Revitalised Harrington putts faith in St Jude

PHIL MICKELSON always plays the week before a major championship. Tiger Woods never does. That’s why Lefty will be in Memphis this week for the St Jude Championship and Tiger will be back home in Florida honing his swing and taking due care of wife Elin, who is expecting their first child in early July.

However, there is no doubt where their minds will be over the next few days. The US Open returns to Oakmont, Pittsburgh, next week and nowadays it’s all about majors for the gifted duo. By and large, the top players prefer not to play the week before the big ones and that’s one reason why the fields for this week’s tournaments in Memphis and Austria have failed to attract marquee names.

That won’t bother Padraig Harrington who left Dublin yesterday for his latest sortie in the US. He’ll be over there for three weeks, taking in Memphis, Oakmont and the Travellers Championship in Connecticut. After that, he hopes to have clinched his place in the lucrative Fed-Ex series in September having yesterday returned to 10th in the world rankings. It won’t come as much surprise that the Fed-Ex points list is currently headed by Woods and Mickelson followed by Vijay Singh and Zach Johnson. Luke Donald is the leading European in 11th place and Harrington is well inside the cut-off mark in 58th spot.

The Irishman took a rest from the competitive scene last week but it can hardly have seemed all that peaceful given that he took the opportunity for a practice round at Carnoustie in the build-up to next month’s Open Championship over the much-feared Scottish links and also gave up another day to launching The Marlbrook, a new course in Clonmel which he has designed and on which work will shortly get underway.

Harrington insists that he is feeling more and more at home in the US and especially so in the majors. He has twice been seventh there this year, in the Nissan Open at Riviera in January and the Masters at Augusta in April, along with four other top 25 finishes. He has also made the cut in each of the nine tournaments he has contested. He has a scoring average of 70.12 for 16th place in the stats; an average driving distance of 285 yards with an accuracy rating of 61% and he is fifth in putting with an average of 1.729. He currently stands 58th in the order of merit with winnings of $793,764 (€588,851) bringing his total US earnings to $9,108,804 (€6,757,288).

He will shortly realise an ambition to own a private jet that will make all his globetrotting easier.

However, nobody realises better than Harrington that winning a major is the one way to ensure his golfing immortality and he will arrive in Oakmont from Memphis on Sunday night entirely focused on potentially the biggest week in his life.

His chief rivals in Memphis are likely to be Mickelson, current US Open champion Geoff Ogilvy and Adam Scott. Two-time US champion Retief Goosen is also in the field and desperate to find some form prior to Oakmont having missed the cut in both the BMW PGA Championship and the Wales Open in recent weeks. As a result, he has fallen outside the world’s top 10. Harrington’s fellow European Ryder Cup players, Spaniards Jose-Maria Olazabal and Sergio Garcia, will also be in Memphis.

Kilkenny man Gary Murphy has been discovering that a fortnight can be a long and rewarding time in golf. Before the Irish Open, he was nowhere in the order of merit and facing an uphill battle to retain his Tour card, just as in 2006. Suddenly, he discovered form and can look forward to the rest of the year with considerable confidence having tied for 12th at Adare and sixth in the Wales Open where he finished only two behind the winner, Richard Sterne from South Africa. He is now a relatively comfortable 80th in the money list with €165,478, some 70,000 short of what he needs to retain his card.

The Baltray-based, 34-year-old banked €35, 611 and €71,918 respectively for those creditable performances and now heads to Vienna for this week’s €1.3m Austrian Open with confidence. Another Irishman feeling pretty good is Dubliner Peter Lawrie, who performed solidly in the BMW PGA where he shared 12th spot and won €63,183 and followed with a 12th place finish in Wales for which he picked up €35,611.

Lawrie has a total of €205,270 for 61st in the money list and will be in Austria this week along with Graeme McDowell (44th with €286,254); Darren Clarke (148th, €64,092) and David Higgins (197th, 32,590).

Damien McGrane (85th, 151, 553) and Paul McGinley (108th, €114, 565) are taking the week off.