Pádraig targets FedEx jackpot

IT may sound like a million to one double.

But is it really outlandish to suggest that over the next seven days Padraig Harrington will capture the US Tour Championship and along with it, the FedEx $10 million jackpot in Georgia? Or that Paul McGinley will take a major step forward towards the future captaincy of the European Ryder Cup team by the manner in which he leads the British & Irish team against the Continent of Europe in the battle for the Vivendi Trophy, formerly the Seve Trophy, in Paris?

Mission impossible? Very probably. After all, Harrington must win the Tour Championship to jump from 6th to first in the FedEx standings and even then Tiger Woods would need to finish outside of the top two for that to happen. The winner of the Tour Championship receives $1.260 million while the winner of the FedEx Series picks up $10 million so there’s an awful lot at stake this week at East Lake, Atlanta, the home club of the legendary amateur Bobby Jones.

It looked like a lost season for Harrington heading into the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational in Akron at the beginning of August. The three-time major championship winner had missed six cuts in the States and had yet to record a top-10 finish. But to make sure the season was anything but lost, Harrington finished in the top 10 in the next five events, including twice tying for second. The string of top-10s moved him from 130th in the FedEx standings following the British Open to No. 6 entering this week. He is the only player who has recorded top-10 finishes in all three of the play-off events.

After four days back in Dublin with wife Caroline and children Pádraig and Ciarán, Pádraig flew back to America yesterday with his mind more at ease than it has been at any other time in 2009.

Meanwhile, at St Nom La Breteche in Paris, Paul McGinley skippers a B & I side that includes Rory McIlroy and Graeme McDowell although among the notable absentees are Lee Westwood, who opted to take the week off, and Harrington for more apparent reasons.

In truth, the outcome of the doesn’t make a great deal of difference except, perhaps, in monetary terms with the players on the winning team picking up €65,000 and the losers €15,000 per man less. But it does give McGinley a taste of what captaincy entails and the leading Europeans the chance of reacquainting themselves with match-play golf in a non-Ryder Cup season.

World number five Henrik Stenson, the highest ranked player in the field, will head the Continental Europe team captained by Thomas Bjorn. Joining Swede Stenson will be compatriots Robert Karlsson and Peter Hanson, Danish trio Anders Hansen, Søren Hansen and Søren Kjeldsen and Spaniards Gonzalo Fernandez-Castaño, Miguel Angel Jiménez and Alvaro Quiros, while there is a debut for Italian Francesco Molinari.

For B & I, McDowell and McIlroy line out alongside eight Englishmen, Nick Dougherty, Simon Dyson, Ross Fisher, Robert Rock, Anthony Wall, Steve Webster, Oliver Wilson and Chris Wood.

“I am captaining some of the most exciting talent in world golf at the moment and that is a challenge in itself”, says McGinley.

Interestingly, six of the 2008 European Ryder Cup team, Soren Hansen, Jimenez, Karlsson, McDowell, Stenson and Wilson will be part of this week’s contest while many would already regard youngsters McIlroy, Wood and Quiros as strong candidates for Celtic Manor in twelve months time.

Paul McGinley’s Ryder Cup record as a player is nothing short of outstanding and there are few brighter or more articulate people in the game.

After Colin Montgomerie in 2010, the search will go on for the next candidate at Medinah, Chicago, in 2012 and beyond that Gleneagles in 2014. By then, his credentials for the job should be unarguable and allow McGinley to go on and become the first Irishman to be appointed European Ryder Cup captain.