The golf champion who has shown how to turn talent into greatness

I HAVE never met Padraig Harrington. Well, that’s not entirely true. He once, last year, held a door open for me, and when I passed him without realising who it was, he said, “you’d think a better class of doorman would be worth acknowledging”.

I was covered with embarrassment.

Imagine not even recognising that an Open champion was holding the door for me. But he laughed and told me that next time he’d expect a tip!

I did once hear him speak in public. That was at the Irish Examiner Junior Sports Stars of the Year Awards.

It’s a great event that each year recognises the real achievements of young people in sport.

And it’s a great talent-spotter as well. People like Roy Keane, Sonia O’Sullivan, Anthony Foley and Sean Óg Ó hAilpín were all junior sports stars in their day, and last year Rory McIlroy was given top honours.

All of them, and many more, have gone on to make great names for themselves.

The year I was at the lunch, Harrington was the guest speaker. To be honest, I didn’t think he was an inspired choice. His radio and TV interviews up to then had been a bit halting, and it certainly wouldn’t have been my impression that he was an accomplished public speaker.

In fact, he started off by acknowledging that very fact.

“I don’t have much experience at this kind of thing,” he said, “so if you don’t mind I’m going to talk about something I do know a little bit about. And I’m going to direct what I have to say to the younger sports stars here, who clearly have a huge bundle of talent between them.”

And he went on to talk, for 20 minutes or so, about the difference between talent and success, and how to turn one into the other.

It was spellbinding stuff — not great oratory, but practical down-to-earth advice, directed from one reasonably established sports person to a group of youngsters just starting off.

What struck me most forcibly about it at the time was two things. First, it was generous — enabling anyone who listened to learn a lot about what made him tick. And secondly, it was entirely devoid of ego.

Although he acknowledged his own success, this was a speech aimed at helping other people with practical advice.

And the first thing he talked about was education.

“I know,” he said, “that all you want to do right now is to get stuck into your sport. Winning and competing is what your lives are about. But winning and competing never last forever — and besides, winning is never guaranteed. The only thing you can ever guarantee yourself is to do your best — and if you set out to do your best by finishing your education, to the highest level you can achieve, you’ll give yourself a second guarantee, the guarantee of something to fall back on and a way to be happy in life if sport doesn’t work out.”

There was more in the same vein. I can still remember coming away from that lunch thinking that anyone who listened to Harrington and took him seriously couldn’t fail to turn whatever talent they had into sustained and lasting success.

And the other impression I formed that day was that Padraig Harrington himself was bound to go a very long way.

He hadn’t won a major tournament then, or been European number one. In fact he was involved in one of those incidents that can do irreparable damage to a professional sports star when he was disqualified from the Benson and Hedges tournament for forgetting to sign his card after the second round.

The mistake — and that was all it was — was discovered just before Harrington was due to start the final round and he had a five shot lead at the time.

It would have been probably the biggest win of his career up to then, worth around €250,000, and a shot at becoming European number one.

As a layman who follows the game avidly, I’ve always thought it took a while for Harrington to recover from that incident. The Benson and Hedges was in May that year and it was October before he won again.

And over the following couple of years he accumulated all those second places that looked for a while as if they would be the enduring legacy of a career that never quite reached the heights.

But the human qualities he talked about to the junior sports stars are the things that have made him what he is today.

Determination, mental toughness and the ability to go easy on yourself when things aren’t going your way — those are keys to success in any walk of life.

When you add humour and straightforward, honest-to-God decency, they’re also pretty decent keys to success as a person. And Harrington has proved he has all those in abundance.

Mind you, he also has a bit of talent for scaring the life out of his supporters. I can still remember that moment when I saw the driver in his hand at the final hole in Carnoustie last year.

The camera seemed to get close enough so you could also see a dangerous glint in his eye, and you realised that winning by a shot wasn’t enough — he was determined to win it in style.

I was still shouting “don’t do it” at the television when his ball disappeared into the water on that infamous hole on the way to a six that marred an otherwise impeccable round and nearly cost him his first Open.

It took incredible mental strength, I reckon, to recover from that and go on to win.

And I shouted the same thing on Sunday when it became clear that he was determined to finish the Open off with an eagle on the 17th. He didn’t need to do it because he was well enough placed to ensure that a birdie would be simple enough.

BUT something else took over at that moment — only this time, instead of leading to disaster, it led to one of the great shots in golf history.

I used to think the instinct that kicks in at moments like that is a sort of mad foolhardiness.

But it isn’t. It’s self-belief, the knowledge that this moment is something you have trained for, prepared for and are perfectly capable of.

It is that quality of self-belief, especially in a moment of crisis, that marks out the genuinely great competitor.

And that was what Harrington told the young sports stars at that lunch.

“There’ll be times,” he said, “when even those closest to you will doubt your ability — and no doubt you’ll give them plenty of cause to. But as long as you can maintain your own belief in yourself, everything will work out in the end.”

The evidence would suggest that whatever the rest of us might think, whatever the ups and downs of a sporting year, Padraig Harrington has never lost belief in his own ability. And in the process, he has demonstrated how to turn talent not just into success, but into greatness.