McGinley pays tribute to Harrington’s success
Before Harrington’s memorable play-off victory over Ryder Cup team-mate Sergio Garcia on Sunday, 31 majors had been played without a European winner – a streak going all the way back to Paul Lawrie’s win on the same Carnoustie course in 1999.
There had been several near-misses of course. Harrington himself missed the four-man play-off – which did feature France’s Thomas Levet – at Muirfield in 2002 by a shot after a bogey on the 72nd hole, while Thomas Bjorn blew the 2003 Open at Sandwich by dropping four shots in three holes late in the final round.
Garcia is the latest European star to have to cope with letting a major title slip from his grasp after starting the final day with a three-shot lead, but McGinley insisted: “The big thing was we had a European winner.
“The press will no longer go on about it. The Irish press have been going on for so long about when we were going to get an Irish winner of the Irish Open and Padraig has done that (at Adare Manor in May).
“The next thing was a European winner of a major and Padraig has done that now. He is knocking down the hurdles one after the other and all credit to him.”
McGinley was joint third with Harrington going into the final round, only to fade to 19th with a closing 73.
The enthralling finish at Carnoustie finally drew attention away from the other burning issue of last week, that of players taking performance-enhancing drugs.
Gary Player claimed he “knows for a fact” that players are taking drugs while Dick Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency urged the game’s authorities to introduce testing as soon as possible.
The comments were met with incredulity by the players at Carnoustie, in particular Player’s fellow South Africans Ernie Els and Retief Goosen and Niclas Fasth.
Meanwhile, Germany’s Bernhard Langer was forced to pull out of the Deutsche Bank Players’ Championship at Hamburg with a stomach complaint.
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