

These aren't terminal things, but to a perfectionist they are alarming. To a man who leaves no part of his game or indeed his life unexamined, they are almost certainly worrying. His trajectory has been upwards for five years now. If he tails off, will he be devoured by the pack?

America is hardly a novel place to Padraig Harrington anymore, but giving the Tour there a virtually full-time crack for a few years would be something new, refreshing and challenging. Better greens, more money, the competition of finer players, the virtual elimination of the lottery of links golf. It could be the kick that a very good career needs to become a great career.

He is careful and methodical, of course, and he plans his calendar carefully in terms of rest periods, practice, travel requirements, etc, and he is loyal to things in a way which players of individual sports seldom are. He feels the team ethic of Ryder Cup play more than perhaps anyone else and he is loyal to the European Tour.

America doesn't have to mean abandonment of the old world, of course. Ernie Els is hailed for his loyalty to the little ole euro Tour but still manages to spend almost half the year on US fairways. It harms neither his game nor his income. You can't really say the same for Sergio Garcia, but the problems there are different; one has the impression that certain people have killed the Golden Goosia. Harrington is older, wiser, better focused and more hard-working.

Besides, it is the home of the game. Not the musty, fog-ridden, wind-bitten literal home, but the place where the tradition truly lies. America is where you make your bones. Steve Collins once said that he went to America to learn pro boxing because, when he figured it out, if he wanted to learn ballet he'd have gone to the Bolshoi and if he wanted to learn sumo he'd have gone to Japan and if he wanted to learn French he'd have gone to France, etc.

Harrington has traditionally done well in America. The set-up, the adventure, the freshness. A few years of it, even a few years playing as much in America as Els does now, might put him over the top, up there with the legends.

He has it inside him. Like the green green foam of Hulkiness it's just waiting for the right circumstances to come out.